What's on the Cloud Practitioner exam

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) validates an overall understanding of the AWS Cloud, independent of any specific job role. It is designed for people who are new to the cloud and may not have an IT background at all — including sales, marketing, product, project management, and finance roles — as well as technologists who want a structured grounding before moving to associate-level certifications. AWS suggests the target candidate has up to six months of exposure to AWS, though this is not a requirement.

Domains covered

The exam is organized into weighted domains. The percentages indicate roughly how much of the exam each domain represents, which is a useful guide for allocating study time.

Cloud Concepts 24%

The value proposition of the AWS Cloud, the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, cloud adoption and migration strategies including the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, and cloud economics — fixed versus variable costs, rightsizing, licensing models, and economies of scale.

Security and Compliance 30%

The AWS shared responsibility model and how it shifts between services, governance and compliance concepts including AWS Artifact and AWS Config, identity and access management with IAM and IAM Identity Center, the principle of least privilege, root user protection, MFA, and security services such as GuardDuty, Shield, WAF, and Trusted Advisor.

Cloud Technology and Services 34%

Deployment and operating models, AWS global infrastructure — Regions, Availability Zones, and edge locations — and the core service families: compute (EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, Fargate), storage (S3, EBS, EFS, FSx), databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache), networking (VPC, Route 53, Direct Connect), plus AI/ML, analytics, and application integration services.

Billing, Pricing, and Support 12%

Compute purchasing options including On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Spot, and Savings Plans; billing and cost management tools such as AWS Budgets, Cost Explorer, and the Pricing Calculator; AWS Organizations and consolidated billing; and the AWS Support plan tiers, Trusted Advisor, and the AWS Partner Network.

How to prepare

The exam rewards breadth rather than depth: you need to recognize what each core AWS service does and when it applies, not how to configure it. Coding, architecture design, and troubleshooting are explicitly out of scope. Note that of the 65 questions, 50 are scored and 15 are unscored trial questions that do not affect your result, and there is no penalty for guessing — so answer everything. Working through full timed papers is the fastest way to surface the service-recognition gaps that cost marks.

Cloud concepts mapped to AWS services

Most CLF-C02 questions describe a business need and ask which AWS service meets it. This table maps the concept you will see in a question to the service that answers it, grouped by category. Knowing what each service does — and which neighbouring service it is easily confused with — is most of the exam.

Not every service listed here is heavily tested, but each one appears in the CLF-C02 in-scope list. Focus first on the pairs that are easily confused — CloudWatch versus CloudTrail, EBS versus EFS, RDS versus DynamoDB, and Shield versus WAF.

Exam formats and passing scores are updated periodically by AWS. Always confirm the current details on the official AWS certification page before booking your exam.