I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam
On April 13 I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. It’s the entry-level AWS certification — it covers the fundamentals of cloud computing, AWS services, pricing models, security basics, and how AWS is structured as a platform.
Not a technical deep dive, but a solid foundation if you’re coming from IT support or systems administration and want to move into cloud.
How I studied
About a month. I didn’t follow a rigid schedule — I studied when I had time and whenever something clicked I moved on.
AWS Learning Path — Amazon has their own official training path for the Cloud Practitioner exam. It’s free and covers everything on the exam. Good for understanding the “official” framing of each service and concept.
FreeCodeCamp on YouTube — There’s a full course on YouTube that covers the entire exam in one video. I used this to fill gaps and get a different explanation of things that didn’t click the first time. Having a second voice explain the same concept differently is underrated.
Practice exams — This is what actually prepared me for the format. I did a lot of them. The AWS exam has a specific way of phrasing questions — they often present four plausible answers and you have to pick the most correct one. That logic takes some getting used to and the only way to get comfortable with it is repetition.
What the exam is actually like
The Cloud Practitioner is foundational, which means it tests breadth over depth. You don’t need to know how to configure a VPC — you need to know what a VPC is and why you’d use it. You need to understand the shared responsibility model, the difference between regions and availability zones, the basics of IAM, and the general pricing philosophy of AWS.
What’s next
The Cloud Practitioner is a starting point. The next step is the Solutions Architect Associate, which goes much deeper into actually designing systems on AWS. I’m not rushing it — I’d rather build real things on AWS first and let the certification follow the experience, not the other way around.
The blog itself runs on EC2 with Nginx, Cloudflare, and a Python automation layer — that’s been a better teacher than any course.
Certified on April 13, 2026 · Issued by Amazon Web Services Training and Certification · Verify on Credly