The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (exam code CLF-C02) is AWS's foundational certification. It is designed for people who need to understand the AWS Cloud without necessarily building on it: newcomers to cloud, and people in sales, finance, project management and other non-engineering roles, as well as technical staff who want a first AWS credential. No coding or architecture experience is expected.
Exam format at a glance
- Questions: 65 multiple-choice and multiple-response questions. 15 of them are unscored items AWS uses to evaluate future content, and they are not marked, so treat every question as if it counts.
- Time limit: 90 minutes.
- Passing score: 700 on a scaled score of 100–1000.
- Fee: USD 100.
- Validity: 3 years.
What the exam covers
The CLF-C02 exam guide splits the content into four domains:
- Cloud Concepts (24%) — the benefits and economics of the cloud, deployment models, and cloud design principles.
- Security and Compliance (30%) — the shared responsibility model, identity and access management, and AWS security and compliance services.
- Cloud Technology and Services (34%) — core compute, storage, database and networking services, the global infrastructure, and choosing the right service for a use case.
- Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%) — pricing models, cost-management tools, account structures and support plans.
Security and technology together account for almost two-thirds of the exam, so give them the most study time. Don't skip billing and support, though. Those questions are often very direct, and they are easy points if you have learned the material.
How to prepare
Master the shared responsibility model. It appears repeatedly, in different forms. For any given service, you should be able to say what AWS secures and what the customer secures.
Learn services by their use case. CLF-C02 rarely asks how to configure something. It asks which service fits a need. For each core service, learn one sentence on what it does and when you would choose it over its nearest alternative. S3 versus EBS versus EFS is a classic example.
Open the free tier. Clicking through the AWS console for an afternoon, launching an instance and creating a bucket, makes service names concrete in a way reading alone does not.
Finish with timed practice. 65 questions in 90 minutes is manageable, but multiple-response questions ("select two") catch people out. Practise until you reliably read how many answers a question wants.
Study resources from CertCraft
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Practice Tests — exam-style questions across all four domains.
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Notes — condensed notes organised by exam topic.
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Quick Reference — for last-minute review.
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Simulator — interactive practice in your browser.
Interested in AI on AWS next? Read our guide to the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01).
AWS updates exam guides and fees from time to time. Check the official exam page on the AWS Certification site before booking. CertCraft Institute is an independent study resource and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon Web Services.