AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam measures foundational, role-agnostic understanding of the AWS Cloud and the candidate’s ability to explain core concepts, identify appropriate services for common scenarios, and interpret cost and support constructs. It targets individuals with limited hands-on experience—typically up to six months of exposure—who need a reliable baseline of cloud literacy without deep engineering or operational responsibilities. Candidates are expected to articulate the business and technical value of cloud adoption, describe migration considerations and high-level design principles drawn from the Well-Architected Framework, and recognize how elasticity, high availability, and global infrastructure affect deployment decisions. Competency expectations include basic fluency in cloud economics and cost models, the ability to compare purchasing and storage options, and familiarity with AWS billing, budgeting, and reporting tools used to manage consumption and allocate costs. On security and governance, candidates must understand the shared responsibility model, common access-management constructs (such as IAM principals, roles, and multi-factor authentication), and where to find compliance and auditing resources. They should also recognize AWS security capabilities and monitoring tools that support operational oversight and incident detection. The technology domain covers core service families—compute, storage, database, networking, serverless, container services, analytics, and selected AI/ML and developer tools—at a conceptual level, enabling candidates to select appropriate services for straightforward use cases and to describe connectivity and deployment options. Practical skills emphasize knowing when to use managed versus self-hosted offerings, understanding the purpose of load balancing and autoscaling, and identifying lifecycle and backup considerations for storage. Scope boundaries are explicit: the exam does not evaluate coding, detailed architecture design, deep troubleshooting, implementation specifics, or load and performance testing. It is compensatory across domains, so overall performance determines success rather than per-section minimums. The exam format uses single-answer and multiple-response questions, includes both scored and unscored items used for test development, and reports results on a scaled score with a defined minimum standard. Cross-cutting themes that inform the tested material include security, reliability, cost optimization, governance and compliance, and the practical use of AWS resources and documentation to locate authoritative guidance and support.