AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02): Beginner's Study Guide

The entry point to AWS certifications. Learn the CLF-C02 exam format, the four domains, and a focused 3-week plan to pass even without a technical background.

Practice 719 free AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) questions

Official exam page: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) is the ideal first AWS certification. It validates a foundational understanding of the AWS Cloud — concepts, security, core services, pricing and support — and requires no hands-on engineering experience.

Exam at a glance

• Format: 65 questions (multiple choice and multiple response)
• Duration: 90 minutes
• Cost: 100 USD
• Passing score: 700 out of 1000 (scaled)
• Recommended experience: up to 6 months of general AWS exposure

Exam domains

1. Cloud Concepts — 24%. Benefits of the cloud, the AWS Cloud value proposition, the Well-Architected Framework, cloud economics.
2. Security and Compliance — 30%. The shared responsibility model, IAM, compliance programs, security services like Shield, WAF and GuardDuty.
3. Cloud Technology and Services — 34%. Core compute, storage, networking and database services; ways to deploy and operate on AWS.
4. Billing, Pricing, and Support — 12%. Pricing models, the Billing and Cost Management tools, support plans.

What to focus on

• The shared responsibility model — appears in many questions. AWS secures the cloud; you secure what you put in it.
• Core services and their one-line purpose: EC2 (VMs), S3 (object storage), RDS (managed relational DB), Lambda (serverless), VPC (networking), CloudFront (CDN), IAM (access).
• Pricing fundamentals: pay-as-you-go, Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans vs Spot, the Free Tier, and the AWS Pricing Calculator.
• Support plans: Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise — and what each includes.

A 3-week study plan

• Week 1: Cloud concepts and the global infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations).
• Week 2: Security, the shared responsibility model, and core services.
• Week 3: Billing, pricing, support — then practice exams.

Exam-day tips

• Most questions are definitional — if you know what each service does, you can eliminate wrong answers quickly.
• Beware of "trap" services that sound right but belong to a different category.
• Don't overthink: the CLF-C02 rewards breadth, not depth.

Start practicing

Work through the free CLF-C02 questions below. If you can consistently score above 80%, you are ready to book the exam.