CLF-C02 Exam Guide: Domains, Format and Study Priorities

AWS specifies 65 questions for CLF-C02: 50 contribute to your score and 15 are unscored questions used to evaluate potential future exam content. You cannot identify the unscored questions during the exam, so treat every question seriously. Multiple-choice questions have one correct response and three distractors; multiple-response questions have two or more correct responses from five or more options. Follow each question’s instruction about how many answers to select. There is no penalty for guessing, while unanswered questions count as incorrect, so leave time to review flagged items and answer anything you initially skipped.

The passing score is 700 on a scale from 100 to 1,000. This is a scaled score, not a statement that answering exactly 70% correctly guarantees a pass. AWS uses compensatory scoring, meaning you need to pass the exam overall rather than achieve a separate passing result in every domain. The domain percentages describe the weighting of scored content; do not assume they translate into an exact visible question count because the exam also contains unscored items. Before booking, check the official exam page for current delivery options, languages, fees and any applicable testing arrangements.

Cloud Concepts accounts for 24% of scored content. Its scope covers the benefits of the AWS Cloud, cloud design principles, migration benefits and strategies, and cloud economics. Be able to explain why organisations value elasticity, agility, availability and global reach, rather than simply reciting those terms. Distinguish scaling capacity from automatically matching capacity to changing demand, and recognise how managed services can reduce operational work. Understand the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework at a conceptual level: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and sustainability. Questions can ask which principle best addresses a stated business need.

Cloud economics requires more than remembering that AWS uses pay-as-you-go pricing. Understand fixed versus variable costs, economies of scale, right-sizing and the operational implications of moving from on-premises infrastructure to cloud services. Cloud adoption does not automatically make every workload cheaper; resource choices and usage patterns still matter. For migration, recognise the purpose of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and the broad approaches described in AWS migration guidance. You should be able to discuss why an organisation migrates and what influences its approach, without producing a detailed migration runbook or calculating a complex business case.

Security and Compliance represents 30% of scored content. Begin with the AWS shared responsibility model: AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, while customers are responsible for security in the cloud. The practical boundary changes with the service selected. For Amazon EC2, customers manage the guest operating system, including patching; with more abstracted managed services, AWS takes on more infrastructure responsibilities. Customers still retain responsibilities such as managing their data and configuring access appropriately. Learn to assign responsibilities in a scenario instead of treating shared responsibility as one fixed checklist that applies identically to every service.

The remaining scope includes security, governance and compliance concepts; access management; and security-related services and resources. Prioritise least privilege, multi-factor authentication, protecting root-user credentials, and the differences between IAM users, groups, roles and policies. Recognise encryption at rest and in transit, and understand the purpose of services such as AWS KMS, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Artifact. Distinguish activity auditing from threat detection and access control. The expected depth is selecting or explaining the relevant capability, not writing complex IAM policies, investigating a live security incident or implementing a complete compliance programme.

Cloud Technology and Services is the largest domain at 34%. It covers deployment and operation methods, AWS global infrastructure, compute, databases, networking, storage, AI and machine learning, analytics, and other in-scope service categories. Understand Regions, Availability Zones and edge locations, including how they relate to resilience, latency and geographic requirements. Recognise the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, SDKs and infrastructure as code as different ways to interact with or provision AWS resources. The goal is to identify an appropriate approach and explain its purpose, not to memorise commands, write deployment templates or configure a production environment.

Study services in contrasting groups. Compare Amazon EC2 with AWS Lambda, Amazon S3 with Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS, and Amazon RDS with Amazon DynamoDB. Know why a scenario calls for virtual machines, event-driven compute, object storage, shared file storage, a relational database or a NoSQL database. Then build recognition of networking, content delivery, messaging, analytics and machine learning services from the official in-scope list. Do not interpret this as permission to ignore less familiar categories: the blueprint is broader than compute and storage. However, detailed tuning, troubleshooting and implementation are outside the target candidate’s expected tasks.

Billing, Pricing and Support accounts for 12%, making it the smallest domain but not an optional one. Learn to compare purchasing and pricing models, including On-Demand usage, Spot Instances and commitment-based options such as Savings Plans and Reserved Instances where applicable. Understand that these models have different flexibility, interruption and commitment characteristics; they are not interchangeable discounts. Recognise the broad factors affecting charges, such as usage, storage, service configuration and data transfer. Exact prices vary by service, Region and usage pattern, so preparation should centre on pricing principles rather than memorising amounts that can change.

Separate the tools used to estimate costs, analyse spending and track budgets. AWS Pricing Calculator supports estimates for planned usage; AWS Cost Explorer helps explore cost and usage data; AWS Budgets supports budgets and notifications. Understand the billing benefits of AWS Organizations and consolidated billing, alongside the purpose of cost allocation tags. The domain also covers technical resources and support options, so know where documentation, AWS re:Post, AWS Health and AWS Support fit. Consult current AWS support documentation for plan names and entitlements rather than relying on an older comparison table or memorising potentially outdated response-time figures.

Start with the official AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam guide and turn each task statement into a checkable learning outcome. For example, replace “study IAM” with “explain when an application should use an IAM role rather than long-term access keys”. Allocate an initial share of study time broadly in line with the aws cloud practitioner exam domains, then adjust it using your actual knowledge gaps. For every service, record its purpose, a typical use case and the nearest alternative you might confuse it with. This produces a more useful revision resource than a long list of product names and definitions.

Use the [AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) course](/courses/aws-cloud-practitioner) from Erudex to organise that checklist, and [practice tests](/practice) to identify weak distinctions under timed conditions. Review why each distractor is unsuitable, not just why the correct answer works. An Erudex course certificate is separate from AWS Certification; becoming AWS Certified requires passing the official AWS exam. Keep hands-on exploration lightweight and purposeful, with cost controls in place, because implementation is not the assessment target. Before final revision, revisit the [official AWS exam page](https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/) and its linked guide to check the current scope and candidate requirements.