This morning I sat the Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner exam and I am very pleased to say I passed it. The exam is meant to be an entry level one to introduce people to core products and services AWS offers and what each of them does.

The resources I used for the exam are the following although I do have to say that I passed my AWS: SA Associate a few years ago so I wasn’t starting from scratch:

• • The ACloudGuru course on the exam was brilliant as usual from the acloud team and also gives you a good opportunity to follow along with the lab work. For me this was where I spent most of my time due to my previous SA Associate knowledge.
  • The whitepapers – There are SO MANY whitepapers out there around all the services but due to this exam being a an entry level exam the only ones realistically you need to read and most importantly understand (the ones from the blueprint) are:
    • Overview of Amazon Web Services whitepaper, April 2017
    • Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices whitepaper, Feb 2016
    • How AWS Pricing Works whitepaper, March 2016
    • The Total Cost of (Non) Ownership of Web Applications in the Cloud whitepaper, Aug 2012
    • Compare AWS Support Plans webpage
  • The blueprint – As you would expect the blueprint covers what you need to know, for me it was actually refraining from going too deep as for this exam it wasn’t necessary and therefore would have been a waste of time.
  • Lab Time – For me the best way to learn is by doing something and using the services and solutions. AWS do a free tier which is perfect for this and all the introductory labs cover everything and probably a bit more than you need to know.

Now to prepare for my VMware Cloud On AWS specialty and then AWS: SA Professional.

Gregg