The whole Cloud Practitioner track, sorted into the four scored domains. Each domain leads with the cheat sheet that anchors it, then the situations to work through, then the cards and quizzes to drill.
One thing about this paper before you revise for it. It is a breadth paper rather than a depth one: fifty scored questions across roughly a hundred services, and almost none of them ask you to configure anything. What they ask is which service does this job, which side of the responsibility line this task falls on, and what distinguishes one option from the one next to it. So the revision that works is the kind that separates pairs. Elasticity from scalability. A pillar from a perspective. CloudTrail from Config from CloudWatch. Multi-AZ from a read replica. A Reserved Instance from a Savings Plan. The situations here are written to make those boundaries visible; the cards and quizzes are written to make them quick.
How to use this
Read each domain heading and its scope line, then run down the list. A line you can explain out loud, tick. A line that makes you hesitate is the next hour. The quizzes are the fastest way to close a gap.
The scored domains and their weight:
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| 1. Cloud Concepts | 24% |
| 2. Security and Compliance | 30% |
| 3. Cloud Technology and Services | 34% |
| 4. Billing, Pricing, and Support | 12% |
All in, the track is about 8 h 36 min of reading.
Domain 1: Cloud Concepts (24%)
About 1 h 22 min of reading.
The only domain with almost no service names in it, and the one that rewards precise vocabulary most. What the cloud is worth, the six Well-Architected pillars and what separates them, the Cloud Adoption Framework and its six perspectives, the seven migration strategies, and the economics of turning a data centre into a monthly bill.
Anchor cheat sheet: Cloud Concepts · 22 min
Work through the situations
About 50 min of reading.
- Say which of the seven migration strategies fits an application, and why discovery comes before any of them.
-
Separate a fixed cost from a variable one, and name the on-premises costs a per-hour price comparison leaves out.
- ☐ Forty Applications and a Lease That Ends in March · 25 min
- ☐ The Servers We Sized for One Tuesday in November · 25 min
Drill the vocabulary
About 10 min of reading.
-
Ready when you can place a recommendation in the right Well-Architected pillar without hesitating, and elasticity, scalability, agility and high availability no longer blur into each other.
- ☐ The AWS Well-Architected Framework · 6 min
- ☐ Elasticity, Scalability and Agility · 4 min
Domain 2: Security and Compliance (30%)
About 2 h 33 min of reading.
The largest domain. Where the shared responsibility line sits for each service and how it moves, identity and access management, protecting the root user, encryption and secrets, and the services that detect, audit, aggregate and report.
Anchor cheat sheet: AWS Security and Compliance · 26 min
Draw the responsibility line
About 30 min of reading.
-
Say who patches what on EC2, RDS, Lambda, Fargate and S3, and name the three responsibilities that never move to AWS.
- ☐ The Patch That Nobody Owned · 24 min
- ☐ The Shared Responsibility Model · 6 min
Get identity right
About 29 min of reading.
-
Tell a user from a group from a role, say why a workload on AWS compute should carry a role rather than an access key, and recite the short list of tasks reserved for the root user.
- ☐ One Login and Eleven People · 24 min
- ☐ What Only the Root User Can Do · 5 min
Know what you inherit and what you encrypt
About 36 min of reading.
- Say where a piece of data is encrypted, in transit or at rest, and who holds the key in each case.
-
Name what a customer inherits by moving, and check a service is in scope before a regulated workload depends on it.
- ☐ Two Encryption Choices and One Service Out of Scope · 36 min
Know which service answers which question
About 32 min of reading.
-
Ready when GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, Security Hub, Config, CloudTrail and CloudWatch each bring one sentence to mind, and you can say what data each of them reads.
- ☐ Four Findings and Four Different Services · 28 min
- ☐ CloudTrail, Config and CloudWatch · 4 min
Domain 3: Cloud Technology and Services (34%)
About 2 h 51 min of reading.
The widest domain, and mostly recall. Regions, Availability Zones and edge locations; the ways to reach AWS; and the compute, storage, database, networking, AI/ML, analytics, integration, developer and end-user services, with the one job each of them does.
Anchor cheat sheet: Cloud Technology and Services · 31 min
Place it on the map
About 24 min of reading.
-
Say what an Availability Zone is, what high availability comes from, and when a second Region is the answer rather than an edge service.
-
☐ Three Copies in One Building · 24 min
Pick the compute
About 24 min of reading.
-
Match a demand shape to a billing model, and know the fifteen-minute ceiling and the per-core licence constraint before comparing anything else.
-
☐ Five Ways to Run the Same Container · 24 min
Pick the storage and the database
About 52 min of reading.
- Choose between object, block and file storage by how the data is reached, and place a workload on the right S3 class.
-
Separate Multi-AZ from a read replica, and say which database service fits which access pattern.
- ☐ Six Petabytes and Nobody Knows Which Drawer · 28 min
- ☐ A Table That Fits and One That Does Not · 24 min
Wire the network
About 28 min of reading.
-
Say what makes a subnet public, what a NAT gateway does that an internet gateway does not, and how a security group differs from a network ACL.
-
☐ A Subnet, a Gateway and a Route Nobody Wrote · 28 min
Recognise the rest of the catalogue
About 12 min of reading.
-
Ready when a service name brings its one-line job to mind, and SNS, SQS and EventBridge no longer feel interchangeable.
- ☐ AI, Machine Learning and Analytics Services · 6 min
- ☐ Integration, Developer and End-User Services · 6 min
Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%)
About 3 h 35 min of reading.
The smallest domain and the most factual. Three lists carry most of it: the compute purchasing options, the cost and billing tools, and the four paid Support plans. Plus data transfer charges, AWS Organizations and consolidated billing, cost allocation tags, and the partner and technical resources.
Anchor cheat sheet: Billing, Pricing and Support · 26 min
Choose how you pay
About 24 min of reading.
-
Say what each purchasing option commits to, and why a Savings Plan survives a change of instance family and a Standard Reserved Instance does not.
-
☐ The Same Instance at Four Prices · 24 min
Find the help before you need it
About 34 min of reading.
- Raise the right kind of case at the right severity, and know which ones Basic Support will not take.
-
Separate what a partner does from what Marketplace does from what the documentation already answers.
- ☐ A Question Nobody on the Team Could Answer · 34 min
See the bill, and get help
About 2 h 11 min of reading.
-
Ready when you can place Pricing Calculator, Cost Explorer and Budgets on a timeline, and recite the Support response times: one hour, thirty minutes, fifteen minutes.
-
☐ One Bill, Nine Teams and Nobody to Ask · 26 min
Tie it together
The cheat sheets, one per domain, for the last hour:
- ☐ Cloud Concepts · 22 min
- ☐ AWS Security and Compliance · 26 min
- ☐ Cloud Technology and Services · 31 min
- ☐ Billing, Pricing and Support · 26 min
Read the situations for the reasoning, keep the cheat sheets for the last hour, and use the quizzes to find out which distinctions have not stuck yet. When a service name brings its one-line job to mind before you have finished reading the option, you are ready.
Good luck. 🍀