AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner study guide
AWS CRWT · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is AWS's foundational certification. It is designed for people who can demonstrate a broad understanding of the AWS Cloud - what it is, what it costs, how it is secured, and which service categories exist - rather than for engineers who build and operate workloads. Candidates often come from sales, project management, finance, support, or IT roles that touch AWS decisions, as well as career changers preparing for a more technical certification later. The exam is organised around four domains: Cloud Concepts; Security and Compliance; Cloud Technology and Services; and Billing, Pricing, and Support. The AWS CRWT study guide has 4 sections and about 1,613 words.
01Cloud Concepts
Candidates must understand the AWS Cloud value proposition: trade fixed capital expense for variable operational expense, benefit from massive economies of scale, stop guessing capacity, increase speed and agility, and go global in minutes. Know the difference between IaaS (e.g., Amazon EC2), PaaS (e.g., AWS Elastic Beanstalk), and SaaS (e.g., Amazon WorkSpaces).
396 words, about 2 min02Security and Compliance
A candidate must know AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) : users, groups, roles, policies, and the principle of least privilege. Understand the difference between identity-based policies (attached to users/roles) and resource-based policies (attached to resources like S3 buckets).
403 words, about 2 min03Cloud Technology and Services
Candidates must know the major AWS service families and their use cases. Compute : EC2 (virtual servers), Lambda (serverless functions), ECS/EKS (containers), Elastic Beanstalk (PaaS).
389 words, about 2 min04Billing, Pricing, and Support
Candidates must understand the AWS pricing fundamentals : pay-as-you-go, save when you reserve, and pay less by using more (volume discounts). EC2 pricing options : On-Demand (no commitment), Reserved Instances (1- or 3-year commitment, up to 75% savings), Savings Plans (flexible commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage), Spot Instances (up to 90% discount, can be interrupted), and Dedicated Hosts (physical server for compliance).
425 words, about 2 min