Hello, and welcome to this course, which has been designed to help you prepare for and pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam.

My name is Danny Jessee, and I am one of the trainers here at Cloud Academy, specializing in AWS–Amazon Web Services–and AWS certifications. Feel free to connect with me to ask any questions using the details shown on the screen. Alternatively, you can always get in touch with us here at Cloud Academy by sending an email to support@cloudacademy.com, where one of our cloud experts will reply to your question.

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is a foundational certification that’s designed for those who aren’t necessarily in a technical role, but who do have some exposure to and experience with AWS and the services that it provides. For example, your role might involve AWS architecture from a sales, financial, or managerial perspective. This course will provide you with the knowledge you need when preparing to take the latest version of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam, CLF-C02, which was released in September 2023.

The certification itself is broken down into four distinct domains:

1. Cloud Concepts (24%),

2. Security and Compliance (30%),

3. Cloud Technology and Services (34%), and

4. Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%).

Each of these domains carry a specific percentage weighting within the exam. Each domain also contains a series of task statements that call out specific required knowledge and skills. These are outlined in the official AWS exam guide, which is linked in the Course Material section for this course and can be found here [https://tinyurl.com/CLF-C02-ExamGuide]. Let’s start by taking a look at each of these domains in more detail to give you a better understanding of the topics that will be covered on the exam.

We’ll begin with Domain 1: Cloud Concepts. This domain accounts for 24% of the exam content and focuses on four key areas:

• Define the benefits of the AWS Cloud,

• Identify design principles of the AWS Cloud,

• Understand the benefits of and strategies for migration to the AWS Cloud, and

• Understand concepts of cloud economics.

This domain will test your knowledge of general cloud concepts and principles. This includes understanding all the benefits the cloud offers, including scalability, reliability, and security, and how the cloud can help your business from both a financial and operational perspective. You should have a solid understanding of both the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which defines best practices when architecting cloud solutions, and the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, which helps to facilitate successful cloud transformations. Newly in scope for this updated version of the exam is understanding strategies for migrating to the cloud, which includes services like AWS Snowball. And when it comes to cloud economics, you should recognize the value of AWS managed services and be able to identify managed services like the Amazon Relational Database Service, or RDS, and Elastic Container Service, or ECS.

Next, we have Domain 2: Security and Compliance. This domain accounts for 30% of the exam content and focuses on four components of cloud security:

• Understand the AWS shared responsibility model,

• Understand AWS Cloud security, governance, and compliance concepts,

• Identify AWS access management capabilities, and

• Identify components and resources for security.

This domain will assess your understanding of cloud security, governance, and compliance, ensuring that you understand the boundaries of where specific responsibilities lie between you and AWS as dictated by the AWS shared responsibility model. It will also test your knowledge of access control mechanisms using AWS Identity and Access Management, how you can maintain compliance within your environment using services like AWS CloudTrail and Config, as well as how to utilize AWS security services like the AWS Web Application Firewall, or WAF, to enhance the security posture of your environment.

After that, we have Domain 3: Cloud Technology and Services. This domain accounts for 34% of the exam content and has eight key areas of interest: 

• Define methods of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud,

• Define the AWS global infrastructure,

• Identify AWS compute, database, network, and storage services (note that the exam guide separates these into four separate areas of interest, but I’ve combined them here),

• Identify AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) services and analytics services, and

• Identify services from other in-scope AWS service categories.

So as you can see, this domain, along with Domain 2, Security and Compliance, accounts for nearly two-thirds of the exam content. Now Domain 3 in particular will test your knowledge of the core components of AWS, its global infrastructure, and key services across a broad spectrum of categories such as compute, database, storage, and networking. Note here also the addition of AWS artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics services, which is new for the updated version of this exam. It’s important to know the differences between specific services and be able to define the basic use cases for AI and ML services like Amazon SageMaker and Kendra, as well as analytics services like Athena and Glue.

And finally, we have Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support. This domain accounts for 12% of the exam content and assesses you in three areas:

• Compare AWS pricing models,

• Understand resources for billing, budget, and cost management, and

• Identify AWS technical resources and AWS Support options.

This domain is all about your understanding and awareness of how to track, trace, and optimize your cloud spend with AWS using a variety of tools, including AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer. You should understand the differences between purchasing options for AWS compute resources, such as Spot, On-Demand, and Reserved Instances. You should also know how and where to find support resources such as Trusted Advisor and the AWS Health Dashboard.

Throughout this course, you will be guided through a series of lessons, hands-on labs, and assessments that cover every element within the domains I just discussed. This will ensure that you have the required knowledge and sufficient understanding to enable you to pass this certification exam.

Feedback on our courses here at Cloud Academy is valuable to both us as trainers and any students looking to take the same course in the future. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, or if you notice anything that needs to be updated or corrected for the next release cycle, it would be greatly appreciated if you could email support@cloudacademy.com.

That brings me to the end of this introduction, now let’s dive in! Best of luck on your certification journey!