How to use this guide
Give each domain study time in proportion to its official weighting. The percentages below are where your marks actually come from. Work through the domains in order, then let your per-domain practice scores show you what to go back to.
The fastest way to improve: read one domain’s focus areas, take a practice run, then read the explanation for every question you missed before moving on. The explanations are where the learning happens. Skipping them is the most common reason people stop improving.
1. Cloud Concepts
24% of the examWhat to focus on:
- 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
2. Security and Compliance
30% of the examWhat to focus on:
- 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
3. Cloud Technology and Services
34% of the examWhat to focus on:
- 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
4. Billing, Pricing, and Support
12% of the examWhat to focus on:
- 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 most heavily tested idea on the exam, and it is tested as judgment rather than recall.
- Confusing the cost tools. Cost Explorer analyses spend that already happened, Budgets alerts as spend approaches a limit, and the Pricing Calculator estimates before you build.
- Mixing up Regions, Availability Zones and edge locations, then losing every resilience and latency question 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, and time spent on VPC subnetting internals is time not spent on billing and support, which is 12% of the score.
Exam-day tips
- Answer everything. Scoring is compensatory, with no per-domain minimum, so one weak area cannot sink you.
- 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 the qualifier in the stem. MOST cost-effective and MOST operationally efficient often point at different services.
- Flag and move on. 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. What counts is scoring at or above the real pass mark (700 on a 100 to 1000 scaled score) across several full-length sets in a row, with no single domain trailing far behind the others. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.
Free, full-length, and weighted to the official blueprint. Every answer is explained.
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