Purpose of the Exam

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam is designed for individuals to demonstrate general knowledge of the AWS Cloud, regardless of specific job roles. It tests the ability to:

• Explain the value and benefits of the AWS Cloud.
• Understand the AWS shared responsibility model and security best practices.
• Know AWS Cloud costs, economics, and billing processes.
• Describe AWS core services (e.g., compute, network, database, and storage services).
• Identify AWS services for common use cases.

Target Audience

The exam is aimed at individuals with up to 6 months of AWS Cloud exposure. It’s well-suited for candidates from non-IT backgrounds, those early in their AWS Cloud journey, or professionals working with cloud specialists.

Exam Structure

• Question Types: Multiple-choice (one correct answer) and multiple-response (two or more correct answers).
• Number of Questions: 50 scored questions and 15 unscored questions.
• Scoring: Pass or fail with a scaled score from 100 to 1,000. The passing score is 700.
• Domains and Weighting:
  1. Cloud Concepts (24%)
  2. Security and Compliance (30%)
  3. Cloud Technology and Services (34%)
  4. Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%)

Key Domains and Topics

1. Cloud Concepts:
   • Defines benefits of the AWS Cloud such as cost savings, global infrastructure, and high availability.
   • Introduces the AWS Well-Architected Framework and its pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
   • Covers cloud migration strategies and cloud economics including fixed vs. variable costs and the concept of rightsizing.
2. Security and Compliance:
   • AWS Shared Responsibility Model: Clarifies what AWS and the customer are each responsible for.
   • Focuses on cloud security practices, including encryption and AWS compliance services (e.g., AWS Artifact, AWS Security Hub).
   • Access Management: Covers IAM, least privilege, multi-factor authentication, and securing root user accounts.
3. Cloud Technology and Services:
   • Introduces deployment methods like APIs, SDKs, CLI, and the AWS Management Console.
   • Highlights AWS global infrastructure components (Regions, Availability Zones) and the importance of high availability and disaster recovery.
   • Covers AWS services across compute (EC2, Lambda, ECS), database (RDS, DynamoDB), storage (S3, EBS), and networking (VPC, Route 53, CloudFront).
4. Billing, Pricing, and Support:
   • AWS Pricing Models: Covers On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances, as well as data transfer costs.
   • Cost Management Tools: AWS Budgets, Cost Explorer, and consolidated billing under AWS Organizations.
   • Support Options: AWS offers various support plans and resources like Trusted Advisor and the AWS Health Dashboard.

Appendices

• Appendix A lists technologies and concepts that might appear on the exam, including APIs, compute services, migration, machine learning, cost management, and more.
• Appendix B provides a comparison of the old exam version (CLF-C01) with the new (CLF-C02), showing slight changes in domain weightings and content updates.