AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner study plan

Define the AWS global infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations) and explain in your own words how AZ isolation affects application design.

Compare compute options (EC2 instance families, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Fargate, Elastic Beanstalk) and match each to two realistic workloads.

Distinguish block, file, and object storage (EBS, EFS, S3, FSx) and select the correct type for three stated scenarios.

Sketch the shared responsibility model as a two-column table separating customer and AWS duties for EC2, S3, and RDS.

Configure a virtual private cloud with public and private subnets, an internet gateway, and a NAT gateway, then trace the packet path for inbound and outbound traffic.

Explain security groups versus network ACLs, including statefulness and rule evaluation order, and place each in the correct subnet layer.

Describe how Route 53 routing policies (simple, weighted, latency, failover, geolocation) change resolution behavior.

Compare CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and Direct Connect for latency, cost, and use-case fit.

Map managed database options (RDS engines, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift, ElastiCache) to workload characteristics such as relational joins, key-value scale, and analytics.

Explain Multi-AZ versus read replicas in terms of failover, latency, and cost.

Compare tightly coupled and loosely coupled architectures using SQS, SNS, and EventBridge, and identify which decouples a stated pipeline.

Describe elasticity mechanics: Auto Scaling policies, load balancer health checks, and the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling.

Summarize the six advantages of cloud computing and apply each to a migration scenario.

Explain the Well-Architected Framework's six pillars and name one design trade-off per pillar.

Distinguish high availability from fault tolerance and disaster recovery, and match backup-and-restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site to stated RTO/RPO targets.

Identify the AWS service that satisfies a given resilience requirement in five practice scenarios.

Describe the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework perspectives at a high level and how they guide migration planning.

Explain IAM users, groups, roles, and policies, and write a JSON policy that grants least-privilege S3 read access to a specific bucket prefix.

Differentiate identity-based and resource-based policies and state when a role with temporary credentials is preferred over an access key.

Describe multi-factor authentication options, credential rotation, and the purpose of AWS Organizations service control policies.

Map data protection controls: encryption at rest with KMS, encryption in transit with TLS, and S3 bucket policies versus ACLs.

Summarize the AWS compliance program landscape (SOC, ISO, PCI DSS, HIPAA eligibility) and explain how to locate artifacts in Artifact.

Describe logging and monitoring services (CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Config, GuardDuty, Security Hub) and match each to a detection or audit need.

Explain the difference between detective, preventive, and responsive security controls with one AWS service example each.

Outline incident response steps for a leaked access key, including disable, rotate, and audit actions.

Explain the pay-as-you-go model and distinguish On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Spot pricing by commitment and workload fit.

Describe the four support plan tiers and identify which one includes a technical account manager and concierge billing support.

Use the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate a two-tier workload and interpret the line items.

Explain cost allocation tags, Cost Explorer, and AWS Budgets as cost-governance tools.

Identify the main drivers of data transfer and storage cost surprises.

Complete two timed full-length practice sets and log every missed question by domain and root cause (knowledge gap versus misread).

Re-study your two weakest domains using the logged misses, targeting the specific services or concepts behind each error.

Recite the shared responsibility split, support plan differences, and DR strategy definitions from memory without notes.

Build a one-page cheat sheet of service-to-use-case mappings and review it daily before exam day.