AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner study guide
AWS CRI · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is AWS's foundational certification, aimed at people who need a working command of cloud concepts and the AWS platform rather than deep hands-on engineering skill. It suits sales and marketing staff, project and product managers, finance and procurement analysts, support staff, and anyone starting a cloud career who wants a recognized baseline before moving to associate-level technical certifications. The exam tests four areas: cloud concepts (the value proposition of cloud, the shared responsibility model, migration basics, and the Well-Architected Framework); security and compliance (IAM, least privilege, encryption options, logging and monitoring, and the compliance tooling AWS exposes); cloud technology and services (compute, storage, networking, databases, and the managed services that map to common workloads); and billing, pricing, and support (pricing models, cost-management tooling, and support plan differences). Expect scenario-style multiple-choice questions that ask you to pick the most appropriate service or the most cost-effective option, so memorizing service names is not enough - you need to know what each service is for and when it is the wrong choice. The AWS CRI study guide has 4 sections and about 2,087 words.
01Cloud Concepts: Advantages, Design Principles, and Migration Strategy
Domain 1 (roughly a quarter of the exam) tests why organizations move to AWS and how they frame that move. You will not be asked to configure a VPC here - you will be asked to pick the right justification, framework, or migration strategy for a described business situation.
521 words, about 3 min02Security and Compliance: Shared Responsibility, IAM, and Detection Services
Domain 2 is the second-largest area of the exam. It does not ask you to write IAM policy JSON; it asks who is responsible for a control, which service detects a given problem, and which governance artifact proves compliance.
528 words, about 3 min03Cloud Technology and Services: Choosing Compute, Storage, Database, and Network
This is the largest domain. Most questions are of the form "given this workload description, which service fits?" - so learn the decision boundaries between services rather than their feature lists.
493 words, about 2 min04Billing, Pricing, and Support: Cost Models and Plan Selection
The smallest domain, but the easiest place to lose easy marks, because the distractors sound financially sensible. Focus on when each pricing model is appropriate and what each support tier actually includes.
545 words, about 3 min