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AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) study guide: a two-week plan

Updated November 4, 2026 · 8 min read

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) is the usual first step into AWS, and it is aimed at people who are new to the cloud. That does not make it a pushover: it covers a wide set of services, and the questions test whether you can tell similar ones apart. This guide gives you a two-week plan built on AWS's official exam guide and on practice: you learn a topic, test it on the CLF-C02 questions on ExamCup, and finish with a timed practice exam that matches the real exam's length.

The exam at a glance

• 65 questions in 90 minutes. Fifty are scored and 15 are unscored, and you cannot tell which is which.
• Two question types: multiple choice (one correct answer out of four) and multiple response (two or more correct answers out of five or more options).
• Passing score: 700 on a scale of 100 to 1,000, with no penalty for guessing.
• Delivery: at a Pearson VUE testing centre or online with a proctor. AWS lists the exam fee as 100 USD on its exam page; check it there for your country.

What the exam covers

AWS splits CLF-C02 into four domains, each with a weight of the scored content. These are the figures in version 1.0 of the official exam guide. Check the current guide before you start, because AWS updates it.

Cloud Technology and Services is the biggest domain and the one with the most separate things to remember: compute, storage, databases, networking and a few AI and machine learning services. Security and Compliance comes second, so the shared responsibility model and IAM deserve real time. Billing is the smallest domain but is usually the quickest to learn.

The exam guide also lists what is out of scope: coding, cloud architecture design, troubleshooting, implementation, and load and performance testing. You are expected to recognise and position services, not to build with them.

A two-week plan (about one hour a day)

Week 1: concepts, security and core services

1. Days 1–3: cloud concepts. The benefits of the AWS Cloud (economies of scale, elasticity, agility, high availability, global reach), the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, the Cloud Adoption Framework, migration strategies and the basics of cloud economics.
2. Days 4–5: shared responsibility and access. What AWS secures and what you secure, IAM users, groups, roles and policies, the root user, multi-factor authentication and least privilege.
3. Day 6: security services. What services such as AWS Shield, AWS WAF, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS KMS and AWS Artifact are for, and where compliance reports come from.
4. Day 7: practice. Open the CLF-C02 questions and work through the ones on the topics you studied. Choose your answer first, use Check answer, read every explanation, and write down what you missed.

Week 2: services, billing and practice

1. Days 8–10: core services. Global infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations), compute (EC2, Lambda, containers, Elastic Beanstalk), storage (S3 and its classes, EBS, EFS), databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift) and networking (VPC, Route 53, CloudFront, load balancers, VPN and Direct Connect).
2. Day 11: operations and AI. The console, CLI and SDKs, infrastructure as code with CloudFormation, monitoring with CloudWatch and CloudTrail, and what the main AI and machine learning services do.
3. Day 12: billing and support. On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and Spot pricing, AWS Organizations, the Pricing Calculator, Cost Explorer, Budgets and the AWS Support plans.
4. Day 13: the timed practice exam. Take the ExamCup timed practice exam in one sitting, with the clock running and no notes, then review every wrong answer and revisit those topics.
5. Day 14: light review and rest. Skim your notes. Do not start new topics.

Pairs of ideas people mix up

• Region vs Availability Zone vs edge location. A Region is a geographic area. Availability Zones are separate datacentres inside a Region, for resilience. Edge locations serve content closer to users, for example for CloudFront.
• Security of the cloud vs security in the cloud. AWS is responsible for the infrastructure; you are responsible for your data, your identities and how you configure services. Who owns what changes by service type.
• IAM users vs groups vs roles vs policies. Users are identities, groups collect users, roles are assumed temporarily by people or services, and policies say what is allowed.
• Amazon S3 vs EBS vs EFS. S3 is object storage, EBS is block storage attached to one EC2 instance, and EFS is a shared file system for many instances.
• Amazon RDS vs DynamoDB. RDS manages relational databases, DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL key-value and document database.
• CloudWatch vs CloudTrail. CloudWatch collects metrics, logs and alarms about what your resources are doing. CloudTrail records who made which API calls in your account.
• Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans vs Spot. The first two trade a commitment for a lower price, and Spot uses spare capacity at a discount that AWS can take back.
• Security Groups vs network ACLs. Security groups work at the instance level and are stateful. Network ACLs work at the subnet level and are stateless.

Practise on the CLF-C02 questions

Reading explains a service, but practice shows whether you can pick the right one when four look plausible. Every CLF-C02 question on ExamCup has an answer and a written explanation of why it is right and why the other options are wrong, so a miss teaches you something. Use them like this:

1. Learn a topic first, then test yourself on it.
2. Choose your answer before you reveal the explanation, and read the explanation even when you were right. Watch for multiple response questions, where you must pick every correct option.
3. Keep a list of the topics you miss and return to them a few days later.
4. Finish with the timed practice exam. See how to know you are ready and how to use practice questions without memorising.

Rehearse the exam with the timed practice exam

Knowing the material and sitting an exam are different skills. The timed practice exam puts you in the exam's conditions: one sitting, a running clock, and no looking things up. It shows how your pace holds when it counts, which topics you still lose marks on, and how you handle a question you are unsure about. Do it near the end of your plan, review every wrong answer, and go back to those topics before your exam date.

You can try the free CLF-C02 questions without an account, and a free account adds 50% more and lets you take the timed practice exam on them. Full access to the whole CLF-C02 bank, the full timed practice exam and the PDF is $19.99 for 3 months, paid once, which covers a two-week plan with room to repeat the weak spots. See what is included, and the pass guarantee in the refund policy.

Start the CLF-C02 questions

Add some hands-on time

Hands-on work is not tested directly, but it makes the services stick. Create a free AWS account if you are eligible, make an S3 bucket and look at its storage classes, create an IAM user with multi-factor authentication, and open the Billing console and Cost Explorer. Set a budget alert first, and delete what you create so it does not cost anything.

Frequently asked questions

ExamCup is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services. Exam names and codes are trademarks of their owners. Domains, weights, question counts and the passing score are taken from AWS's published CLF-C02 exam guide and exam page, checked on November 4, 2026, and may have changed since.