How I Passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam in 1 Week
Written by: May Ly, Agile Software Engineer, TribalScale
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Working at tech companies whose infrastructure was on AWS, I would always be assigned tasks involving AWS to some degree. I would end up learning how to use the individual cloud service to complete the ticket, but never truly understood what was going on behind the scenes.
Growing in my software engineering career, I’ve come to realize the significance of learning cloud technologies as it offers a deeper understanding of the underlying software development processes, and pretty much every job description is always looking for cloud experience! I told myself I needed to learn it.
So I studied for the AWS cloud practitioner certification, learned a ton about cloud computing, and passed my exam within a week! In this post, I’ll share certification details and my personal experience with the exam, and hopefully you can be inspired to take the exam too!
Why AWS Cloud Practitioner?
Firstly, why did I choose AWS? AWS is the world-leading cloud service provider that currently takes up over 34% of the global cloud computing market share. I have personally worked with AWS more than other cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform and I always see AWS in a majority of job descriptions. AWS was definitely the one!
AWS offers a ton of certifications that are all reputable. I had coffee chats with my colleagues who had experience with AWS certifications and they actually recommended that I skip the cloud practitioner and get the associate level developer certification instead! Even the AWS certification paths note that the “Certified Cloud Practitioner is an optional step for candidates with an IT or STEM background”.
But, associate level exams take months of preparation and I wanted something that would get my foot in the door, learn the basics quickly, and get me familiar with AWS exams. The AWS cloud practitioner certification was enough to get a high-level understanding of the AWS cloud, services, and terminology — I learned a lot of useful information.
Plus, passing the exam gave me a huge confidence booster to get an associate level certification and Amazon gives you 50% off for the next AWS exam you take! So I have no regrets about taking the cloud practitioner at all.
What is the exam like?
The cloud practitioner exam was $100 USD which came out to $153 CAD… definitely pricey. The exam is 65 questions of multiple choice and multi-select, and was scored on a scale from 100 to 1000 with a minimum passing score of 700.
I took the exam online through the Pearson Vue proctoring software which was a pretty good experience — I had no complications. Although the exam was 90 minutes long, Pearson Vue required me to check-in 30 minutes early, so you can expect the whole exam process to take around 2 hours.
One last thing to note about the cloud practitioner exam is that it is actually changing from CLF-C01 to CLF-C02 soon and the last day to take the current exam is September 18, 2023. Right now most of the resources online are for CLF-C01, but hopefully a new wave of content for CLF-C02 will be released shortly. Here are some updates regarding the new CLF-C02 exam.
How did you study?
I took around 8 days to study for the cloud practitioner exam.
I started with 5 days of watching Andrew Brown’s 14 hour freeCodeCamp video on Youtube where he went through everything on the exam. I watched it at 1.5x speed, took notes throughout the video, and at the end of each day I would review and try to memorize everything I learned.
In the last 3 days of studying, I began going through practice exams to test my understanding and get a feel of the questions that could be asked. Honestly, I was getting around 40% of the questions incorrect since they weren’t explained in depth in the video, so I had to go back and go through more AWS official documentation and take notes. If I answered a question incorrectly during these practice exams, I would copy and paste it with its solution explained in a large document to revisit again later.
I didn’t really know what to expect until I started doing practice exams and realized I was memorizing a lot of information from the video that wasn’t going to show up on the exam. So although the way I studied ended up working out and I passed, I definitely could’ve been more efficient with my time and resources. I’ll dive into that next!
What resources do you recommend using?
Andrew Brown’s video was a great explanation on cloud computing from ground zero and I would definitely recommend watching it to first get an overview of everything that will be on the exam. However, for certain topics like VPC, shared-responsibility model and the well-architected framework pillars, they will need to be supplemented with other resources.
I wish I had this opened side by side as I followed Andrew Brown’s Youtube video to know what topics were important, and what was just supporting information to further my understanding on certain concepts. Use this exam guide to define what to focus on when studying and where you may fall short for various topics. If you can explain everything in this document (yes, including all the services), you are good to go!
3. Exam Topics — Amazon AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Bank
This is a free website with around 900 practice questions. Although it is not affiliated with Amazon, this was my favourite resource by far. I did around 300 questions and had around 4 questions that were word for word on my exam, others were worded similarly. I’d recommend going through all 900 questions over the course of a few days, reading the solutions for each question, and taking notes of incorrect answers.
4. Overview of Amazon Web Services — AWS Whitepaper
A lot of questions will be scenario based so you will need to know the services in depth to choose which one is best suited. As you go through the Andrew Brown video, AWS exam guide, and exam bank mentioned above, if you come across any services that need further explanation, this white paper will do the job.
5. Other AWS Official Documentation
These white papers and documentation helped me dive deep on some important concepts Andrew Brown didn’t fully explain in his video. Any other documentation from the official AWS website are all great resources!
What topics should you focus on?
Below are the topics that mainly showed up on my official AWS cloud practitioner exam and what make up a majority of the questions from the Exam Topics exam bank. All of this is covered in the official AWS exam guide along with subtopics to review for each major concept.
- AWS Services + Use Cases
- Benefits of the Cloud
- Cloud Architecture
- Shared Responsibility Model
- Cloud Adoption Framework
- Well Architecture Framework
- EC2 Pricing Model
- Support Plans
- Virtual Private Cloud
What’s next?
Well I’ll definitely be adding the certificate to my resume! Besides that, I’m hoping to get more hands-on experience with AWS through the work at my current company or by building a personal project involving AWS. I can definitely say the cloud practitioner exam gave me the confidence and working knowledge to use the AWS service more effectively.
This is just the start of my cloud computing journey. There are so many other cloud service providers to explore and much more to learn about AWS alone. Who knows, maybe in the near future you’ll see a blog post on how to pass the associate developer exam!
Hope you enjoyed the blog post and found some useful information from it. Best of luck if you are writing the exam — you definitely got this!
If you have any questions feel free to reach me at may.ly7303@gmail.com.
May is an Agile Software Engineer at TribalScale who is currently specializing in iOS development. Her passion lies in collaborating with others on development projects and expanding her knowledge on programming, various tech stacks, and cloud technologies. When she’s not working, she enjoys going to the gym, playing volleyball, and hanging out with friends and family.
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