[CLF-C02] AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Review

Intro

I've been studying the cloud lately. While a certification is not a complete reflection of your skills, I wanted to see some progress, so I took the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification as a first step. In this article, I'd like to share my experiences in preparing for this certification, as well as tips and tricks for studying efficiently.

How to study and prepare

I had a total preparation time of 2 months, but I didn't study properly because I had a lot of things going on. I think I studied in a rush until about a week before the exam.

Preparation sequence

AWS official study material (AWS Skill Builder)

AWS has created a course for Cloud Practitioners, and I don't think there's a better one out there. It's easy to understand, whether you're new to the cloud or already familiar with it. If you're looking to get into the cloud for the first time, I highly recommend watching this course.

At the end of each module, he provides links to whitepapers related to that concept, which are very helpful if you want to study them after the module.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Official Practice Question Set (CLF-C02 - English)

Then you'll have 20 simple questions to work through. It's from AWS, so the questions are well explained and I can see at a glance which questions I'm spending a lot of time on and which concepts I'm lacking.

Stephane Maarek's course on Udemy

This is the most popular Cloud Practitioner course on udemy. You can go through the two courses above and figure out which concepts you're lacking and then listen to just those parts. If you have time, you can also listen to it from start to finish. It goes into a little more detail than the official AWS study materials, and I highly recommend taking the practice exam in Section 22. I took this practice test five times before I took the exam, and I think you'll ace it if you familiarize yourself with the concepts and usage associated with the questions here.

AWS Classroom Youtube

If you're taking the AWS certification exam for the first time, I recommend watching the videos above. You'll learn a lot about the exam and the certification.

Exam day (online exam)

I took the exam from home as an online proctored exam. I was a bit nervous about taking the exam at home.

prepare my ID (passport)
keep a clean desk environment
Prepare and organize your surroundings beforehand as you will have to show your surroundings to the proctor on camera
check the internet connection (stable network environment is essential)

I had a tumbler on my desk, but they didn't really punish me for it. Other reviews said that the proctor asked me to do a lot of things, but I just said "show me your desk -> show me your wrist -> put your phone out of reach" and then went straight into the exam.

I had an Indian proctor come in and his accent was hard to understand, but if it seemed like he wasn't getting it, he would write it down in chat and I was still able to proceed.

Exam tips

The exam is 90 minutes + (30 minutes for Korean-specific settings). There are 65 questions. Before going into the exam, it's a good idea to have an idea of how many questions you need to get wrong to pass. For example, for the CLF-C02 exam, 700 is a passing score and you need to get about 45 questions right out of 65, which means that there shouldn't be more than 20 questions that you're not sure of the answer to during the exam. Knowing this ahead of time gives you a little more confidence going into the exam.

It's been 50 minutes since you've completed all the questions. After a few rounds of review, I finished the exam with 20 minutes left and 8 questions flagged. The exam results are instant, and you'll receive a follow-up email with detailed results.

Outro

I took the exam at 10 (5/21) and finished at 11:10, credly emailed me at 20 and AWS emailed me at 6 the next day (5/22) with details.

Although it was a relatively short period of time, I was able to clear up some of my vague knowledge of the cloud while preparing for the certification. Based on this experience, I'm going to take the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professionala challenge right away. I hope this article will be of some help to those who are starting to study the cloud or preparing for the certification.