AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)

Cloud computing delivers on demand IT resources—compute, databases, and networking—via an API driven model with pay as you go pricing. Deploy all cloud, on premises, or hybrid, with security responsibility.

Discover how AWS offloads operational concerns from traditional IT by offering compute, storage, databases, and security as scalable managed services, accessible via console, CLI, and SDK.

Learn how cloud computing with AWS lets you replace upfront hardware investments with variable expenses, offload data center operations, and scale capacity with agility—achieving economies of scale.

Explore the economics of cloud computing with AWS, including free tier, on-demand pricing, reservations, volume discounts, and price drops.

Design for failure, address single points of failure, decouple components, and implement elasticity to increase resiliency in AWS. Think in parallel to scale workloads efficiently and minimize data loss.

Explore the AWS shared responsibility model and delineate security duties between AWS and customers, from physical infrastructure to operating systems, networks, and applications, including examples like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Learn how compliance and regulatory frameworks shape cloud security. Use AWS Artifact, the Customer Compliance Center, Audit Manager, and AWS Config to ensure ongoing PCI, HIPAA, and other regulatory compliance.

Understand identity and access management in AWS by learning how root users, IAM users, groups, and roles share permissions through policies, enforce least privilege, and enable multi-factor authentication.

Learn how to manage AWS IAM users, groups, roles, and policies; grant permissions with administrator or read-only policies, create S3 buckets, and switch roles for temporary access.

Explore AWS Organizations to manage multiple accounts, group similar accounts into organizational units, and apply service control policies that restrict actions, with policies inherited by the OU.

Learn AWS security resources from preventative to management, covering web application firewall, AWS Shield, AWS Network Firewall, AWS Inspector, GuardDuty, Detective, AWS Config, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Macie, and AWS KMS.

Explore the AWS console, the AWS CLI, and the AWS SDK to deploy and manage resources, highlighting the web GUI, command-line efficiency, and programmatic control.

Explore the AWS console, a web GUI to manage AWS services, sign in, view account settings and regions, and launch EC2 instances with a simple launch workflow.

Master the AWS CLI to create and manage resources from the terminal, including installation, help, and region flags. Try S3 mb and S3 ls to manage buckets.

Explore how the AWS SDK enables your code to interact with AWS services, install libraries, and perform operations like creating and listing S3 buckets from a JavaScript and Node.js app.

Plan region selection to meet regulatory and compliance needs, minimize latency by deploying across availability zones. Use edge locations and local zones to bring compute and storage closer to users.

Explore how AWS networking uses VPCs to isolate resources, manage subnets, CIDR blocks, and gateways (internet, NAT, VPN, Direct Connect) across regions and availability zones.

Explore how AWS creates a default VPC per region with a 172.31.0.0/16 CIDR, per availability zone subnets, an internet gateway, and default security groups plus NACLs enabling public access.

Explore how AWS firewalls use stateless and stateful rules to control inbound and outbound traffic, and compare network ACLs and security groups that protect subnets and individual resources.

Discover how AWS networking links a region to a VPC, subnets in availability zones, security groups, ACLs, internet gateway, NAT gateway, and route tables to manage traffic.

Create and configure VPCs, subnets, route tables, and internet gateways in the AWS console, review the default VPC settings, and secure traffic with security groups and network ACLs.

Explore block, file, and object storage in AWS and their services—EBS, EFS, and S3. Review storage classes such as standard, IA, one zone IA, and Glacier options including intelligent-tiering.

Watch a hands-on demo of creating an EBS volume, attaching it to an EC2 instance, detaching to reuse with another instance in an availability zone, and persisting data via fstab.

Demonstrate creating and mounting an elastic file system (efs) for two EC2 instances, configuring mount targets in a VPC, and using Amazon EFS utils to enable EFS mounts.

Create your first S3 bucket in a global namespace with a unique name and region; upload files, set permissions, and manage prefixes.

Explore AWS compute services with a focus on EC2, virtual machines, AMIs, VPCs, and instance types, and compare on-demand, spot, and reserved pricing for scalable cloud deployments.

Explore AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that runs code without provisioning servers, auto scales with demand, and charges per invocation with triggers from S3, API gateway, and DynamoDB.

Explore containers and how AWS deploys and manages them with ECS and EKS, comparing Kubernetes, other orchestrators, and the managed advantages for control plane and scaling.

Learn how to deploy an EC2 instance on AWS by selecting a region, choosing an Ubuntu AMI, configuring a key pair and security group for SSH, and connecting via SSH.

Demonstrates creating a first AWS Lambda function from scratch, selecting runtime, adding triggers like API Gateway, bundling dependencies, using layers, deploying, testing, and monitoring with CloudWatch.

Understand core AWS database services, from self-managed to cloud-native offerings. Compare SQL relational stores like RDS and Aurora with NoSQL options such as DynamoDB and Timestream.

Launch and compare three AWS RDS databases—standard Postgres, Aurora Postgres, and Aurora Serverless—using easy create, with encryption by default and backup options.

Explore how AWS application integration services buffer and route traffic between applications, using SNS for duplicating messages, SQS as a queue, and elastic load balancing with auto scaling.

Demonstrates integrating SNS and SQS to enable app to app messaging and buffering via a standard topic with email and SQS subscriptions.

Explore AWS management services that provision and optimize resources, from CloudFormation and OpsWorks to Systems Manager, multi-account governance with Organizations and Control Tower, and auditing with Config and CloudTrail.

Watch a practical CloudFormation demo that uses infrastructure as code to create an S3 bucket from a simple YAML template, upload it to CloudFormation, and launch a stack.

Explore AWS migration and transfer workflows, including the cloud adoption framework and migration hub, six migration strategies, snow family data transfer, transfer family protocols, data sync, and modernization services.

Demonstrates setting up an AWS transfer family SftP server with a code cloud user, connecting via SSH, and using a public S3-backed endpoint to upload and manage files.

Explore AWS AI and ML services, define AI and ML, and learn why these tools power modern computing. See AWS as a magical toolbox for building AI applications.

Explore sageMaker, a fully managed aws tool that builds, trains, and deploys machine learning models with integrated jupyter notebooks for predictive analytics, recommender systems, and fraud detection.

Explore Amazon Lex, a voice and text chatbot builder powered by natural language understanding and speech recognition. Learn use cases and how Lex integrates with AWS services to boost accessibility.

Amazon Kendra is an enterprise search service that indexes corporate documents and answers natural language queries with machine learning to boost productivity and enable data-driven decisions.

Explore Amazon Comprehend, a managed NLP service that analyzes text to extract sentiment, entities, languages, and relationships; use it for personalized content, compliance, and social media sentiment.

Explore Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service that turns text into lifelike speech across languages with customization options, boosting accessibility and engagement for books, videos, and apps.

Explore Amazon Rekognition, an AI service that analyzes images and videos with facial analysis and object recognition for security, moderation, personalization, and accessible experiences.

Explore Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that converts image and pdf to text, recognizing forms, tables, and handwriting. Enable digital transformation with automated, compliant data extraction from documents.

Learn how AWS Transcribe converts audio and video to text using automatic speech recognition, with custom vocabularies, speaker diarization, and multilingual support to enable content creation, subtitling, accessibility, and analytics.

Explore Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service that supports real-time and batch translations across many languages, enabling content localization, multilingual customer support, and multilingual e-learning, with strong AWS integration.

Explore AWS AI/ML services as a theme park of options, from SageMaker to Lex and Polly, with Comprehend, Rekognition, Textract, Translate, and Transcribe.

Watch a practical AWS SageMaker Studio demo that showcases notebooks, data processing, and training to deploy models using Autopilot, XGBoost, and the SageMaker SDK with S3 and IAM.

Explore AWS analytics services as a data observatory, from Athena SQL queries on S3 to QuickSight visualizations. Learn how Kinesis and EMR enable real-time data processing and Redshift supports warehousing.

Demonstrates Amazon Athena, a serverless in-memory SQL engine that queries S3 data instantly, using CSV and Parquet formats, with partitions and CloudWatch metrics.

Master AWS business application services with the simple email service for scalable mass emails and Amazon Connect as a cloud-based customer service desk for voice and chat.

Explore a hands-on demo of Amazon Connect, setting up a basic virtual contact center: create an instance, queues, routing profiles, security settings, simple contact flows, and a test login.

Discover AWS customer engagement services, including activate for startups, AWS IQ, AWS managed services, and AWS support, to connect with experts and optimize startup infrastructure.

Explore ten AWS developer tools—App.config, Cloud9, Cloud Shell, CodeArtifact, CodeBuild, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, Codestar, and X-Ray—and learn how they build, host, deploy, orchestrate, and trace applications.

Learn to use AWS Cloud9, an in-browser integrated development environment for writing and running code in AWS, with SSH access, EC2-backed environments, collaboration, supported languages, and AWS explorer.

Explore end user computing in the cloud with AppStream, Workspaces, and Workspaces web, delivering streamed applications and virtual desktops to any device while prioritizing security and easy management.

Learn how Amazon Workspaces deliver persistent virtual desktops in AWS that you access via client or web, using an Active Directory directory, subnets, and configurable operating system and instance sizes.

Explore AWS Amplify for deploying web and mobile apps with authentication and hosting. Discover AppSync's GraphQL access to data sources with real-time and offline support for data synchronization.

Watch an AWS Amplify demo showing how to initialize a dev environment, configure authentication with an admin group, and use Amplify Studio to deploy web and mobile apps at scale.

Discover AWS IoT core and Greengrass, centralized device management and edge computing with offline processing and edge ML inferences for industrial and remote deployments.

Explore the general billing framework in AWS, including duration and request pricing, cost optimization, and elasticity, with practical examples of EC2, Lambda, and the free tier.

Explore EC2 billing by size, licensing models, and running or stopped states. Compare on-demand, reservations, savings plans, spot, and dedicated options, with compute, storage, and networking as pricing drivers.

Explore compute pricing dimensions with the aws calculator, experiment with ec2 configurations (t3 xlarge, t2 nano) and licensing options to build billing familiarity.

Explore the pricing dimensions of RDS, including engine/service type (RDS, Aurora, Aurora Serverless), instance size, storage options, features like backups and replication, blue-green deployments, and on-demand versus reserved instances.

Use the AWS calculator to estimate database costs for RDS MySQL, Aurora MySQL, and Aurora Serverless MySQL, and compare GP2 versus Provisioned IOPS disks and storage-optimized Aurora variants.

Explore VPC pricing fundamentals, noting free base components, inbound data is free while outbound data and cross-zone transfers incur charges, and how NAT gateways add hourly and data-processing costs.

Learn to estimate networking costs in the AWS calculator by configuring a VPC with data transfer and a NAT gateway, then compare VPN setups and ALB vs NLB pricing.

Learn how lambda billing works: memory and compute are tied, pricing depends on size, duration, and invocations, with a free tier and practical examples.

Explore general AWS billing for EBS, S3, DynamoDB, CloudFront, and Macie, and learn which factors drive costs, including volume, storage class, read/write units, requests, and data transfer.

Practice calculating AWS service costs by creating two 1-pb S3 buckets in different regions, comparing EKS and ECS with Fargate and EC2, and reviewing GuardDuty and CloudTrail pricing.

Understand how AWS account structures shape billing, from single accounts to consolidated billing and organizations, including the payer account, reservations, and savings plans.

Explore tools for billing analysis: the billing dashboard, Cost Explorer, the Cost and Usage Report (CUR), and AWS Budgets. Understand overview versus detailed costs, visualize data, and set budget alerts.

Compare AWS support options from basic to enterprise on ramp and enterprise, with SLA times and trusted advisor checks. Explore dedicated technical account managers that optimize production support.

Explore how cloud computing delivers on-demand IT resources—compute, hosting, and databases—cloud, on premise, and hybrid models. Grasp pay-as-you-go economics, design for failure, decoupling, and think in parallel.

Understand the AWS shared responsibility model, unmanaged versus managed services, and how IAM policies and least privilege support compliance and security with AWS Artifact.

Explore deployment methods—console, CLI, and SDK—across regions and availability zones, and understand VPC networking, subnets, gateways, and storage and compute services like EC2, Lambda, S3, and RDS.

Learn how AWS billing works across services, including compute, storage, and data transfer; compare pricing models for EC2, RDS, and Lambda, and use consolidated billing and cost tools.

Continue learning after the Cloud Practitioner, build expertise with hands-on practice, explore AWS docs and white papers, and pursue next certifications while mastering infrastructure as code tools.

Master the basics of AWS for beginners as you explore billing and pricing, core cloud concepts, identity and access management, the shared responsibility model, and essential AWS services.