[2025] AWS Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02: Course & 2 Exams

Explore cloud computing principles and AWS concepts, covering benefits, migration strategies, shared responsibility model, and service and deployment models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS; public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud) with AWS Lightsail lab.

Explore how the AWS cloud powers Netflix and other global services. Discover AWS regions, availability zones, security features, and the broad service catalog.

Explore the five key cloud computing benefits—on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service—and how they enable flexibility, scalability, cost savings, and resilience.

Compare the four cloud service models—SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and FaaS—and their levels of control, flexibility, and management. See real-world examples like Office 365 and AWS Lambda to illustrate practical use.

Explore six cloud deployment models—public, private, hybrid, community, multi-tenancy, and single tenancy—and weigh their security, cost, and risk tradeoffs.

Evaluate deployment model selection in the AWS cloud, covering public, private, hybrid, community, multi-tenancy, single tenancy, and on-premise models, and how they affect cost, control, security, and scalability.

Explain the shared responsibility model in the AWS cloud, detailing AWS security of the cloud infrastructure and the customer’s security of data, apps, and access controls.

Explore creating an Amazon Lightsail instance, selecting region and plan, choosing Linux, attaching disks, and connecting via ssh, then manage files and basic Linux commands.

Identify and apply cloud design principles for AWS, focusing on scaling, redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery, and recovery objectives within the AWS well-architected framework.

Explore cloud scaling concepts, comparing vertical (scaling up or down) and horizontal (scaling out or in), their advantages, trade-offs, and factors like workload, growth, and cost.

Learn how data, hardware, and network redundancy in cloud designs achieve high availability, fault tolerance, and reduced downtime while preventing data loss.

Learn how high availability in cloud design uses redundancy, load balancing, failover, and disaster recovery to minimize downtime and ensure reliable, resilient, and accessible services.

Explore disaster recovery in cloud computing, including backup and restore, replication, and failover. Understand hot, warm, and cold sites to minimize downtime and data loss while maintaining availability.

Define recovery objectives and implement them in cloud designs using RTO, RPO, and MTD, supported by real-time data replication, backups, and failovers.

Explore the AWS Well-Architected framework and its six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. Learn to assess and optimize cloud architectures using the Well-Architected Tool.

Explore cloud migration strategies from on-premise to cloud-based environments, between cloud environments, and from cloud to on-premise, weighing scalability, cost, security, and control.

Plan, implement, and optimize cloud migration by moving data, applications, and infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud, covering assessment, readiness, strategy, provider selection, migration, testing, and security.

Explore the eight cloud migration types—rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, retain, hybrid, and phased migrations. Understand each type's advantages and disadvantages to align IT modernization with your organization's goals.

Explore cloud native applications built with containers and microservices on cloud infrastructure, delivering scalable, resilient, and flexible software through DevOps practices like continuous integration, delivery, and deployment.

Explore the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and its six perspectives—business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations—to reduce risk, boost ESG performance, increase revenue, and improve operational efficiency.

Explore the AWS Snow Family for data transfer and edge computing, from Snowcone to Snowball, with encryption and offline transfer workflows for field and remote sites.

Learn about AWS migration and transfer tools—Application Discovery Service, Application Migration Service, Database Migration Service, Migration Hub, Schema Conversion Tool, Snow Family, and Transfer Family—to streamline cloud migrations.

Showcases a lift and shift migration by exporting a local VM to an OVA, importing it as an AMI, and launching an EC2 instance with AWS CloudShell.

Explore AWS global infrastructure, including regions, availability zones, edge locations, local zones, wavelength zones, and outposts, to ensure reliability, redundancy, and low latency for cloud workloads.

Explore how AWS regions provide global infrastructure to deploy applications closer to end users, balancing latency, cost, service availability, data sovereignty, and disaster recovery across multiple regions.

Discover how AWS availability zones provide fault-tolerant, high-availability infrastructure by distributing resources across multiple zones within a region, optimizing latency, cost, service availability, and resilience.

Explore AWS Local Zones and learn how they extend AWS regions to bring compute, storage, and databases closer to end users, reducing latency and enabling scalable, compliant deployments.

Discover how AWS Wavelength Zones extend compute and storage to the edge of the 5G network for ultra-low latency, enabling real-time analytics, ML inference, and immersive apps.

Explore AWS Outposts, a fully managed hybrid cloud solution that brings native AWS services to on-premise data centers, enabling low-latency processing and data residency while integrating with cloud tools.

Learn how reliability, redundancy, and availability drive resilient cloud architectures with AWS, using auto scaling, multi-AZ deployments, S3 and RDS failover, ELB load balancing, and global infrastructure components.

Explore how AWS regions and availability zones enable fault-tolerant deployments across data centers, local and wavelength zones, with points of presence and edge locations for faster delivery.

Explore cloud economics and pricing, balancing fixed and variable costs and licensing models. Learn about instance types, data transfer, storage tiers, rightsizing, managed services, and cost management tools.

Compare fixed and variable expenses in cloud computing, and understand capex versus opex. Examine ROI and total cost of ownership to guide pay-as-you-go, utility computing decisions.

Explore five cloud licensing models: perpetual, subscription, bring your own license, included licenses, and license managers, with pros, cons, and practical cloud usage examples.

Explore AWS EC2 instance types and pricing models, including on-demand, reserved, spot, savings plans, dedicated instances, dedicated hosts, and capacity reservations, to optimize cloud costs and performance.

Analyze how AWS data transfer charges affect cloud budgets, distinguishing inbound and outbound data across regions and availability zones, including inter-region and internet transfers, to optimize architecture and reduce costs.

Explore AWS storage options and tiers, including S3, EBS, and EFS, and learn to select by data access patterns, retention needs, and budget.

Master rightsizing in AWS to align resource usage with demand, reduce costs via AWS Cost Explorer machine learning recommendations, and boost performance with scaling, consolidation, automation, and CloudFormation.

Explore AWS managed services such as RDS, DynamoDB, ECS, and EKS to automate tasks, optimize costs, and scale resources with minimal manual intervention.

Explore how AWS Organizations centralizes multi-account governance by structuring accounts into organizational units, applying service control policies, and enabling consolidated billing and cost management.

Learn how cost allocation tags in AWS categorize resources by department, project, or application, and how activation, cost and usage reports, and chargebacks drive cost visibility and optimization.

Explore AWS cloud cost management using budgets, cost explorer, billing conductor, pricing calculator, and cost and usage report to set budgets, track usage, optimize costs, and model scenarios.

Learn to allocate AWS costs with cost allocation tags, cost categories, cost explorer, and cost and usage reports; attach tags to resources to track department costs and generate reports.

Explore how to connect to AWS using the AWS Management Console, programmatic access, and infrastructure as code, with connectivity options for secure on-premise environments.

Navigate and manage AWS resources with the web-based AWS Management Console, using service dashboards, resource groups, tag editor, IAM and MFA integration, and monitoring tools to control costs.

Explore programmatic access to AWS resources via APIs, SDKs, the AWS CLI, PowerShell tools, and CloudFormation to automate tasks and manage resources from code or scripts.

Explore infrastructure as code (IaC) to codify and automate infrastructure with machine-readable templates, enabling versioned, auditable deployments and rollbacks across dev, test, and production on AWS.

Learn AWS connectivity options including site-to-site and client VPNs, DirectConnect, SSH, and public internet, and determine secure, scalable connections with IPSec, OpenVPN, and IAM integration.

Explore the AWS management console, a web-based GUI to view, manage, and monitor resources via the navigation bar and dashboard, access EC2, S3, and Kinesis, and view AWS Health status.

Learn aws identity and access management essentials, including root user, users and groups, policies, authentication methods, the iam identity center, and credential storage to enforce least privilege and secure access.

Learn how AWS identity and access management enables you to create and manage users and groups, attach policies to control permissions, and enforce the principle of least privilege.

Explore identity and access management policies in AWS, including IAM policy structure in JSON, least privilege, managed and inline policies, and deny-by-default rules.

Explore AWS authentication methods, including IAM-based identity management, usernames and passwords, access keys, MFA, SSO, 2FA, cross-account IAM roles, and IAM Access Analyzer for secure resource access.

Manage authentication and authorization in AWS by configuring IAM users, groups, roles, and policies, and enable identity federation to connect enterprise identities to AWS resources.

Enable secure, unified sign-on across multiple AWS accounts by using the IAM Identity Center to centralize user access and integrate with existing identity sources like Microsoft Active Directory or Google Workspace.

Create a migration user and group in AWS IAM, build a MigrationHubOrchestrator policy with the visual editor, and attach it for granular access control.

Explore AWS compute services, from EC2 instances and auto-scaling to load balancing, containerized options (ECS, ECR, EKS), serverless (Lambda, Fargate), and end-user computing (WorkSpaces, AppStream 2.0, WorkDocs).

Explore Amazon EC2, the scalable cloud service for spinning up pay-as-you-go virtual machines, with six instance families including general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, high-performance computing, and accelerated computing.

Explore how auto-scaling with EC2 dynamically adjusts resources to meet demand, using launch configuration, auto scaling groups, scaling policies, and health checks to ensure elasticity, availability, and cost efficiency.

Distribute incoming application traffic across multiple EC2 instances using Elastic Load Balancing, enabling fault tolerance, high availability, and scalable performance with application, network, and gateway load balancers.

Explore containerized compute in AWS, including ECS, EKS, and ECR, and learn how containers provide portability, scalability, efficiency, and security for applications.

Explore three AWS compute options beyond EC2: LightSail for simple, cost-effective VPS hosting; Elastic Beanstalk for fully managed deployment and scaling; and AWS Batch for scalable batch workloads.

Explore end-user computing services, including AppStream 2.0, WorkSpaces, and WorkSpaces Web, for cloud-based access to apps, desktops, and non-persistent browser access to SaaS.

Set up an AWS EC2 auto scaling group using a launch template to adjust instances based on CPU utilization with a 70% threshold for scaling up and down.

Explore AWS networking services, including SDN, VPC, VPC security, DNS, and Route 53. Learn to configure edge services, API Gateway, VPN, and Direct Connect to create secure, scalable cloud networks.

Explore software defined networking (SDN) and its control, data, and management planes, and how automation, IaC, and cloud orchestration enable scalable, secure networks.

Configure VPC security with network ACLs (stateless) at the subnet level and security groups (stateful) at the instance level to control inbound and outbound traffic.

Explore how the domain name system translates domain names to IP addresses, covers DNS records, FQDNs, TTL, and recursive versus iterative lookups for both internal and external use.

Explore Amazon CloudFront and the AWS Global Accelerator, delivering content and applications via a content delivery network and routing traffic to edge locations for low latency.

Amazon api gateway is a fully managed service that enables real-time, scalable, serverless restful, REST, and websocket APIs with tiered pricing, monitoring, and robust security.

Explore Amazon VPN, a managed service that securely connects on-premise networks to AWS via encrypted tunnels. Learn about client VPN and site-to-site VPN, setup, authentication, and elastic, pay-for-what-you-use scalability.

Route 53 lets you purchase and configure a domain name, and set up a hosted zone with an A record and a CNAME to route traffic to your web server.