How to pass the AWS cloud practitioner exam?

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cloud practitioner study guide

The AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam is an entry-level certification exam that validates the candidate’s knowledge of the AWS Cloud platform. This exam is designed for individuals with little or no experience with AWS or cloud computing in general, and it serves as a foundation for other AWS certifications. Passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam requires a solid understanding of the AWS Cloud, its services, security, pricing, support, and architectures. The AWS Cloud Practitioner exam guide is an entry-level certification that is designed to validate your overall understanding of the AWS Cloud. To pass this exam, here are some tips:

  1. Understand the exam format: The exam consists of 65 multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions, and you have 90 minutes to complete it.
  2. Read the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide: This guide outlines the topics covered in the exam, including AWS core services, security, compliance, and billing and pricing.
  3. Study the AWS Whitepapers: AWS offers a wide range of whitepapers on various topics related to cloud computing. Read the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials whitepaper, AWS Overview whitepaper, and AWS Well-Architected whitepaper to get a better understanding of AWS services, security, and best practices.
  4. Take AWS Cloud Practitioner Training: AWS offers online training courses and labs that can help you prepare for the exam. The training covers topics such as AWS core services, security, pricing, and support.
  5. Practice with AWS sample exam questions: You can check your understanding and find areas to improve by trying out sample exam questions. AWS offers these sample questions in the exam guide.
  6. Use AWS services: Create an AWS account and use the services to get hands-on experience. This will help you understand the services and concepts better.
  7. Schedule your exam: Once you feel confident, schedule your exam. The exam can be taken online or in-person at a testing center.

Stay concentrated while taking the exam. Go through each question attentively and remove the wrong choices to improve your chances of selecting the correct answer. Wishing you the best of luck with your exam!

AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Difficulty

The difficulty of passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam can vary depending on your background and level of experience with AWS. However, the exam is designed to test your knowledge of the fundamental concepts of the AWS Cloud, so if you have a basic understanding of cloud computing and AWS services, you should be able to pass the exam with adequate preparation.

The test has 65 questions, including multiple-choice and multiple-response questions. You have 90 minutes to finish it. To pass, you need a score of 700 out of 1000 points. These questions are made to check your knowledge of AWS services, security, costs, support, and structures.

To give you an idea of the difficulty level, the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam is considered an entry-level certification, and it is often the first certification that professionals earn in their AWS certification journey. However, you should still prepare adequately to increase your chances of passing the exam. By studying the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide, reviewing AWS whitepapers and documentation, taking AWS training courses, using practice exams, and joining AWS communities, you can gain the knowledge and confidence you need to pass the exam.

AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Guide

Here are some official links to resources for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam:

  1. AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide: https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-cloud-practitioner/AWS-Certified-Cloud-Practitioner_Exam-Guide.pdf
  2. AWS Cloud Practitioner Official Study Guide: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Cloud-Practitioner-Official-Study/dp/1119490700
  3. Thirdly, AWS Cloud Practitioner Training and Certification: https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-cloudpractitioner/
  4. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Readiness Training: https://www.aws.training/Details/Curriculum?id=20686
  5. AWS Whitepapers and Guides: https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/

AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips and tricks to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam:

  • Firstly, read the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide thoroughly and understand the exam format, topics, and structure.
  • Take advantage of the official AWS Cloud Practitioner training resources, including the official study guide, sample exam questions, and exam readiness training.
  • Next, practice with AWS Free Tier services to gain hands-on experience with AWS services and solutions.
  • Familiarize yourself with the AWS console and command-line interface (CLI) to perform tasks and manage AWS resources.
  • Review AWS whitepapers and guides related to the exam topics, such as the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS Best Practices, and AWS Pricing Overview.
  • Utilize practice exams and quizzes to evaluate your understanding and pinpoint areas where you can enhance your knowledge.
  • Focus on the core AWS services and their use cases, such as EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, and CloudWatch.
  • Memorize key AWS concepts and terminology, such as regions, availability zones, elastic IPs, security groups, and roles.
  • Manage your time effectively during the exam, and don’t spend too much time on a single question.

AWS Cloud Practitioner Course Outline

The AWS Cloud Practitioner exam covers the following topics –

Domain 1: Cloud Concepts
1.1 Define the AWS Cloud and its value proposition
  • Define the benefits of the AWS cloud including:
  • Explain how the AWS cloud allows users to focus on business value
    • Shifting technical resources to revenue-generating activities as opposed to managing infrastructure (AWS Documentation: Business Value on AWS)
1.2 Identify aspects of AWS Cloud economics
1.3 Explain the different cloud architecture design principles
Domain 2: Security and Compliance
2.1 Define the AWS shared responsibility model
2.2 Define AWS Cloud security and compliance concepts
2.3 Identify AWS access management capabilities
2.4 Identify resources for security support
Domain 3: Technology
3.1 Define methods of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud
3.2 Define the AWS global infrastructure
3.3 Identify the core AWS services
3.4 Identify resources for technology support
Domain 4: Billing and Pricing
4.1 Compare and contrast the various pricing models for AWS

(for example, On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instance pricing) (AWS Documentation: Amazon EC2 pricing)

4.2 Recognize the various account structures in relation to AWS billing and pricing
4.3 Identify resources available for billing support

AWS Cloud Practitioner Glossary

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) – A cloud platform that offers various cloud services like storage, computing power, and databases, all online.
  • Cloud Computing: The delivery of computing resources like storage, processing power, and applications over the internet.
  • Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): A web service that provides scalable computing power in the cloud, allowing users to manage virtual machines.
  • Simple Storage Service (S3): A web-based cloud storage service for data storage and retrieval.
  • Relational Database Service (RDS): A web service for setting up, operating, and scaling relational databases in the cloud.
  • DynamoDB: A fully managed NoSQL database service for fast and scalable data storage.
  • Elastic Block Store (EBS): High-performance block storage for use with EC2 instances.
  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): A service to launch AWS resources in a user-defined virtual network.
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM): A service for controlling access to AWS resources.
  • Simple Notification Service (SNS): A pub/sub messaging service for sending and receiving messages.
  • Simple Queue Service (SQS): A message queuing service for decoupling and scaling microservices.
  • Lambda: A serverless computing service for running code in response to events.
  • Elastic Beanstalk: A service for deploying and managing applications without worrying about infrastructure.
  • CloudFormation: A service for defining and managing AWS infrastructure as code.
  • Route 53: A scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) service.
  • CloudFront: A content delivery network (CDN) service for faster content delivery.
  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Automatically distributes application traffic across multiple targets.
  • Auto Scaling: Automatically adjusts capacity to maintain performance and reduce costs.
  • Trusted Advisor: Provides guidance to optimize AWS infrastructure.
  • CloudTrail: Monitors, logs, and audits AWS infrastructure by recording API calls and events.
  • Cost Explorer: Analyzes AWS usage and costs.
  • AWS Well-Architected Tool: Framework for designing reliable, secure, and cost-effective systems.
  • AWS Organizations: Manages multiple AWS accounts with centralized billing and management.
  • CloudWatch: Monitors AWS resources, collects metrics, and provides alarms and notifications.
  • Glacier: It’s like a low-cost storage freezer for rarely used data. You can securely keep lots of data and retrieve it when you need, although it might take a little time.
  • Kinesis: Think of it as a real-time data stream catcher. It helps you collect, process, and analyze data as it flows in from various sources like websites, sensors, or mobile devices.
  • Elastic MapReduce (EMR): This service makes handling big data easier. It helps you process large amounts of data using powerful frameworks like Hadoop and Spark. You can launch and manage clusters of virtual computers and run various data processing tools.
  • Amazon Redshift: It’s like a super-fast, massive warehouse for data. You can analyze huge amounts of structured and semi-structured data using standard SQL queries.
  • AWS Direct Connect: This service gives you a super highway for your data between your own data centers and AWS. It’s like having a dedicated, high-speed road that avoids the regular internet.
  • AWS Snowball: Imagine a secure courier service for moving large amounts of data between your place and AWS. They send you a rugged device, you load your data onto it, and they transport it safely to or from AWS.
  • Amazon WorkSpaces: It’s like having your computer in the cloud. You can access your applications and data from anywhere using any device securely.
  • AWS IoT: This helps you manage and connect all your smart devices securely and efficiently. It also allows you to collect, process, and analyze the data these devices generate.
  • Amazon GuardDuty: Think of it as your security watchdog. It continuously watches over your AWS accounts and workloads, alerting you to any suspicious activity or threats.
  • AWS WAF: It’s like a shield for your web applications. It protects them from common online attacks like injecting malicious code or trying to trick your website into doing bad things.
  • AWS Certificate Manager: It’s like a certificate manager for your website’s security. You can easily get, control, and use secure certificates for your website or other systems to keep your data safe during online transactions.
  • AWS Key Management Service (KMS): Think of it as a key keeper for your data. You can create and manage encryption keys to lock and unlock your data using strong encryption methods.
  • AWS Glue: It’s like a data mover and organizer. You can use it to smoothly transfer data between different sources and destinations, and get it ready for detailed analysis.
  • Amazon SageMaker: Imagine having a personal trainer for your machine learning models. It helps you build, teach, and deploy machine learning models on a large scale, and it comes with pre-built tools and techniques.

Learning Path with AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide

Step 1 : AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide and Learning

To begin your learning journey, you can sign up for free AWS digital training. This will provide you with a strong starting point for building your AWS skills. The free digital training can be accessed on the following link:
Free Digital Training: AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

Once you complete the free digital training you can test your knowledge with our free AWS cloud practitioner practice tests on the following link:
https://www.testpreptraining.com/aws-cloud-practitioner-exam-questions
Then you can proceed with your training

The free cloud practitioner essentials course above covers the following essential concepts. We have also added additional practice material and exercises for you to make your learning as solid as possible. You can follow the path laid out below:

1. Introduction to AWS and the interface:

1. Begin with AWS Overview and learn about core services, aws platform and global infrastructure

2. Learn about AWS Well Architected Framework

Start with learning about the basic cloud computing services, concepts and the AWS interface. You can start with making an AWSs free tier account.
What is an AWS free tier account?

2. Core AWS services

First you will start learning about the following core aws services:

  • Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2),
  • Secondly, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS),
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3),
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and
  • Security Groups.

Additional practice and learning exercises:

Amazon EC2:
Amazon EC2 is the virtual application server provider which are known as instances, to host your web application or website. Further, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud gives you the ability to scale up your computing capacity. It eliminates your need to buy hardware and helps you in increasing the speed of developing and deploying your application.  You can learn and practice amazon EC2 on the following links.

Know about EC2 instance categories
User guide for linux instances
User guides for windows instances

Amazon EBS:
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is not so difficult to use, but high performance block storage  which has been designed to be used with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for intensive workloads at any scale. You can learn and practice amazon EBS on the following links.

Amazon Elastic Block Store
Creating an Amazon EBS volume
Attaching an Amazon EBS volume to an instanceDeep dive on amazon EBS elastic volumes

Amazon simple storage (S3):
Amazon simple storage as the name tells is a cloud storage service by aws. It provides secure, durable, and highly-scalable cloud storage making web based high scale computing easier for developers.You can learn and practice amazon S3 on the following link.
Learn Amazon S3

Amazon virtual private cloud :
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) is a virtual network service to make you able in launching AWS resources into a your own virtual network. Closely resembling your at premise network the benefit it brings is the scalability of infrastructure of AWS.
Amazon VPC concepts

3. AWS integrated services

Now as you have studied and practiced the basic aws services, you will proceed to learn about some of the integrated services that are part of the AWS Cloud: You can learn about them through the following links

Load Balancing:
Elastic Load Balancing is used to handle network traffic workloads. It distributes incoming network traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in multiple Availability Zones. A load balancer distributes network workloads across multiple compute resources and increases the availability and fault tolerance of your applications.
AWS Elastic load balancing,
AWS Application Load Balancer

Auto Scaling:
In events of surge in traffic or demands auto scaling helps you to automatically scale up or down the number of compute resources needed for your application at any given time
Auto Scaling

Amazon Route 53:
The main functions of amazon route 53 are: domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking. Used separately or in any combination
Amazon Route 53

Amazon RDS:
Easily scale, operate and setup relational databases with amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS)

AWS Lamba:
A serverless computing service lets you execute a code to automate the scaling as per the need

Other important Integrated services:
AWS Lambda
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
N
ext, Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudFront, and
AWS CloudFormation.

4. AWS Architecture

It is important to know the practice of implementing well-architected framework in aws

source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture

The following resources will help.

AWS well architected tool
AWS well architected framework
Fault tolerance and high availability
Web hosting on aws cloud

5. Next, AWS Security

Firstly, AWS Overview of security Process

Next, AWS Security Service

6. AWS Pricing Support

AWS Pricing


It is time to take the practice tests again to check your progress:
https://www.testpreptraining.com/aws-cloud-practitioner-exam-questions

Step 2 : AWS Whitepapers and learning resources

Now as you have finished your lessons, it is time to practice your learning with use cases, hands on exercises and not to forget go through the aws whitepapers.

1. AWS Cloud Practitioner White Papers

Cloud best practices – AWS Well Architected Framework
AWS Pricing overview
Compare aws support plans

2. AWS hands on exercises:

You can find all the hands on exercises on the following link. You can practice the relevant exercises.

https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/

3. Others Learning Resources

All whitepapers:
https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/?whitepapers-main.sort-by=item.additionalFields.sortDate&whitepapers-main.sort-order=desc
Learning Library:
https://www.aws.training/LearningLibrary?&search=&tab=view_all
AWS complete documentation:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html

Step 3: Evaluate yourself with Practice tests

Now before finally sitting for the exam, it is essential to practice and prepare for AWS Cloud Practioner exam question. Moreover, it is essential to take practice tests to check your learning so far and polish those skills. This step is very crucial because it forces you into the actual scenario of giving an exam and here you can find out about your weaknesses. You can go back to the learning stage to revise anything you feel you have no solid grasp.

Link for practice tests again
https://www.testpreptraining.com/aws-cloud-practitioner-exam-questions
That’s it, now you are ready to sit for the exam. All the best.

Learn with AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide and Online Tutorial. Begin with AWS Cloud Practitioner exam prep with Free Test Now!

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