AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• The AWS Well-Architected Framework's six pillars and what each optimises for
• Benefits of cloud: elasticity, agility, economies of scale, trading capex for opex
• Cloud deployment models — all-in cloud, hybrid, on-premises
• Migration basics: the 7 Rs, AWS Snow Family for bulk transfer

Know these cold:

• The shared responsibility model — where AWS's duty ends and yours begins, and how that line moves between EC2, RDS and Lambda
• IAM: users, groups, roles, policies, least privilege, root-account protection and MFA
• Compliance tooling: AWS Artifact for reports, Config for resource compliance, CloudTrail for audit trails
• Security services by purpose — GuardDuty, Inspector, Shield, WAF, Macie, KMS

Know these cold:

• Core compute, storage, database and networking services and when each is the right fit
• Global infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations and how they drive resilience
• Connectivity options — VPC basics, Direct Connect, VPN, Route 53, CloudFront
• Ways to interact with AWS: Management Console, CLI, SDKs, Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation

Know these cold:

• EC2 purchasing options — On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans — and the trade-off each makes
• Cost tooling: Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost and Usage Report, the pricing calculator
• Consolidated billing and AWS Organizations
• Support plan tiers and what each unlocks, including when a Technical Account Manager is included

Common mistakes

• ✕Memorising service names without the shared responsibility model — it is the single most heavily tested idea on the exam and it is tested as judgment, not recall.
• ✕Confusing the cost tools: Cost Explorer analyses spend that already happened, Budgets alerts on spend as it approaches a limit, and the Pricing Calculator estimates before you build.
• ✕Mixing up Regions, Availability Zones and edge locations, then getting every resilience and latency question wrong as a result.
• ✕Treating Reserved Instances and Savings Plans as interchangeable — the exam tests which commitment fits which workload shape.
• ✕Over-studying deep technical detail. This exam rewards breadth; time spent on VPC subnetting internals is time not spent on billing and support, which is 12% of the score.

Exam-day tips

• ✓Scoring is compensatory — there is no per-domain minimum, so a weak area cannot sink you on its own. Answer everything.
• ✓There is no penalty for a wrong answer. Never leave a question blank.
• ✓When two options both look right, pick the one that is more managed or more least-privilege — that is usually the AWS-preferred answer.
• ✓Watch for the qualifier in the stem: MOST cost-effective and MOST operationally efficient often point at different services.
• ✓Flag and move. At 65 questions in 90 minutes you have well over a minute each, but only if you do not stall early.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. The signal that holds up: consistently at or above the real pass mark (700 on a 100–1000 scaled score) across multiple full-length sets, with no single domain dragging far below the rest. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.