AWS cloud practitioner notes, my personal path towards the CLF-C01 based on three pillars - official material, online course and self test

Last updated Oct 24, 2021 Published Jan 20, 2021

The content here is under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license

This post aims to expose the path I took to take the AWS cloud practitioner certification (CLF-C01). This post was inspired by [1] and some of the resources I am going to share here were taken from his post, in addition to that, I am going to share my own notes, based on the free official training [2] that AWS offers and how I built my study plan to conquer the exam.

Before taking the exam, note that the CCP (Certified Cloud Practitioner - CLF-C01) exam is the first certification in the AWS list, as such, if you have some experience with AWS it should be no problem to complete it. Therefore, the material needed for this certification depicts the conventions used by AWS and its pricing model, which is not common for developers or hands-on people to know (usually those terms are known by more seniors). If that is your case, I would recommend to focus more on the terminology and what each service does, its pricing range and for which workload it’s recommended. [3] is the place to have an overview of aws services.

Long history short

Before going any further the following list is a collection of each topic covered by the certification. Those are based on my own notes from different resources, but mainly from the AWS free course. Feel free, to go over the ones you are most interested in. In my opinion, the order in which they are presented are not relevant, still, it gives a path for those that have no experience with AWS.

Following up this post, I am going to share how I did to study and the approach I took.

What I did

I followed three basic ideas before taking the exam:

Read the official material provided
Attend the official online course
Self test

Reading the official material provided by AWS helped me to get familiar with the content. AWS has a section called “prepared for your exam” linking resources to read. The online course was one of the mains sources I used to prepare myself, there are two of them: AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials and AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (Second Edition).

Besides that I found this video course freely recorded which I would not recommend. I found this style of approach a rush into all the sections of the exam on a “try to memorize and good luck”, but of course, this is my humble opinion. I am listing it here so you can have your own.

For self test, I used an android app to keep on track my progress, as the sample questions provided by AWS are not enough [4], it has only 10 questions. The first time I took the simulation, I scored between 50 ~ 60% only, therefore, after some reading and watching the course I improved this mark to 80 ~ 90%.

Lastly, I also bought a simulation pack. Besides the 6 simulations, it also offers tips for ace the exam and a community that is studying, it’s useful as there are comments and people discussing about the topics and the questions.

I followed this short path of reading docs, watching the trainings and self test till the day of the exam. I took some time to digest all the content as well, I tried to follow the focused and diffused mode to make the process easier.

References

[1]G. Venkatraman, “Preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP) exam in 2 weeks,” 2020 [Online]. Available at: https://medium.com/@gaurav.venkatraman/preparing-for-the-aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-ccp-exam-in-2-weeks-7f73fd6c7dec. [Accessed: 2021-Apr-1AD]
[2]A. W. S. training and certification, “AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials,” 2020 [Online]. Available at: https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=60697. [Accessed: 2021-Apr-1AD]
[3]AWS, “Overview of Amazon Web Services,” 2021 [Online]. Available at: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-overview.pdf. [Accessed: 2021-Jan-26AD]
[4]A. web services, “AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) Sample Exam Questions,” 2020 [Online]. Available at: https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-cloud-practitioner/AWS-Certified-Cloud-Practitioner_Sample-Questions.pdf. [Accessed: 2021-Apr-1AD]