CCP (WorldatWork Rewards Certifications) study guide
CCP · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Certified Cloud Professional (CCP) is a vendor-neutral credential for people who design, deploy, and operate workloads in public or hybrid cloud environments. It suits cloud engineers, solutions architects, systems administrators moving into cloud roles, and technical managers who need to reason about cost, risk, and reliability rather than only one vendor's console. The CCP study guide has 7 sections and about 3,434 words.
01Cloud Concepts and Architecture
The Cloud Concepts and Architecture domain tests whether you can explain the business case for cloud, describe AWS's global infrastructure, map workloads to the right service model, and draw the shared responsibility line. Questions are framing questions: you are given a constraint (cost, latency, compliance, resilience) and asked which model or architecture satisfies it.
514 words, about 3 min02Compute and Application Services
This domain tests selecting a compute primitive and a purchasing model that fit a workload's traffic pattern, runtime limit, and cost profile. Most questions reduce to two decisions: instance or serverless, and commitment or on-demand.
487 words, about 2 min03Storage and Data Management
Storage and Data Management tests mapping data to the correct store - object, block, file, relational, NoSQL, warehouse, cache - and then to the correct tier and protection mechanism. The decisive inputs are access frequency, retrieval latency tolerance, sharing model, and retention rules.
473 words, about 2 min04Networking and Connectivity
Networking and Connectivity tests whether you can build an isolated VPC, control traffic in both directions, and connect that VPC to the internet, to other VPCs, and to on-premises networks without over-exposing it. A VPC is defined by a CIDR block (AWS accepts /16 to /28).
505 words, about 3 min05Security, Identity, and Compliance
Security, Identity, and Compliance tests least-privilege access design, data protection, threat detection, and audit evidence. Expect scenario questions where a bad answer hands out long-lived credentials or a good answer uses a role.
472 words, about 2 min06Operations, Monitoring, and Reliability
Operations, Monitoring, and Reliability tests how you observe a running system, automate its operations, and recover it after failure within stated targets. Most questions hinge on the difference between logging, metrics, and events, and between the disaster-recovery strategies.
440 words, about 2 min07Cost Management and Governance
Cost Management and Governance tests pricing mechanics, cost visibility, multi-account governance, and support entitlements. Questions usually contrast two tools that sound similar - Cost Explorer versus Budgets, or the Pricing Calculator versus the TCO Calculator - or ask what an Organizations feature actually does.
543 words, about 3 min