Amazon Web Services certifications

Cloud Practitioner is the foundational AWS certification: 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 speak about AWS credibly.

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

Developer – Associate covers building, deploying, securing and debugging applications that run on AWS. It is the associate exam for people who write code: heavy on SDKs and service APIs, IAM from the application's point of view, CI/CD pipelines, and reading failure symptoms back to a 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%.