Cloud Practitioner
AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)
Independent preparation for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — the blueprint, 122 study points across ten note pages, the service catalogue you must be able to place by purpose, and the habits that pass a foundational exam.
The entry point to AWS certification. CLF-C02 validates that you understand what the AWS Cloud is, what the main services do, how AWS charges for them and who is responsible for what. It assumes no prior IT or cloud experience, and it asks you to recognise and place services rather than configure them. The whole exam turns on one skill: given a business need in one sentence, name the AWS service that meets it.
Unofficial preparation
Independent study material, not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS, containing no official exam questions. Verify every figure on this page against the current CLF-C02 exam guide before booking.
The blueprint
| # | Domain | Weight | Where it is taught here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cloud Concepts | 24% | Cloud concepts & networking |
| 2 | Security and Compliance | 30% | Security & compliance |
| 3 | Cloud Technology and Services | 34% | Storage, Compute, Databases, Serverless, Monitoring, Analytics |
| 4 | Billing, Pricing, and Support | 12% | Billing, pricing & support |
Two-thirds of the exam is services and security. Domain 3 alone is a third of the paper and is the reason six of the ten note pages are service pages. Domain 4 is the smallest but the most mechanical — support plans, pricing models and cost tools are pure recall, so it is the cheapest 12% you will ever bank.
Exam mechanics
- 65 items, 90 minutes — about 83 seconds each. Foundational items are short; time pressure is mild if you do not stall.
- 50 items are scored, 15 are unscored pretest items mixed in unmarked. You cannot tell which, so treat every item as real.
- Scaled 100–1,000, pass at 700, compensatory — you pass the exam as a whole, never domain by domain.
- No penalty for guessing. An unanswered item scores zero exactly like a wrong one. Answer everything.
- Multiple choice (one of four) and multiple response (two or more of five-plus, all-or-nothing credit).
The ten note pages
| # | Page | Study points | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cloud concepts & networking | 15 | Regions, AZs, Edge Locations, HA vs fault tolerance, Well-Architected, deployment models, CloudFront |
| 2 | Storage | 11 | S3 and its classes, EBS, EFS, Glacier tiers, lifecycle policies, durability |
| 3 | Compute | 12 | EC2 families and purchasing options, Auto Scaling, ELB, containers |
| 4 | Databases | 12 | RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Redshift — which shape fits which workload |
| 5 | Serverless | 11 | Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, Step Functions, EventBridge |
| 6 | Security & compliance | 15 | Shared responsibility, IAM, MFA, KMS, WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, Artifact |
| 7 | Monitoring & logging | 11 | CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config, Trusted Advisor |
| 8 | Billing, pricing & support | 14 | Pricing models, Free Tier, Budgets, Cost Explorer, Organizations, the four support plans |
| 9 | Analytics & big data | 10 | Athena, Glue, EMR, Kinesis, QuickSight, the AWS AI services |
| 10 | Exam extras | 11 | Migration tooling and the cross-cutting facts that do not sit in one domain |
122 study points in total. Each one is a fact or a distinction that CLF-C02 items are built on.
A two-week plan
Days 1–4 · Concepts and services
Pages 1–5 straight through, one per session. Do not memorise yet — you are building the map of what exists.
Days 5–7 · Security and operations
Pages 6–7. The shared responsibility model is worth its own session: know which side of the line every example falls on.
Days 8–9 · Money
Page 8 twice. Support plans and pricing models are recall questions you can get to 100% on.
Days 10–14 · Testing
Pages 9–10, then the practice exam. Re-read only the pages your weak domains point at.
The practice exam is pitched at associate depth, which is deliberately harder than CLF-C02. Treat anything above 65% on it as comfortably ready for this exam, and use the explanations as teaching rather than as a score.
What this exam rewards
- Naming the service. Most items are “which service does X” in disguise. If you can define every entry in the services glossary in one sentence, you are most of the way there.
- The shared responsibility line. AWS secures of the cloud, you secure in the cloud. Patching a managed database: AWS. Patching an EC2 guest OS: you.
- Knowing the cheapest correct answer. Reserved and Spot instances, S3 storage classes, the Free Tier and Savings Plans all exist to be selected against a stated constraint.
- Support plans by capability. Which plan gets a Technical Account Manager, which gets 24/7 phone, which gets full Trusted Advisor — pure recall, frequently asked.
- Not over-thinking. This is a foundational exam. If an answer requires three inferences, it is probably the distractor.
Where to go next
- The certification tracks page compares this with the four other courses and suggests what to sit after it.
- Solutions Architect – Associate is the natural follow-on; roughly half its service coverage is already here.
- The AWS appendix carries the reference material — frameworks, service landscape, pricing and ROI, study plans.
Last updated Sep 18, 2026