AWS Certification Exam Prep

Amazon Web Services runs a tiered certification ladder. Foundational covers Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) and AI Practitioner (AIF-C01); Associate covers Solutions Architect (SAA-C03), Developer (DVA-C02), CloudOps Engineer (SOA-C03), Data Engineer (DEA-C01) and Machine Learning Engineer (MLA-C01); Professional covers Solutions Architect (SAP-C02), DevOps Engineer (DOP-C02) and Generative AI Developer (AIP-C01); and the Specialty track covers Advanced Networking (ANS-C01), Security (SCS-C03) and Machine Learning (MLS-C01).

AWS exams are scored on a scaled 100-1000 system with a passing mark around 700-750 depending on the exam, so a raw percentage is never published. Foundational exams run 90 minutes, associate exams 130-180, and professional and specialty exams 170-180 with noticeably longer, scenario-driven questions. Certifications are valid for three years; passing a higher-tier exam in the same track recertifies the ones beneath it.

Career outcomes: Solutions Architect Associate is the most-requested AWS credential in job postings and the usual target for engineers moving into cloud roles. Cloud Practitioner suits non-technical staff and career changers who need the vocabulary first. The professional and specialty tiers are where salary differentiation tends to appear, and they assume real operational experience rather than study alone.

What you will study: IAM and identity federation, VPC design and hybrid connectivity, compute across EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS and Fargate, storage across S3, EBS, EFS and Glacier, managed databases including RDS, Aurora and DynamoDB, observability with CloudWatch, CloudTrail and Config, infrastructure as code with CloudFormation and the CDK, CI/CD pipelines, cost management, and the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework that underpin how AWS phrases nearly every scenario question.