AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) — the full course

Every lesson and every lab is free to read, mapped one-to-one to the task statements in AWS’s published exam guide.

The labs run in your own AWS account. The first one sets a budget alert before anything else, every lab stays inside the Free Tier where it can, and every lab ends by deleting what it made.

26written lessons

30hands-on labs

17hours of lab work

5audio episodes

Start with lesson 1 — The benefits of the AWS Cloud: global reach, high availability, elasticity and agility Exam simulator

Jump to a domain: 1. Cloud Concepts · 2. Security and Compliance · 3. Cloud Technology and Services · 4. Billing, Pricing, and Support

What the exam weighs

Domain	Share of the exam	Lessons here
1. Cloud Concepts	24%	5
2. Security and Compliance	30%	6
3. Cloud Technology and Services	34%	11
4. Billing, Pricing, and Support	12%	4

The curriculum

1. Cloud Concepts 24% of the exam

01The benefits of the AWS Cloud: global reach, high availability, elasticity and agilitytask statement 1.1
- Set a budget alert first, then map the global infrastructure you can deploy to short · 25 min
02The AWS Well-Architected Framework, and how its six pillars differtask statement 1.2
- Run a first Well-Architected review of an invented shop short · 30 min
03Moving to AWS: the Cloud Adoption Framework and migration strategiestask statement 1.3
- Choose a migration strategy for each application in an invented portfolio short · 30 min
04Cloud economics: fixed against variable costs, on-premises costs and economies of scaletask statement 1.4
- Sort on-premises costs from cloud costs and watch a variable cost move short · 25 min
05Cloud economics: licensing models, rightsizing and what automation savestask statement 1.4
- Capstone: build a right-sized development server that stops itself when idle capstone · 75 min
- Compare licence models, rightsize on paper, and build two identical environments from one template short · 30 min

2. Security and Compliance 30% of the exam

01The AWS shared responsibility model, and how it shifts between EC2, RDS and Lambdatask statement 2.1
- Find the customer's half of the shared responsibility model in a bucket and a function short · 30 min
02Compliance and governance: AWS Artifact, regional and industry requirements, and the services that monitor and audittask statement 2.2
- Answer an auditor's questions with CloudTrail, the IAM credential report and AWS Artifact short · 30 min
03Securing resources on AWS: encryption in transit and at rest, and the services customers use to protect workloadstask statement 2.2
- Encrypt at rest, client side and in transit with one private S3 bucket short · 25 min
04IAM: users, groups, roles and policies, least privilege, federation and IAM Identity Centertask statement 2.3
- Grant least privilege through a group, then watch an explicit deny win short · 25 min
05Protecting the root user, and handling access keys, password policies and stored credentialstask statement 2.3
- Audit the root user's protection from an admin identity, and store secrets properly short · 30 min
06Security services, third-party security tools, and where AWS publishes security informationtask statement 2.4
- Run a first security review of a new project's AWS footprint capstone · 80 min
- Sort AWS security services by the job they do, in your own account short · 25 min

3. Cloud Technology and Services 34% of the exam

01Ways to provision and reach AWS: the console, APIs, SDKs, the CLI and infrastructure as code, across deployment modelstask statement 3.1
- Build the same resource through the console, the CLI, an SDK and a CloudFormation template short · 30 min
02AWS global infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations, and when to use more than one Regiontask statement 3.2
- See which resources belong to a Region and which are global short · 25 min
03Amazon EC2 instance types, auto scaling and load balancerstask statement 3.3
- Compare instance families and watch an Auto Scaling group replace an instance short · 35 min
04Containers and serverless compute: Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate and AWS Lambdatask statement 3.3
- Run code without a server: an AWS Lambda function, invoked and logged short · 25 min
05Databases on AWS: managed or self-hosted, relational, NoSQL and in-memory, and migrating with DMS and SCTtask statement 3.4
- A serverless NoSQL table: DynamoDB on demand, written and read by key short · 20 min
06Amazon VPC, Route 53 and connecting to AWS: subnets, gateways, security groups, network ACLs, VPN and Direct Connecttask statement 3.5
- Build a small VPC: public and private subnets, a security group and a network ACL short · 35 min
07Amazon S3: object storage, storage classes and lifecycle policiestask statement 3.6
- Store objects in three S3 storage classes and add a lifecycle configuration short · 20 min
08Block, file and hybrid storage, and AWS Backup: EBS, instance store, EFS, FSx and Storage Gatewaytask statement 3.6
- Move an EBS volume between zones with a snapshot, and set out an AWS Backup plan short · 30 min
09AI/ML and analytics services: what SageMaker AI, Lex and the other AI services do, and Athena, Kinesis, Glue and Quick Sighttask statement 3.7
- Call three pre-trained AI services, then query a CSV in S3 with Athena short · 35 min
10Messaging, business applications and customer enablement: EventBridge, SNS, SQS, Connect, SES and AWS Supporttask statement 3.8
- Fan one message out from an SNS topic to two SQS queues short · 30 min
11Developer tools, end-user computing, frontend and IoT services: CodeBuild, CodePipeline, X-Ray, WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0, Amplify and IoT Coretask statement 3.8
- Capstone: a three-stage release pipeline with CodePipeline and CodeBuild capstone · 80 min
- Register a device in AWS IoT Core and read its device shadow short · 25 min

4. Billing, Pricing, and Support 12% of the exam

01Pricing models: On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot and Dedicated options, data transfer and storage tierstask statement 4.1
- Compare EC2 purchasing options and storage tiers without buying anything short · 25 min
02Billing and cost management: AWS Budgets, Cost Explorer, the Pricing Calculator, consolidated billing and cost allocation tagstask statement 4.2
- Capstone: estimate, build, tag and trace the cost of a small project capstone · 75 min
- Read your budget, your bill and your costs, then estimate before you build short · 30 min
03AWS Support plans and technical resources: re:Post, Knowledge Center, Prescriptive Guidance, Trusted Advisor and AWS Healthtask statement 4.3
- Find the right help: your support plan, Trusted Advisor, AWS Health and the free resources short · 30 min
04AWS Partners, AWS Marketplace, AWS Professional Services and solutions architectstask statement 4.3
- Browse AWS Marketplace and the Partner directory without buying anything short · 25 min

The exam simulator

Open the simulator See the paid tier

5 of the 26 lessons have an audio episode so far, and each plays in the lesson itself.

This is an independent study companion for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam and is not produced by or endorsed by Amazon Web Services. AWS, Amazon Web Services and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.