How I Passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam in 3 Months

I passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner (CP) exam in 3 months without any formal knowledge of the cloud. To provide some context to my technical background and abilities, I currently work as a DevOps Engineer, although previously worked as a software engineer for 2 years. During my time as a software engineer, I was involved in a project that used AWS extensively. With this being my first time using that particular ecosystem, it made sense to use the opportunity to gain the AWS CP certificate.

Tips toward exam preparation

How you prepare for any exam is completely up to you, and there is no right way to do it. Although generally for most people, studying for exams on complex technical subjects doesn’t come easy, therefore I’ve shared some of the things that helped me get to a position to pass the exam

1. Book the exam early. The first thing I would advise you to do is book the exam before you start studying so you have a deadline and a goal to work towards. After you book the exam, you can only reschedule twice. If you’re looking to reschedule for a third time around without getting charged, you’ll have to cancel and book a new appointment.
2. Set up an AWS account and get hands on experience with AWS to understand how the services work. It’s very easy to follow tutorials blindly and not retain much so if you can work on a mini project whilst preparing for the exam, you’ll get a much better understanding of each service. Tip: AWS offers a free tier account that gives you the ability to explore and try out AWS services free of charge up to specified limits for each service.
3. Follow a course to help you structure and stay on track with your learning. Learning a new technology can be overwhelming so following a course will provide you with a structured plan to follow.
4. Shut down services you’re no longer using. After you configure a service and no longer need it shut it down! Tip: Use AWS Budgets (a service that monitors your AWS spend) after you set up a service, to set personalised budgets and obtain alerts when you’re close to going over your budget. Although you can use the AWS free trial, if you leave services running, it’s easy to incur unwanted costs.
5. Do practice questions and papers. AWS has an official course you can follow that includes practice questions after every unit. It’s a good idea to do the questions as you’ll find out what information you’ve retained and be able to identify any gaps in your knowledge. There are also practice exam papers you can do (linked below) to get used to the official exam layout and question style. The practice exams have a very similar format to the real AWS CP exam. My advice is to do practice papers before you take the exam and aim to get at least 75% before sitting the real thing. Whilst doing practice papers, pay attention to the questions you consistently trip-up on and go back to study that content until you’ve understood what a certain service is responsible for. Make sure you also review answers you get right to gain a deeper understanding of what specific services do.

Resources

There are a lot of resources you can use to become familiar with AWS, below is a list of resources that I’ve personally found useful when studying for the AWS CP exam. I’ve split the resources list into courses, blogs, AWS Whitepapers and practice papers.

Courses
AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course: https://www.aws.training/

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Training 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hLmDS179YE

Blogs & Whitepapers
How I passed my AWS CCP Exam by Pauline Narvas: https://pawlean.com/2019/12/07/how-i-passed-my-aws-ccp-exam

Practice Papers
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner: 6 Full Practice Exams 2022: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-practice-test/

I wanted to keep this blog short, sweet and to the point so if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter or Instagram. Good luck with your exam!