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Megha Shivhare
Megha Shivhare

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How I Passed the AWS Practitioner Exam: Study Tips + Resources

If you're just starting your AWS journey, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is the perfect foundational step. It’s designed to test your understanding of core AWS services, global infrastructure, and basic cloud concepts. Here’s how I prepared for and successfully passed the exam.

Understand the Basics of AWS Services

AWS offers over 200 services, but don’t worry—the exam doesn’t expect you to know them all! Instead, following are the AWS services I was tested on the most, focus on these foundational services and concepts:

  1. IAM (Identity and Access Management): Learn about users, groups, roles, MFA, and CLI setup.
  2. EC2: Understand instance types, security groups (and common ports like SSH and HTTP), instance connect, and purchasing options (spot, reserved, etc.).
  3. EC2 Instance Storage: Get familiar with EBS, snapshots, AMIs, and an overview of FSx.
  4. Load Balancing and Scaling: Study the concepts of ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) and ASG (Auto Scaling Group) to understand scalability and elasticity.
  5. S3 (Simple Storage Service): Cover bucket policies, versioning, replication, storage classes, encryption, and tools like Snowball Edge and Storage Gateway.
  6. Databases and Analytics: Focus on RDS (Relational Database Service), DynamoDB, Aurora, ElasticCache, and an overview of services like Redshift and Glue.
  7. Compute Services: Explore ECS, Fargate, Lambda (serverless), Lightsail, and API Gateway.
  8. Deployment Tools: Get a basic understanding of CloudFormation, CDK, Beanstalk, CodeDeploy, and related services.
  9. Global Infrastructure: Learn about Route 53, CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and Local Zones.
  10. Monitoring: Focus on CloudWatch, EventBridge, CloudTrail, and the AWS Health Dashboard.
  11. Networking: Understand VPC, subnets, security groups, NAT gateways, Direct Connect, and VPN options.
  12. Security & Compliance: Cover DDoS protection, encryption, GuardDuty, Inspector, and IAM Access Analyzer.
  13. Account Management: Study billing tools, AWS Organizations, cost allocation tags, and budgets.
  14. Machine Learning: Gain an overview of services like Rekognition, Sagemaker, and Textract.
  15. Architected Framework: Familiarize yourself with the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and tools like AWS IQ.

Study the Shared Responsibility Model

AWS's shared responsibility model what AWS manages (e.g., infrastructure) versus what you manage (e.g., securing your data). You can expect(most probabl) at least one question about this in the exam.

Additional Services to Explore

While these might not be the exam’s main focus, having a basic understanding of the following services can be helpful:

  • Workspaces
  • AppStream 2.0
  • IoT Core
  • Elastic Transcoder
  • AppSync and Amplify
  • Device Farm
  • DataSync
  • Step Functions
  • Fault Injection Simulator
  • AWS Pinpoint
  • Elastic Disaster Recovery

My Study Tips

  1. Focus on High-Yield Topics: Spend most of your time on core services like IAM, EC2, S3, and VPC.
  2. Practice Questions: Take as many practice tests as possible to familiarize yourself with the question style.
  3. Use AWS Free Tier: Experimenting hands-on with AWS services helped me solidify my understanding.
  4. Leverage AWS Documentation and Training: The AWS website has free resources and FAQs that are incredibly useful.
  5. Create a Study Schedule: Set aside consistent study hours to stay on track.

Resources to Help You Prepare

  1. AWS Free Tier: Practice hands-on with core services.
  2. Practice Exams: Check out these free sample questions and practice tests to test your knowledge:
  3. Notes & online courses:
    • Udemy - Stephane Maarek [Paid]
    • AWS Cloud Practitioner course - Hitesh Choudhary [Free]
    • Study Guide - Nirav Kanani [Free]

Be Aware of Exam Details

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam consists of 65 questions, but only 50 are scored. The remaining 15 are experimental questions that won’t affect your score—however, you won’t know which ones they are. To pass, you’ll need a score of at least 700 out of 1,000 (around 70%).
Review the official AWS study guide properly before appearing for the exam.

With a solid understanding of these core concepts, some dedicated preparation, and the right resources, passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is completely achievable. Good luck!

Note : I appeared for the exam on Dec, 2024. Please look out for any changes in the exam structure/schedule or details accordingly.

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Top comments (2)

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vedansh_dubey profile image
Vedansh Dubey

Really very insightful... Thanks for sharing the needful resources as well.

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ty__dipti_f385e1aec29792e profile image
TY_ Dipti

Great work Megha!! 👏

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