AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner: Study Guide for developers who've been using AWS already

Intro

I’ve set myself out, since I’ve been working with AWS for some time to gather up some of their certifications. For this year, I wanted to get started with the foundation, being the AWS Cloud Practitioner. As I’ve been using AWS already, I thought it might be really easy, but after some research I figured out it’s harder to prepare for the Cloud Practitioner exam than I thought. They really want to know what all of their weird sounding service names mean. Also they seem to focus a lot on support plans and billing topics, so knowing about these things in detail is beneficial.

My learning strategy

  1. Learn with a explanation video to get an overview about the certification
  2. Study written notes like the kananinirav.com ones, as well as the AWS Well Architected documentation
  3. This was to me the most beneficial one: Do mock tests.
    1. Understand how the questions are structured (multiple choice), they communicate if multiple answers are correct
    2. The choices are usually real product names, AWS doesn’t make them up
    3. If you hit consistently >80% it’s likely that you pass the test, since only 70% are required

Conclusion

After passing the exam, I think the most important part is to do the mock tests. If you hit 80% across all questions, it’s likely to pass the test. Knowing all kinds of AWS service names was the most challenging part to me, since AWS really doesn’t have a clear naming strategy, which is from my perspective a very bad product decision in general.

Resources