Amazon Web Services certifications

Cloud Practitioner is the foundational AWS certification. It is a broad, non-engineering exam covering cloud concepts, security and compliance, core AWS services, and the economics of running on AWS. It is the usual first credential for people entering cloud work, and the one most often taken by non-engineers (sales, finance, project and account managers) who need to talk about AWS credibly.

Solutions Architect - Associate is the most widely held AWS certification and the one named most often in cloud job postings. It tests design judgment rather than recall. Given a workload with constraints on security, resilience, performance and cost, you pick the right combination of AWS services. Every domain is framed as "design", so there is no operations or coding content.

Developer - Associate covers building, deploying, securing and debugging applications that run on AWS. This is the associate exam for people who write code. Expect SDKs and service APIs, IAM from the application's point of view, CI/CD pipelines, and tracing a failure symptom back to its cause. It assumes you are comfortable in at least one high-level programming language.

AI Practitioner is AWS's foundational credential for AI and generative AI. It is not a machine-learning engineering exam. It tests whether you can reason about model selection, prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, and the governance questions that come with putting AI in front of customers. Applications of Foundation Models is the single largest domain at 28%, and responsible AI plus security together make up another 28%.

DEA-C01 is AWS's associate-level data engineering certification. It covers the pipeline end to end: ingesting and transforming data, choosing and operating the right stores, running pipelines in production, and governing the whole thing securely. Ingestion and transformation is the largest domain at 34%. It replaced the retired Data Analytics - Specialty as AWS's primary data credential, and is aimed at practitioners who build pipelines rather than analysts who query them.