AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner: Top 10 Questions Answered

Several years into the Cloud giants’ battle, there is still an interesting and fairly amusing rivalry among the top three: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). At the beginning of Feb 2020, despite Azure’s 62% growth compared to its year-ago result, Amazon remains the strong market-share leader, meaning AWS certifications look as hot as before for IT professionals, if not even more interesting.

If you still have not stepped into AWS certs track, it looks like a very good time for you to do so and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is the best place to start for most people who are involved in technology. As a holder of this certification myself, there are a number of questions that I get asked or hear that others want to know the answers for this. Here are the Top 10 questions I have come across and my answers to them:

1. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam: What is it?

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is designed for those who want to obtain knowledge and skills necessary for successfully demonstrating an overall understanding of the AWS Cloud, without diving into specific technical details covered by other AWS Certifications. It deals with different components of cloud computing in AWS world, terminologies, services and their basic roles. AWS Cloud concepts, Security and Compliance, Technology and Billing/Pricing are the four domains covered in this certification.

2. Who is AWS CCP certification for?

Amazon’s target audience for its Cloud Practitioner certification are your C-levels, Technical Sales team, and Senior technical teams who are new to Cloud technologies in general and particularly to AWS. In other words, it is for those who are only starting with Cloud and have picked AWS to go with; either beginners or those whom are working in non-Technical positions.

However, I do NOT recommend it as your first IT certification if you have less than 2 years of experience in entry level IT position since potential gaps in your knowledge could make some concepts difficult to fully understand.

3. Is AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam Hard?

It mostly depends on your exposure. I know some in the Tech industry who have worked on AWS for 2+ years have been able to clear the exam with a relatively high score without any study. Personally, when I decided to go for the certification, I was into my 2nd year of working as a Senior Desktop Support Engineer and without almost zero exposure it took me almost a month to get prepared for the exam, book it and clear it with a high score in the first attempt. Cloud Practitioner, without any doubt, is the easiest exam in AWS certification track. If you are an engineer in any IT stream, you are going to have to learn some new concepts, but the majority of concepts and services would be in correlation with what you already know and use daily at work. With all that being said, you need to spend enough time to read and understand the new concepts before you can say you are ready to tackle the test.

4. Is AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification Worth it?

Honestly, like any other certification, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve by becoming an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. Some managers just got this certification to make sure they have a base understanding of the services used by the teams they supervise, even though they don’t get involved in performing solution architecture and DevOps Administration tasks. You need to look at your role in the organisation and see if it would be beneficial to get certified.

From a different perspective, you can ask yourself this question: Could becoming an AWS CCP at all move my career forward? (In fact, this is the key question to ask yourself before going for any certification!). Sometimes you are looking for a breakthrough in your career and just not seeing enough progress in landing on jobs interviews/offers and this is where you might get some help from a certification like AWS Cloud Practitioner.

In fact, I myself have benefited from this approach. A short few months after getting my AWS CCP certification, one day I found out that the senior engineers at my team are looking for a Cloud-based alternative for an on-prem legacy backup solution we already had in place. At the end of my workday, I sat down and wrote a very basic two-page proposal on why we should go for AWS storage options and how a combination of S3 and Glacier could save us a significant amount of capital while being way more reliable and much easier to manage and sent it to my manager. Very soon after that, there was an opening in the higher-level team for which I got called for an interview and eventually secured the job!

Also, since then, I have received tens of messages from recruiters on LinkedIn for a variety of high-paying AWS-related jobs for half of which I was not qualified at the time! Why? because my new AWS certification put me right in the middle of their AWS-sensitive radar!

5. Does AWS CCP certification expire?

Yes, AWS Certifications are valid for 3 years. After getting certified, in order to keep your AWS ‘Certified’ Cloud Practitioner status, you need to get re-certified by passing any of AWS foundation, Associate or Professional certifications exams before the expiry date.

6. What are the requirements/prerequisites for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam?

AWS have not made any official prerequisite for taking Cloud Practitioner certification exam. However, their recommendation for candidates is to have at least six months of experience with the AWS Cloud in any (technical, managerial, sales, or financial) position. You don’t have to be an IT expert, but should at the very least have an understanding of technology services and their uses in AWS Cloud platform.

7. What materials should I use to study for AWS CCP certification exam?

Firstly, I strongly recommend reviewing the exam guide which contains key information about the exam including content outline and type of exam questions. Then, like almost every other tech certification, there are a wide variety of options for exam preparation. My first choice and the one that I used is AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials. It’s a FREE 6-hour online self-paced course designed by AWS training team. Don’t let the shortness of the course fool you as it is PACKED with LOTs of information.

There are many relevant AWS Training courses and other resources to assist you with acquiring additional knowledge and skills to prepare for the certification including A Cloud Guru and Cloud Academy platforms. For getting prepared for the real world application of the concepts you study, there is no better preparation than hands-on experience. Using AWS free tier could better prepare you not only for the Cloud Practitioner certification test, but also for AWS Associate and Professional level exams.

8. How Many Questions and How Much Time Should I Expect to get in AWS CCP exam?

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam consists of 65 multiple-choice/multiple-answer questions to be completed in 90 minutes. The exam costs U$100 (or regional equivalent), and is available in English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. You can find some Sample Questions to give you an idea of what kind of questions you could expect in the actual exam.

9. What can an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner do?

As an AWS CCP you might not be able to dive deep in working out technical solutions for your organization, but building on top of that foundation, earning next-level AWS certs and landing on a higher-paying job becomes a smoother process. Once you go for higher certifications, you can apply for roles like Operational Support Engineer, System Integrator, Cloud Software Engineer, Cloud Developer, DevOps Engineer, Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator and Cloud Architect and depending on the position and responsibilities, you could earn between 60K and 160K+.

10. How Much an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner could make?

As per a recent salary survey from Global Knowledge, the average yearly salary of an AWS Amazon Certifications holder is $113,932. There has been a 10 percent increase in salaries in the last 12 months and with AWS being the leading cloud computing platform in countless enterprises, these numbers are very much likely to go up to the right.