AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Preface

For the past five yeary I'm working with AWS in a professional manner and I felt the urge to gain some certifications.

According to the AWS Certification Overview there are differnt kind of certifications you can target for.

I decided to start with the "AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner" (CLF-C01) as in the daily buisiness I work with EC2, Lambda, Databases etc. and it seemed to be a good possibility to gain an overview over other services and aspects you are possibly missing in your daily work.

Preparation

I've bought the Udemy Course [NEW] Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - 2022 from Stepahne Maarek and watched it once taking notes and second time with increased speed within two days before my exam.

The course was an excellent preparation for the certification as it covered all topics which may be asked in the exam and it ofen provided additional information to get deeper insights.

After watching the course once and passing the practice exam twice I've bought additional six practice exams but did only four of them, because I had the feeling that my preparation should be sufficient for the real exam. The practice exams are a lot more difficult than the real exam but this gurantees are very good preparation.

All in all, it took me two months to prepare, but learned very sporadically.

The exam

I did the exam via Pearson Vue online and booked an appointment two days in advance on a tuesday afternoon. There seems to be no restriction regarding the time as I could have also set an appointment very late in the evening or past midnight.

To do the exam online I had to download a software from Pearson an do some system checks prior to the exam. These checks were necessary to check that microphone, sound and webcam work and that the internet connection ist fast enough. The software did not work on my private Windows computer so I had to use my business notebook (Mac) for it.

Before the exam I had to prove my identity by taking photos of my id card and was prompted to take photos of my place where I was taking the exam. The onboarding was pretty easy and afterwards I was queued to wait for a free supervisor.

After I've got my supervisor assigned I had a short talk with him, showed him my sourrindings once again and agreed to start the test.

You've got 90 minutes of time to answer 65 questions. The exam is in english so I recommend to do the preparation likewise in english. The questions were a lot more easier than in the practice exams and I needed round about 45 minutes to answer all questions and review marked questions.

After finishing the test you'll only get an information if you passed the test or not. To pass the test you need 700 of 1000 possible points. Your exact score can be retrieved from your AWS Training and Certification pages a few days after your exam.

With all my preparation I've reached 906/1000 points and earned my "AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner" Badge 🤓.

What's next?

Perhaps I'm aiming for the "AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate" next, but AWS has retired the current SAA-C02 certification to August 2022, replacing it with SAA-C03 afterwards. I think I'll wait a little bit until the Udemy courses have been updated to cover the topics of the new certification and enjoy my spare time meanwhile 🏝️.