Intro
Interested in learning about the cloud aka someone else's computer? No cloud experience, but have an interest in learning? Then consider studying and taking the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP) exam CLF-C01 that cost $100 USD at the time of this blog post. I've read a lot about people saying just to skip this certification and go directly to one of the associate provided exams first. I would highly discourage this as it will make the exam more difficult as all of the services that they provide can become a bit overwhelming.
So trying to learn all of the services later while navigating a more advance topic might be difficult for a beginner, but it would be fine for someone that has some experience already with AWS. Plus I was surprised to find out that Amazon is very generous to their certificate holders when getting AWS certified. You are presented with a free practice exam voucher and 50% off toward your next AWS certification, plus you get special access to AWS swag! How cool is that?! Continue on if you would like to know how I passed the exam within a week an a half and become an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.
Study Materials
After going through 3 Ea courses I was able to get a good feeling of what was useful for me to really absorb the knowledge and understand the material. The following materials are what I highly recommend to help pass the exam the first time.
AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials - A free full course provided by AWS Training Team.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 2019 - A free full YouTube course of short videos provided by ExamPro. I highly recommend to follow along with setting up an AWS account and navigate through all of the various services that are covered in his lessons.
Tutorials Dojo Study Guide eBook – AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - A paid PDF that is only $4.99 USD, which can be immediately downloaded upon purchase.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams 2021- A paid collection of various practice exams for $14.99 USD to really help prepare for the exam. Very helpful, because it provides why the wrong answers are wrong and why the correct answers are correct. Also, it comes with 5 Ea lessons, 4 Ea Topics, and 16 Ea Quizzes. The only con is that the quizzes can only be accessed through their website and require an account. Otherwise, extremely beneficial to help pass the exam the first time.
Exam Preparation
I actually started off with ITProTV's material over the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course. It was good for the first time exposure; however, after watching it I took a practice exam and quickly realized that there was a lot of material missing from the course that wasn't covered for the exam. So on to the next study materials; from there I found the course on YouTube by ExamPro and he covered way more material than the ITProTV course covered, plus it was for free.
Starting off going through the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 2019 course I followed along with the videos and created an AWS account and navigated through to setup instances and trying out different services. I highly recommend that if you are not familiar with AWS to not divert from the videos to keep from ending up with a high bill at the end. By the end, do go through and make sure that you have deleted all of your buckets from S3, terminated all EC2 instances, deleted all AMI backups, and ensured that all instances related to RDS, Lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk have been terminated and deleted. As I did find some still running and I incurred a small charge less than $1 USD.
Afterwards, while reading some of the comments from one of the discord channels that I'm subscribed to for called Certification Station great place to learn for exams by the way; I found out about Tutorials Dojo (TD). After going to their site, they was offering promotional discounts and I decided to go for it after reading the reviews. I can attest as a reviewer myself that you will be glad that you invested with TD. They mostly cover AWS cloud certifications and only have the intro Azure material if you are interested in Microsoft's cloud offering.
While going through the TD's PDF for CCP I quickly found information on AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course that they recommended taking. I was very glad that I did go through it, because it was also free and plus it's more interactive training that covers the suggested reading of all the white papers. Which reading white papers can be super dry, but if you have an alternative then why not go for it. I'm glad that I did take that route and ended up solidifying the information and learning much more about majority of the AWS services that are offered.
After completing Amazon's training, I attempted to scheduled my exam for that weekend, but couldn't since they had a policy that stated you can't schedule an exam under 48hrs out. So I ended up booking it for the next available date which put me at a week and a half and then I proceeded to go through TD's practice exams multiple times. TD offers 16 Ea practice exams in various offerings, a section that simulates the actual exam, a section that provide a walk-through as you take the exam, then a section that condenses all the topics that are covered for the exam, and finally a final practice exam.
Exam Day
Upon exam day I went to the testing center feeling good about taking the exam. I started off with approximately 100 minutes, which included an intro section, the exam consisting of 65 questions, and then a survey at the end. So I took my time to read the questions and all of the answers multiple times, before making my final selection as not to make any simple mistakes.
By the time I completed my exam I had approximately 38 minutes remaining. The great part was seeing my screen afterwards that read as PASS I was super excited, as I have put in a lot of study time and effort to achieve this certification. The only thing was is that I had to wait for about 3 days later until I received my official report and my congratulations letter and Acclaim Badge with all of my perks that came along with being AWS certified. My next AWS certification I plan on taking is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate.
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