Prepare for the Cloud practitioner exam

Contents
Notes from public resources ............................................................................................................... 3
AWS official requirements .................................................................................................................. 3
Candidate Overview ........................................................................................................................ 3
These training courses and materials may be helpful for examination preparation: .................... 4
Go through the AWS products ............................................................................................................ 4
VPC .................................................................................................................................................. 4
EC2 .................................................................................................................................................. 5
EBS Elastic Block Store https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ .................................................................. 5
EB Elastic Beantalk(豆类的茎可以长的很快) https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ ......... 6
Elastic Load Balancing https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/ ........................................ 6
CloudFront https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ edge computing(one of buzzwords) .............. 6
Amazon Route 53 ............................................................................................................................ 6
AWS shield https://aws.amazon.com/shield/ ................................................................................ 7
AWS WAF - Web Application Firewall https://aws.amazon.com/waf/ .......................................... 7
S3 https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ .................................................................................................... 8
Snowball https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ ............................................................................... 8
Glacier https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ ...................................................................................... 8
RDS (Relational Database Service) https://aws.amazon.com/rds/ ................................................ 9
Aurora https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/ ............................................................................... 9
DynamoDB https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ noSQL .......................................................... 9
Redshift https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/ - learn it is a database............................................ 10
Database Migration Service https://aws.amazon.com/dms/....................................................... 10
Amazon EMR https://aws.amazon.com/emr/ - learn it is for Big Data ........................................ 10
CloudTrail https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/ - logging.......................................................... 10
Elasticsearch Service https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/ ....................................... 11
CloudFormation https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/ ...................................................... 11
CloudWatch https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/ - view the metrics on dashboard .............. 11
Kinesis Data Firehose .................................................................................................................... 11
Lambda - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ - Important ........................................................... 12
Billing - TCO Total Cost of Ownership Calculator ......................................................................... 12
Billing - AWS Cost Explorer............................................................................................................ 12
Security - Shared Responsibility Model - Important .................................................................... 12
 Security - IAM (Identity and Access Management)...................................................................... 12
Security - Key Management Service (KMS) ................................................................................... 12
Security – Cognito - Handle authentication for your APP ............................................................. 12
Support plans ................................................................................................................................ 12
Syllabus ............................................................................................................................................. 13
1. Cloud Concepts ......................................................................................................................... 13
2. Security...................................................................................................................................... 13
3. Technology ................................................................................................................................ 13
4. Billing & Pricing ......................................................................................................................... 13
How to Prepare for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification? ............................................... 14
1. Start with AWS Training Classes................................................................................................ 14
2. Read AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam Guide ............................................ 14
3. Get Familiar with the Subject Areas.......................................................................................... 14
4. Go Through AWS Whitepapers ................................................................................................. 15
5. Self-Study .................................................................................................................................. 15
6. Examine Sample Questions and Take Free Practice Test.......................................................... 15
7. Schedule the Exam and Get Certified ....................................................................................... 15
Best AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification Books .............................................................. 15
1. AWS: The Beginners Guide to Amazon Web Services by Dennis Hutten ................................. 15
2. AWS Basics: Beginner’s Guide by Gordon Wong ...................................................................... 16
3. Learning AWS by Aurobindo Sarkar and Amit Shah.................................................................. 16
4. Amazon Web Services for Dummies by Bernard Golden .......................................................... 17
5. Amazon Web Services in Action by Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig .................................. 17
6. AWS Automation Cookbook – Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment using
AWS Services by Nikit Swaraj ........................................................................................................ 18
7. Mastering AWS Security: Create and Maintain a Secure Cloud Ecosystem by Albert Anthony18
Final Words ....................................................................................................................................... 19
Notes from public resources
1. Watch the AWS official video for Practitioner Exam the do the next 2 items.
2. A LOT of questions around billing so understand billing in detail.
3. More Products covered than in the video course so please go through them.
https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/
https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-...
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbal...
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
https://aws.amazon.com/route53/
https://aws.amazon.com/shield/
https://aws.amazon.com/waf/
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/
https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/
https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/
https://aws.amazon.com/dms/
https://aws.amazon.com/emr/
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/
https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-...
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-f...
https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
https://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/
https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-manag...
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/sha...
https://aws.amazon.com/iam/
https://aws.amazon.com/kms/
https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport...
Ratio of the topic (65 questions in total)
 Cloud Concepts 28% - 19 questions
 Security 24% - 16 Q
 Technology 36% - 24 Qs
 Billing and Pricing 12% - 7 questions

AWS official requirements

Candidate Overview
This exam validates an examinee's ability to:

 Define what the AWS Cloud is and the basic global infrastructure
 Describe basic AWS Cloud architectural principles
 Describe the AWS Cloud value proposition
 Describe key services on the AWS platform and their common use cases (for example, compute
and analytics)
 Describe basic security and compliance aspects of the AWS platform and the shared security
model
 Define the billing, account management, and pricing models
  Identify sources of documentation or technical assistance (for example, whitepapers or support
tickets)
 Describe basic/core characteristics of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud
These training courses and materials may be helpful for examination preparation:
AWS Training

 AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

 AWS Technical Essentials
 AWS Business Essentials
AWS Whitepapers

 Overview of Amazon Web Services whitepaper, April 2017

 Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices whitepaper, February 2016
 How AWS Pricing Works whitepaper, March 2016
 The Total Cost of (Non) Ownership of Web Applications in the Cloud whitepaper, August 2012
 Compare AWS Support Plans webpage

Go through the AWS products

VPC
https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of
the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.
You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of
your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and
network gateways. You can use both IPv4 and IPv6 in your VPC for secure and easy access to
resources and applications.

You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon VPC. For example, you
can create a public-facing subnet for your web servers that has access to the Internet, and
place your backend systems such as databases or application servers in a private-facing
subnet with no Internet access. You can leverage multiple layers of security, including
security groups and network access control lists, to help control access to Amazon EC2
instances in each subnet.

Additionally, you can create a Hardware Virtual Private Network(VPN) connection between
your corporate data center and your VPC and leverage the AWS Cloud as an extension of
your corporate data center. Or AWS Direct Connect (https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/).

MULTIPLE CONNECTIVITY OPTIONS

A variety of connectivity options exist for your Amazon VPC. You can connect your VPC to
the Internet, to your data center, or other VPCs, based on the AWS resources that you want
to expose publicly and those that you want to keep private.

 Connect directly to the Internet (public subnets)– You can launch instances into a
publicly accessible subnet where they can send and receive traffic from the Internet.

 Connect to the Internet using Network Address Translation (private subnets) –

Private subnets can be used for instances that you do not want to be directly
addressable from the Internet. Instances in a private subnet can access the Internet
 without exposing their private IP address by routing their traffic through a Network
Address Translation (NAT) gateway in a public subnet.

 Connect securely to your corporate datacenter– All traffic to and from instances in
your VPC can be routed to your corporate datacenter over an industry standard,
encrypted IPsec hardware VPN connection.

 Connect privately to other VPCs- Peer VPCs together to share resources across
multiple virtual networks owned by your or other AWS accounts.

 Privately connect to AWS Services without using an Internet gateway, NAT or firewall
proxy through a VPC Endpoint. Available AWS services include S3, DynamoDB,
Kinesis Streams, Service Catalog, EC2 Systems Manager (SSM), Elastic Load Balancing
(ELB) API, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API, and SNS.

 Privately connect to SaaS solutions supported by AWS PrivateLink.

 Privately connect your internal services across different accounts and VPCs within
your own organizations, significantly simplifying your internal network architecture.
EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable
compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for
developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal
friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on
Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and
boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as
your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by
allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the
tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.

Amazon EC2 pricing

4 ways to pay for EC2 instances.

 On-Demand
 Spot instances
 Reserved instances
 Dedicated hosts

EBS Elastic Block Store https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use
with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated
within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and
durability. Amazon EBS volumes offer the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run
your workloads. With Amazon EBS, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes – all while
paying a low price for only what you provision.
Amazon EBS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance,
cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS
ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases (like Microsoft SQL Server
and MySQL or Cassandra and MongoDB), stream and log processing applications (like Kafka and
Splunk), and data warehousing applications (like Vertica and Teradata).

EB Elastic Beantalk(豆类的茎可以长的很快) https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and
services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers
such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from
capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same
time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the
underlying resources at any time.

There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to
store and run your applications.

Elastic Load Balancing https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets,
such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the
varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability
Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers that all feature the high
availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make your applications fault
tolerant.

 Application Load Balancer

 Network Load Balancer
 Classic Load Balancer

CloudFront https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ edge computing(one of buzzwords)

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data,
videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within
a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront is integrated with AWS – both physical locations that
are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as other AWS services. CloudFront
works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load
Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code
closer to customers’ users and to customize the user experience.

You can get started with the Content Delivery Network in minutes, using the same AWS tools that
you're already familiar with: APIs, AWS Management Console, AWS CloudFormation, CLIs, and SDKs.
Amazon's CDN offers a simple, pay-as-you-go pricing model with no upfront fees or required long-
term contracts, and support for the CDN is included in your existing AWS Support subscription.

Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It
is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route
end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP
addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully
compliant with IPv6 as well.

Amazon Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS – such as
Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also
be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can use Amazon Route 53 to configure
DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints or to independently monitor the health of
your application and its endpoints. Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow makes it easy for you to manage
traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS,
Geoproximity, and Weighted Round Robin—all of which can be combined with DNS Failover in order
to enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Using Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow’s
simple visual editor, you can easily manage how your end-users are routed to your application’s
endpoints—whether in a single AWS region or distributed around the globe. Amazon Route 53 also
offers Domain Name Registration – you can purchase and manage domain names such as
example.com and Amazon Route 53 will automatically configure DNS settings for your domains.

AWS shield https://aws.amazon.com/shield/

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards
applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline
mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS
Support to benefit from DDoS protection. There are two tiers of AWS Shield - Standard and
Advanced.

All AWS customers benefit from the automatic protections of AWS Shield Standard, at no additional
charge. AWS Shield Standard defends against most common, frequently occurring network and
transport layer DDoS attacks that target your web site or applications. When you use AWS Shield
Standard with Amazon CloudFrontand Amazon Route 53, you receive comprehensive availability
protection against all known infrastructure (Layer 3 and 4) attacks.

For higher levels of protection against attacks targeting your applications running on Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator and
Amazon Route 53 resources, you can subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced. In addition to the network
and transport layer protections that come with Standard, AWS Shield Advanced provides additional
detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, near real-time visibility into
attacks, and integration with AWS WAF, a web application firewall. AWS Shield Advanced also gives
you 24x7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT) and protection against DDoS related spikes
in your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS
Global Accelerator and Amazon Route 53 charges.

AWS Shield Advanced is available globally on all Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, and
Amazon Route 53 edge locations. You can protect your web applications hosted anywhere in the
world by deploying Amazon CloudFront in front of your application. Your origin servers can be
Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), or a custom server
outside of AWS. You can also enable AWS Shield Advanced directly on an Elastic IP or Elastic Load
Balancing (ELB) in the following AWS Regions - Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Northern California,
Ireland, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Sydney.

AWS WAF - Web Application Firewall https://aws.amazon.com/waf/

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web
exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive
resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web applications
by defining customizable web security rules. You can use AWS WAF to create custom rules that block
common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that are designed for
your specific application. New rules can be deployed within minutes, letting you respond quickly to
changing traffic patterns. Also, AWS WAF includes a full-featured API that you can use to automate
the creation, deployment, and maintenance of web security rules.

With AWS WAF you pay only for what you use. AWS WAF pricing is based on how many rules you
deploy and how many web requests your web application receives. There are no upfront
commitments.

You can deploy AWS WAF on either Amazon CloudFront as part of your CDN solution, the
Application Load Balancer (ALB) that fronts your web servers or origin servers running on EC2, or
Amazon API Gateway for your APIs.

S3 https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading
scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and
industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as
websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and
big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your
data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and
compliance requirements. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability, and
stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.

Snowball https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/
Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses devices designed to be secure to
transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud. Using Snowball addresses common
challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and
security concerns. Customers today use Snowball to migrate analytics data, genomics data, video
libraries, image repositories, backups, and to archive part of data center shutdowns, tape
replacement or application migration projects. Transferring data with Snowball is simple, fast, more
secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of transferring data via high-speed Internet.

With Snowball, you don’t need to write any code or purchase any hardware to transfer your data.
Simply create a job in the AWS Management Console ("Console") and a Snowball device will be
automatically shipped to you. Once it arrives, attach the device to your local network, download and
run the Snowball Client ("Client") to establish a connection, and then use the Client to select the file
directories that you want to transfer to the device. The Client will then encrypt and transfer the files
to the device at high speed. Once the transfer is complete and the device is ready to be returned,
the E Ink shipping label will automatically update and you can track the job status via Amazon Simple
Notification Service (SNS), text messages, or directly in the Console.

Glacier https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/
Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data
archiving and long-term backup. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and provides
comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that can help meet even the most stringent
regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 Glacier provides query-in-place functionality, allowing you to
run powerful analytics directly on your archive data at rest. Customers can store data for as little as
$0.004 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep
costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon S3 Glacier provides three options for
access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours.

3 ways to get data into Glacier.

 SDK
 API
 Lifetime policy

RDS (Relational Database Service) https://aws.amazon.com/rds/

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a
relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating
time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and
backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high
availability, security and compatibility they need.

Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types - optimized for memory, performance or
I/O - and provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon
Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. You can use the AWS
Database Migration Service to easily migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS.

Aurora https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that
combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity
and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than
standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial
databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database
Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning,
database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up
to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-
latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication
across three Availability Zones (AZs).

Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start
migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

DynamoDB https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ noSQL

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond
performance at any scale. It's a fully managed, multiregion, multimaster database with built-in
security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. DynamoDB can
handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and support peaks of more than 20 million requests
per second.

Many of the world's fastest growing businesses such as Lyft, Airbnb, and Redfin as well as
enterprises such as Samsung, Toyota, and Capital One depend on the scale and performance of
DynamoDB to support their mission-critical workloads.
More than 100,000 AWS customers have chosen DynamoDB as their key-value and document
database for mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, IoT, and other applications that need low-latency data
access at any scale. Create a new table for your application and let DynamoDB handle the rest.

Redshift https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/ - learn it is a database

Amazon Redshift is a fast, scalable data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze
all your data across your data warehouse and data lake. Redshift delivers ten times faster
performance than other data warehouses by using machine learning, massively parallel query
execution, and columnar storage on high-performance disk. You can setup and deploy a new data
warehouse in minutes, and run queries across petabytes of data in your Redshift data warehouse,
and exabytes of data in your data lake built on Amazon S3. You can start small for just $0.25 per
hour and scale to $250 per terabyte per year, less than one-tenth the cost of other solutions.

To create your first Amazon Redshift data warehouse, follow our Getting Started Guide and get the
most out of your experience. Contact us to request support for your proof-of-concept or
evaluation.To accelerate your migration to Amazon Redshift, you can use the AWS Database
Migration Service (DMS) free for six months.

Database Migration Service https://aws.amazon.com/dms/

AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The
source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to
applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data
to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases.

AWS Database Migration Service supports homogenous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well
as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL
Server to Amazon Aurora. With AWS Database Migration Service, you can continuously replicate
your data with high availability and consolidate databases into a petabyte-scale data warehouse by
streaming data to Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3. Learn more about the supported source and
target databases.

When migrating databases to Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon
DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) you can use DMS free for six months.

Amazon EMR https://aws.amazon.com/emr/ - learn it is for Big Data

Amazon EMR provides a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to
process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances. You can also run
other popular distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, and Flink in EMR, and
interact with data in other AWS data stores such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. EMR
Notebooks, based on the popular Jupyter Notebook, provide a development and collaboration
environment for ad hoc querying and exploratory analysis.

EMR securely and reliably handles a broad set of big data use cases, including log analysis, web
indexing, data transformations (ETL), machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and
bioinformatics.

CloudTrail https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/ - logging

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk
auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain
account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history
of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS
SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis,
resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.

Elasticsearch Service https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to deploy, secure,
and operate Elasticsearch at scale with zero down time. The service offers open-source Elasticsearch
APIs, managed Kibana, and integrations with Logstash and other AWS Services, enabling you to
securely ingest data from any source and search, analyze, and visualize it in real time. Amazon
Elasticsearch Service lets you pay only for what you use – there are no upfront costs or usage
requirements. With Amazon Elasticsearch Service, you get the ELK stack you need, without the
operational overhead.

CloudFormation https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the
infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text
file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your
applications across all regions and accounts. This file serves as the single source of truth for your
cloud environment.

AWS CloudFormation is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the AWS resources
needed to run your applications.

CloudWatch https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/ - view the metrics on dashboard

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service built for developers, system
operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and
actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide
performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events,
providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications and services that run on AWS, and
on-premises servers. You can use CloudWatch to set high resolution alarms, visualize logs and
metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to optimize
your applications, and ensure they are running smoothly.

With Amazon CloudWatch, it is easy to get started. There is no up-front commitment or minimum
fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for what you use.

Kinesis Data Firehose

https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-firehose/ - know what is it. Real-time data analytics

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to reliably load streaming data into data stores and
analytics tools. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift,
Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business
intelligence tools and dashboards you’re already using today. It is a fully managed service that
automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration.
It can also batch, compress, transform, and encrypt the data before loading it, minimizing the
amount of storage used at the destination and increasing security.

You can easily create a Firehose delivery stream from the AWS Management Console, configure it
with a few clicks, and start sending data to the stream from hundreds of thousands of data sources
to be loaded continuously to AWS – all in just a few minutes. You can also configure your delivery
stream to automatically convert the incoming data to columnar formats like Apache Parquet and
Apache ORC, before the data is delivered to Amazon S3, for cost-effective storage and analytics.

With Kinesis Data Firehose, you only pay for the amount of data you transmit through the service,
and if applicable, for data format conversion. There is no minimum fee or setup cost.

Lambda - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ - Important

AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the
compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running.

With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero
administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale
your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS
services or call it directly from any web or mobile app.

Billing - TCO Total Cost of Ownership Calculator

https://aws.amazon.com/tco-calculator/

Get the estimation of the total cost of running AWS services.

Billing - AWS Cost Explorer

https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-explorer/

Security - Shared Responsibility Model - Important

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-model/

To clarify the differentiated responsibility between AWS and customers.

Security - IAM (Identity and Access Management)

https://aws.amazon.com/iam/

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage access to AWS services and
resources securely. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups, and use
permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.

IAM is a feature of your AWS account offered at no additional charge. You will be charged only for
use of other AWS services by your users.

To get started using IAM, or if you have already registered with AWS, go to the AWS Management
Consoleand get started with these IAM Best Practices.

Security - Key Management Service (KMS)

https://aws.amazon.com/kms/

Security – Cognito - Handle authentication for your APP

https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/

Support plans
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/

for 4 different types of plans, ask ‘who can open cases’ or ‘how many people can be contacted’.

Or ask the difference for Response times

Syllabus
1. Cloud Concepts
If you want to pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam then you must have some basic
knowledge of Cloud Computing Concepts. Questions asked from this field are broad enough. So to
perform well, you must know high-level Cloud Concepts which includes

 Elasticity
 Scalability
 High Availability
 Fault Tolerance

It is found that cloud concept domain covers 28 % of this certification exam content approximately.

2. Security
If you are preparing for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam, Security is marked as an
important topic whether you are working with infrastructure or not. This certification exam includes
a variety of questions related to security, acquiescence, and culpable management. You may find
some following topics regarding this domain in your exam:

 Shared Security Model

 Cloud Logs
 DDoS Protection
 IAM- Managing users, Password policies, and MFA

It is found that Security domain covers 24 % of this certification exam content approximately.

3. Technology
Technology is the most important domain of AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam. If
you want to be adept in this section then you should have the knowledge of core AWS services. Here
are some of AWS services that you must know

 EC2
 RDS
 SNS
 ELB
 S3
 Lambda
 Route 53

It is found that Technology domain covers 36 % of this certification exam content approximately.

4. Billing & Pricing

As AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam concentrates on the business application of
AWS, Billing & Pricing becomes important topics you should know. You must have knowledge of
general account information, AWS support, how certain services are billed, how to calculate the cost
of services and using what tools etc. There may be some questions which overlap with other exam
domains e.g. AWS Cost Calculator service may fall into billing & pricing domain as well as technology
domain.
How to Prepare for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification?
As we all know that preparation for any certification course is not so easy. For preparing an exam,
we need to follow a correct path to pass the exam. So, here we present the preparation path to pass
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam.

1. Start with AWS Training Classes

Here are three AWS Training courses that will help you to pass this certification.

 AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials : This course is for those candidates who are seeking for
complete understanding of AWS Cloud. This course includes cloud concepts, AWS services,
pricing, architecture, security, and support.

 AWS Technical Essentials : This course informs you about AWS services, products, and some
ordinary solutions. It makes you more efficient in analyzing AWS services so that you will be
able to resolve IT issues. It allows you to learn new skills and implement them in your
business.

 AWS Business Essentials : AWS Business Essentials helps you to know the benefits of cloud
computing, including financial profits and how a cloud approach helps you to attain business
goals. Also, this course informs you about security and compliance concepts and helps you
understanding AWS cloud computing approach.

2. Read AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam Guide

If you are preparing for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam then this guide gives you an idea
about the necessary areas that you need to concentrate on while preparing for the exam. The exam
guide will provide you an overview of all the exam objectives with the preparation instructions. You
just need to follow them with proper dedication to passing the certification exam.

3. Get Familiar with the Subject Areas

When you are preparing for an exam, subject area for the exam becomes the most important thing
that you must understand. Objectives of AWS CCP certification exam has already been stated above,
review them carefully, and then start your preparation through the recommended study material for
each subject area.

4. Go Through AWS Whitepapers

Since we know that white papers are created to educate the viewers about a specific issue and
accelerate a specific methodology. AWS whitepapers are a good source of information and cover the
basic topic such as security, architecture, and economics.

Here are some popular AWS whitepapers that will help you in the preparation of AWS Certified
Cloud Practitioner certification exam

 Overview of AWS
 How AWS Pricing Works
 Maximizing Value with AWS
 AWS Security Best Practices
 An Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
 The Business Value of AWS: Succeeding at Twenty-First Century Business Infrastructure

5. Self-Study
AWS Cloud Practitioner certification exam covers the basic concepts and knowledge of AWS Cloud. If
you have some experience of working on AWS cloud platform, the self-study is enough to pass the
certification exam. If you are not good at some concepts, take an online course for the preparation
of AWS CCP exam. The online training will help you to understand all the subject areas and thus, you
will be able to pass the certification exam. You can find a lot of material on AWS website itself. Read
the frequently asked questions related to the AWS cloud, services, and applications.

6. Examine Sample Questions and Take Free Practice Test

Practice test for any certification exam is the best contraption to evaluate your readiness for the
exam. As we know that learning the exam content is necessary but not enough to do well in the
exam. If you want to perform well, you must practice through free AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
practice exam as these tests contain actual exam structure and contents. You can also try some full-
length practice tests as they are more beneficial to find out weak areas and make improvements on
them.

7. Schedule the Exam and Get Certified

When you are done with your preparation and confident enough, it is the right time to enroll for the
exam. Choose any testing center near you at AWS.training website and register yourself. As in you
are well prepared by following the above steps, you will definitely pass the exam. Wish you the luck!

Best AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification Books

Start your preparation with AWS Exam Guide. This guide will acts as a study plan for you, after this
book-learning, continue your preparation with following AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Certification Books. We have enlisted some important books that will help you to prepare for the
AWS certified cloud practitioner exam. Read all or few of these to clear your concepts of AWS cloud
and get ready to pass the certification exam. So, here are the recommended AWS certified cloud
practitioner books –

1. AWS: The Beginners Guide to Amazon Web Services by Dennis Hutten

This AWS certified cloud practitioner book is intended for beginners. This is a complete study guide
that explains how Amazon Web Services provides flexible, reliable, and scalable, cost-effective and
easy-to-use solutions. So, if you have the desire to learn how Amazon Web Services will work and
how to run your website on Amazon Web Services can be beneficial then you can get benefit from
this book.

2. AWS Basics: Beginner’s Guide by Gordon Wong

This is a recommended AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner book that covers basic concepts of Amazon
Web Services (AWS). If you want to know how to start with AWS then you can use this AWS
Certification Cloud Practitioner study guide. This book explains how we can create an account and
can assign that account to a security group. Also to understand how to install Unified Cloud
Controller on AWS; you can refer this book. Reading this book will help you pass the AWS Certified
cloud practitioner certification.

3. Learning AWS by Aurobindo Sarkar and Amit Shah

This AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner book is for the experts who want to learn Amazon Web
Services (AWS). So, this book is best for those who are experts in programming. It is assumed, a
programmer who wants to learn AWS, they are familiar with Spring, RESTful web services, and
MySQL. With the help of this AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide, you can develop your
skills by learning the below-mentioned approaches, tools, and processes. With this book, you can
easily learn application monitoring, developing and automating your cloud infrastructure, DevOps
pipeline and set up the operations.
4. Amazon Web Services for Dummies by Bernard Golden
This book is an Amazon Web Services study guide that provides you an easy way to understand the
AWS platform. This book helps you learn toolset for Amazon Web Services and how to implement
AWS in your organization. By reading this book, you will learn how the different Amazon Web
Services like Amazon EC2, S3, Glacier, and Amazon Flexible Payments works. In this book, you will
find step by step instructions for everything along with the practical examples. You will learn
different AWS features and get to know how to create a robust and reliable website according to
your requirement. Thus, Amazon Web Services for Dummies is a complete study guide for you if you
are looking for a book to get your hands on the cloud with Amazon Web Services.

5. Amazon Web Services in Action by Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig

Amazon Web Services in Action is the complete introduction to AWS cloud. This book familiarizes
you with the basics of computation, networking, and storage in the AWS cloud. With this book, you
can get a complete overview of cloud computing and then account creation. You will understand the
procedure of how to get the system isolation done with the implementation of private networks.
Also, you will come to know about different techniques and options for the data storage. This AWS
certified cloud practitioner book will teach you to build highly available, robust, and reliable system
using AWS cloud.
6. AWS Automation Cookbook – Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment using
AWS Services by Nikit Swaraj
AWS Automation Cookbook is a recipe based study guide and makes you learn how to reduce the
downtime for application deployment. The approach this book work upon is how to do it, and meant
to provide the easiest solutions to automate the processes related to common maintenance and
deployment tasks. This book is for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam and helps you learn the
concepts of AWS development and administration. With this book, you will learn how to manage the
instances and host the AWS applications. If you want to have the detailed knowledge of continuous
deployment, integration, and delivery of AWS services, then this book is a perfect choice for you.

7. Mastering AWS Security: Create and Maintain a Secure Cloud Ecosystem by Albert Anthony
As AWS Cloud security is the important objective covered in AWS certified cloud practitioner exam
syllabus, this book is a right choice for the cloud practitioner exam. This AWS certified cloud
practitioner book provides you an in-depth knowledge of how to effectively use and implement
security services for AWS. This book is for all IT professionals who are working with AWS cloud in any
domain. If you are implementing AWS in your organization, it is recommended to read this AWS
book to maintain the security of all of your works. Understanding the security concepts of all the
AWS services in different domains, scenarios, and use cases will benefit you to become the master of
AWS cloud.
So, these are the AWS books that cover all the exam objectives of AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
exam. Reading these books with proper concentration will surely clear your concepts of AWS cloud.

Suggestions to Follow While Taking the Exam

 Start the exam by answering questions you are sure about. Avoid spending more time on the
difficult and confusing questions.
 Keep the record of time while you are taking the exam. It is important to manage time as it will
help you to attempt all the questions.
 Don’t rush, stay steady. You are given 90 minutes, enough time to complete the exam so just
take your time to answer all the questions.
 It is not always the case that the answer will only be the best answer. Revolve your mind and try
to find the second best answer to the question.
 Keep in mind that there may be more than one question in a single question, so try to
understand the question first and then choose the answer.
 As per the exam pattern, the question may have multiple correct answers. So read the question
and every option carefully to find all the correct answers.

Final Words
One thing you should keep in mind is that there is no shortcut method to pass an exam. So, prepare
with the above-mentioned preparation guide and step ahead to pass the cloud practitioner exam. As
the certification only doesn’t matter but the knowledge does, you should cover the exam objectives
by clearing the concepts through the described study material.

Whizlabs is aimed to help you in your preparation and so we brought this complete preparation
guide for you. Also, we are offering AWS certified Cloud Practitioner Practice
Exam (https://www.whizlabs.com/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner/) that will help you track your
preparation and work on the weak areas. By practicing through these practice tests, you will be
confident enough to pass the certification exam in first attempt only.