I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification

Yesterday I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, and therefore I am a certified Practitioner of the Cloud of AWS.

This is my first AWS certificate, and I have been planning to obtain it for the last few years. The final push that convinced me to do it was that my employer offered to reimburse it. It’s always nice to save a hundred dollars :)

Why did I do it? I’m a software developer with leanings towards the DevOps side, and I think that preparing for this certificate provides a good basis for going deeper in the future and learning the tools that will open for me the doors towards becoming a full-time DevOps. And I have this growing feeling that in the current market situation, being “just” a Python developer is just enough, and it is more and more expected of people to be more full-stacky. And I prefer to expand towards the DevOps side, not towards Frontend.

The syllabus for this certificate is a very wide bird-eye view of the whole ecosystem of AWS, from the basics like S3 and EC2, through databases, serverless, Infrastructure as Code, to more theoretical stuff like the Cloud Adoption Framework and adherence to local laws. There is also a lot about billing and managing users and companies in the cloud.

At times I felt that the syllabus is more like an advertisement of AWS rather then strictly objective data. There’s a lot of topics discussing how the cloud is so much better than on-premise. And while reading that, in the back of my mind I constantly had that one blog post how a company saved millions of dolars by leaving the cloud . Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that going cloud-first has a lot of benefits, but then again, there are always two sides of the coin.

How I prepared for the exam

I started with going to the AWS training site. And I have to say, their training materials are a mess. There are so many sites and courses available there, and every site looks a bit different, every log in is several redirects, it’s hard to find stuff you’ve already visited, it’s just confusing.

Having conquered their site, I enrolled to the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (Second Edition) course. The course itself was okayish, it has that corporate feel with a visibly calculated amount of cringe jokes. The content revolved about explaining how the AWS cloud works on the example of a coffee shop. It is visible that it’s aimed at non-technical or semi-technical people. The whole course took me a around a week of afternoons to finish.

Having finished that course I did not feel like I was prepared to take the exam, so I looked for other options. What I chose was the ExamPro AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course . I found it on Youtube first, and then came across many positive comments on Reddit, so I gave it a go and bought it for 29 dollars. Not cheap, but I decided I prefer to go this way. I don’t mind learning from videos, and the example exams were a big help. I felt that it gave me much more information than the AWS course.

Finally, I went through the question set provided in this very useful GitHub repo: AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Notes (CLF-C02)

All in all it took me around two weeks of an hour or two a day to prepare for the exam. For me, the technical parts like EC2, lambdas, databases and S3 were relatively easy, harder to remember were the management and law parts. It’s easy to learn what interests you, and hard to learn the boring stuff.

The exam itself was relatively straightforward. I went to a local training center governed by Pearson Vue, was greeted, registered, and was sat in front of a computer in an empty room. Answered the 65 single or multiple choice questions. After that there was a short survey how was the exam, and finally I got the score screen saying that I passed. I got an official confirmation via email a few hours later, and was informed that I received the score of 86%. 70% is the passing threshold.

What next?

I don’t think I will stop here. Currently I am considering either going slow and steady and enrolling for the AWS Certified Developer exam, or going straight all in, and attempting to get the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional. I am sure both of them will look good on my CV and will help me in my daily job, but probably the second one will be a big boost in my possible transition to a more DevOps career. I still have some time to decide.

And that’s it! If you have any questions or suggestions, you can contact me via email, on Mastodon (links in the footer), or in my Matrix space.

BTW: This blog uses AWS. While the webpage is hosted at another provider, I am using S3 with CloudFront to serve the images and that one video.

Thanks for reading!

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