I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam in 2024. This is what I learned about the certification itself, how I studied, and whether it was worth it.
What the certification covers
The Cloud Practitioner is AWS's entry-level certification. It's not technical in the traditional sense — you won't be writing CloudFormation or debugging Lambda cold starts. Instead, it covers the conceptual foundation: what services exist, what problems they solve, how AWS pricing works, and the shared responsibility model.
Think of it as the vocabulary test before you get into the grammar.
Who it's for
Despite being "entry-level," I found real value in it as a working developer. I'd been using AWS services for years — S3, EC2, Lambda, RDS — without a clear mental model of how they related to each other or why you'd choose one over another.
The certification forced me to fill in those gaps. I came out with a much clearer understanding of the full service landscape, even for services I've never touched directly.
How I studied
I used a combination of Stephane Maarek's Udemy course and practice exams from Tutorials Dojo. The course is thorough and well-paced. The practice exams from Tutorials Dojo are harder than the real exam, which is exactly what you want.
Total study time: roughly 30–35 hours spread over three weeks. I'd recommend not rushing it — the practice exams are where you identify gaps, and you need time to revisit those gaps before sitting the real test.
The exam itself
65 questions, 90 minutes, multiple choice and multiple select. The multiple select questions are where people lose points — you need to get all the correct answers, and partial credit isn't a thing.
Read every question carefully. AWS loves to test edge cases in service naming and pricing models. "Which service does X" questions often have two plausible answers and one correct one.
Was it worth it?
Yes, for two reasons. First, it gave me a structured framework for thinking about cloud architecture decisions — one I use regularly. Second, it built credibility when discussing infrastructure trade-offs with clients and teammates who hadn't worked with me before.
If you're a developer who uses AWS regularly, I'd recommend it. If you're completely new to cloud, start with some hands-on experimentation first — the certification will make more sense with some practical context behind it.
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