AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Cheat Sheet

Exam Overview

Format: 65 questions | 90 minutes | $100 USD | Passing score: 700/1000

Domains:

• Cloud Concepts (24%)
• Security & Compliance (30%)
• Cloud Technology & Services (34%)
• Billing, Pricing & Support (12%)

Cloud Computing Fundamentals

Six Advantages of Cloud Computing

1. Trade capital expense for variable expense
2. Benefit from massive economies of scale
3. Stop guessing capacity
4. Increase speed and agility
5. Stop spending money on data centers
6. Go global in minutes

Deployment Models

• Public Cloud: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
• Private Cloud (On-Premises): Own data center
• Hybrid Cloud: Mix of public and private

Service Models

• IaaS: EC2, S3 (Infrastructure as a Service)
• PaaS: Elastic Beanstalk, RDS (Platform as a Service)
• SaaS: Gmail, Office 365 (Software as a Service)

AWS Global Infrastructure

Region Selection Factors: Compliance, Latency, Pricing, Service Availability

AWS Shared Responsibility Model ⭐ CRITICAL

AWS Responsibility: "Security OF the Cloud"

• Physical security of data centers
• Hardware, software, networking infrastructure
• Managed services (RDS, Lambda, DynamoDB)
• Global infrastructure (regions, AZs, edge locations)

Customer Responsibility: "Security IN the Cloud"

• Customer data and content
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Application configuration
• Operating system patches (for EC2)
• Network and firewall configuration
• Client-side data encryption
• Server-side encryption (file systems)

Core AWS Services by Category

Compute

EC2 Pricing Models:

• On-Demand: Pay per hour/second, no commitment
• Reserved Instances: 1-3 year commitment, up to 75% savings
• Spot Instances: Bid on unused capacity, up to 90% savings
• Savings Plans: Flexible pricing, commit to $/hour

Storage

S3 Storage Classes:

• S3 Standard: Frequent access, millisecond latency
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering: Automatic cost optimization
• S3 Standard-IA: Infrequent access, lower cost
• S3 One Zone-IA: Single AZ, even lower cost
• S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: Archive, millisecond retrieval
• S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: Archive, minutes-hours retrieval
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive: Lowest cost, 12-hour retrieval

Database

RDS Features:

• Multi-AZ: High availability, automatic failover
• Read Replicas: Scale read workloads, up to 5 replicas

Networking & Content Delivery

Elastic Load Balancer Types:

• ALB (Application): Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS), path-based routing
• NLB (Network): Layer 4 (TCP/UDP), extreme performance
• GLB (Gateway): Third-party virtual appliances

Route 53 Routing Policies:

• Simple, Weighted, Latency, Failover, Geolocation, Geoproximity, Multi-value

Security, Identity & Compliance

IAM (Identity and Access Management) ⭐ CRITICAL

Components:

• Users: Individual accounts
• Groups: Collections of users
• Roles: Assign permissions to AWS services
• Policies: JSON documents defining permissions

IAM Best Practices:

• Enable MFA on root account
• Use principle of least privilege
• Use roles for EC2 instances (not access keys)
• Never share credentials
• Rotate credentials regularly
• Use groups to assign permissions

Root User:

• Created when account is created
• Complete access to all AWS resources
• Secure it: Enable MFA, don't use for everyday tasks

Security Services

Compliance Programs: HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO, SOC, FedRAMP, GDPR

Management & Governance

Trusted Advisor Categories: Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, Service Limits

Migration & Transfer

Snow Family:

• Snowcone: 8TB storage, portable edge computing
• Snowball Edge: 80TB storage, compute capabilities
• Snowmobile: 100PB storage, exabyte-scale transfer

Application Integration

SQS Queue Types:

• Standard: Unlimited throughput, at-least-once delivery, best-effort ordering
• FIFO: First-in-first-out, exactly-once processing, ordered

Analytics & Machine Learning

Analytics

• Athena: Query S3 data using SQL
• EMR: Big data processing (Hadoop, Spark)
• Kinesis: Real-time data streaming
• QuickSight: Business intelligence, visualizations
• Glue: ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

Machine Learning

• SageMaker: Build, train, deploy ML models
• Rekognition: Image and video analysis
• Comprehend: Natural language processing
• Lex: Build chatbots (powers Alexa)
• Polly: Text-to-speech
• Transcribe: Speech-to-text
• Translate: Language translation

Pricing & Billing ⭐ CRITICAL

Pricing Models

Pay-as-you-go: No upfront costs, pay only for what you use

Save when you reserve:

• Reserved Instances (1-3 years, up to 75% savings)
• Savings Plans (flexible, commit to $/hour)

Pay less by using more: Volume-based discounts, tiered pricing

Free Tier

12 Months Free (New Accounts):

• EC2: 750 hours/month t2.micro or t3.micro
• S3: 5GB standard storage
• RDS: 750 hours/month db.t2.micro
• CloudFront: 50GB data transfer out

Always Free:

• Lambda: 1M requests/month
• DynamoDB: 25GB storage
• SNS: 1M publishes/month
• CloudWatch: 10 custom metrics

Cost Management Tools

Consolidated Billing (Organizations):

• One bill for multiple accounts
• Volume pricing discounts combined
• No extra charge

Data Transfer Costs

• Inbound: FREE
• Outbound: Charged (varies by service)
• Between AZs: Charged
• Same AZ: Often free

AWS Support Plans ⭐ CRITICAL

All Plans Include:

• 24/7 access to customer service
• Documentation and whitepapers
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard

Business & Enterprise Add:

• AWS Trusted Advisor (all checks)
• Infrastructure Event Management

Enterprise Exclusive:

• Technical Account Manager (TAM)
• Support Concierge
• Well-Architected Reviews

Well-Architected Framework

Six Pillars

1. Operational Excellence

   • Run and monitor systems
   • Automate operations
   • Learn from failures

2. Security

   • Protect information and systems
   • Defense in depth
   • Encryption at rest and in transit

3. Reliability

   • Recover from failures
   • Test recovery procedures
   • Scale horizontally

4. Performance Efficiency

   • Use appropriate resources
   • Monitor performance
   • Evolve with technology

5. Cost Optimization

   • Avoid unnecessary costs
   • Measure efficiency
   • Use consumption model

6. Sustainability

   • Minimize environmental impact
   • Maximize utilization
   • Use managed services

Developer Tools

Common Exam Scenarios

High Availability

• Multi-AZ: Deploy across multiple Availability Zones
• Multi-Region: Deploy across multiple Regions for disaster recovery
• Auto Scaling: Automatically adjust capacity
• Load Balancing: Distribute traffic

Cost Optimization

• Use Reserved Instances for predictable workloads
• Use Spot Instances for flexible workloads
• Right-size resources (don't over-provision)
• Use S3 lifecycle policies
• Delete unused resources
• Use AWS Cost Explorer

Security Best Practices

• Enable MFA
• Use IAM roles, not access keys
• Encrypt data (at rest and in transit)
• Use Security Groups and NACLs
• Enable CloudTrail for auditing
• Use private subnets for databases
• Principle of least privilege

Performance

• Use CloudFront for content delivery
• Use ElastiCache for caching
• Use Read Replicas for read-heavy workloads
• Use Multi-AZ for database high availability
• Choose appropriate instance types

VPC Essentials

Components:

• Subnets: Divide VPC into smaller networks
  • Public: Has internet access via Internet Gateway
  • Private: No direct internet access
• Internet Gateway: Connect VPC to internet
• NAT Gateway: Allow private subnets to access internet
• Route Tables: Control traffic routing
• Security Groups: Stateful firewall (instance level)
• NACLs: Stateless firewall (subnet level)
• VPC Peering: Connect two VPCs
• VPC Endpoints: Private connections to AWS services

Security Groups vs NACLs:

• Security Groups: Stateful, allow rules only, instance level
• NACLs: Stateless, allow and deny rules, subnet level

Key Terms to Know

Elasticity: Scale resources up/down based on demand

Scalability: Handle increased load by adding resources

• Vertical: Increase instance size
• Horizontal: Add more instances

Fault Tolerance: System continues operating if component fails

High Availability: System is accessible and operational most of the time

Durability: Long-term data protection (S3: 11 nines)

RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Maximum acceptable data loss time

RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Maximum acceptable downtime

Exam Tips

Question Strategy

1. Read carefully: Identify key words (most, least, cost-effective, secure)
2. Eliminate wrong answers: Cross out obviously incorrect options
3. Flag difficult questions: Return later with fresh perspective
4. Don't overthink: First instinct is often correct
5. No penalty for guessing: Answer every question

Time Management

• 90 minutes for 65 questions = ~1.4 minutes per question
• Spend no more than 2 minutes on any question
• Flag and move on if stuck
• Reserve 15 minutes for review

Common Traps

• ❌ Outdated services (Classic Load Balancer vs ALB)
• ❌ Solutions that work but aren't optimal
• ❌ Missing key requirements in question
• ❌ Confusing similar service names

Must Memorize

• ✅ Shared Responsibility Model
• ✅ Support plan response times
• ✅ Core services and their use cases
• ✅ IAM best practices
• ✅ Six advantages of cloud computing
• ✅ Well-Architected Framework pillars
• ✅ Free Tier offerings

Quick Service Lookup

Need to: → Use this service:

• Virtual servers → EC2
• Serverless compute → Lambda
• Object storage → S3
• Block storage → EBS
• Shared file storage → EFS
• Relational database → RDS
• NoSQL database → DynamoDB
• Caching → ElastiCache
• CDN → CloudFront
• DNS → Route 53
• Load balancing → ELB
• Virtual network → VPC
• Identity management → IAM
• Monitoring → CloudWatch
• API logging → CloudTrail
• Infrastructure as Code → CloudFormation
• DDoS protection → Shield
• Threat detection → GuardDuty
• Message queue → SQS
• Pub/Sub messaging → SNS
• Container orchestration → ECS/EKS
• Serverless containers → Fargate

Resources

Essential Study Materials

• AWS Skill Builder: Free Cloud Practitioner Essentials course
• AWS Whitepapers: Overview of AWS, Well-Architected Framework
• Tutorials Dojo: Practice exams (highly recommended)
• Stephane Maarek (Udemy): Video course with practice exams
• freeCodeCamp: Free 4-hour course on YouTube
• AWS Documentation: Service FAQs

Practice Exams

• AWS Official Practice Question Set ($20)
• Tutorials Dojo by Jon Bonso (Best quality)
• Whizlabs
• Stephane Maarek

Free Resources

• Tutorials Dojo Cheat Sheets
• Reddit r/AWSCertifications
• AWS re:Post forum
• YouTube: AWS Official, freeCodeCamp, Stephane Maarek

Final Checklist Before Exam

• Memorized Shared Responsibility Model
• Know all support plans and response times
• Can identify 5+ services in each major category
• Understand IAM best practices
• Know AWS global infrastructure components
• Understand pricing models and Free Tier
• Taken 3+ practice exams scoring 85%+
• Reviewed all incorrect practice questions
• Know Well-Architected Framework pillars
• Understand cost management tools
• Created AWS Free Tier account and explored console

Remember: The Cloud Practitioner exam tests foundational knowledge, not deep technical implementation. Focus on understanding what each service does and when to use it. With proper preparation, you'll pass! 🎯

Good luck! ☁️