- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Crash Course
- Domain 2: Security and Compliance
- AWS Well-Architected Framework
What is the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is a foundational (meaning beginner level) certification aimed at getting the basics of AWS cloud.
You won’t learn how to develop in AWS, but you’ll learn the basic cloud concepts (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, serverless, etc), the basics of AWS ( IAM, billing …), and the most common AWS services (like S3, EC2, lambda, RDS).
Why take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner?
If you are just getting started, I think it is a good way to get your feet in the door for some interviews and into the certification world.
The contents are quite basic, so you shouldn’t have any problem passing the certification exam.
This is a good bonus since you get a discount on your second certification. This means you could for example take two certifications, Certified Cloud Practitioner and AWS Certified Developer – Associate for $175 ($100 + 50% of $150) which I think is a good deal.
How the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner crash course is structured
I structured this crash course in a very simple, but dense way. The Certification home page has an exam guide available for download. This guide contains the learning objectives covered in the exam. There are four: Cloud Concepts, Security and Compliance, Technology, Billing, and Pricing.
This blog series is organized so that each domain is covered in an independent way. You can just follow along with the posts to learn about them!
This is a very dense way, but each blog is organized to meet the bullet points of the exam guide, so you know point-per-point what you are learning.
Learning resources
Although I think the series is more than enough, I’ll add some extra resources, namely the ones I used for this course:
- Sample questions The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner home page has a PDF with some twenty questions, that you can download. It doesn’t hurt to use them, although I recommend not doing them over and over again so you don’t overfit them.
- Question set. AWS has a learning platform called SkillBuilder with an Official Practice Question Set. It is only 20 questions, but it is an excellent way to get a feel for the question structure.
- O’Reilly resources. If you can afford an O’Reilly license, the platform has some excellent resources.
- For example, it has a great practice exam tool, with lots of questions and explanations.
- I also did a live webinar by Chad Smith, which was great to get the bulk of the course material in.
- Lastly, it also has some ebooks, although I haven’t tried them.
- Udemy courses Last but not least, Udemy! The online shop is permanently in discount.
- I really liked the vibe of Stephane Mareek. I started with his course, but I’m not really a type of video course guy.
How to take the exam
You can take the exam in one of two ways. At a test center, or in the comfort of your home. Both need to be scheduled and have the same price. However, reading from all the horror stories in Reddit from the ones that attempted the online taking, I really recommend the in-person option.
Conclusion
Please follow along, and let me know if you have any comments. Good studying!
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