AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02): the exam guide
Everything to know before preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam: how it works, what it covers and how to study without wasting time.
Information checked on 8 October 2026 on the AWS website. AWS may change it: when in doubt, the official page is the reference.
The exam at a glance
- Questions
- 65: 50 count towards your score and 15 are unscored (you can't tell which)
- Question types
- Multiple choice (1 right answer out of 4) or multiple response (2 or more right answers out of 5 or more)
- Length
- 90 minutes
- Passing score
- 700 on a 100–1,000 scale. Only the overall score counts, not each domain.
- Wrong answers
- No penalty: an unanswered question counts as wrong, so answer everything.
- Price
- USD 100, plus any exchange fees or taxes
- Where
- At a Pearson VUE test centre or online with remote proctoring
- Languages
- Including English and French
- Prerequisites
- None. AWS mentions up to 6 months of exposure to the AWS Cloud, but it isn't required.
- Valid for
- 3 years
The 4 exam domains
The official guide splits the exam into four domains. The percentage is their weight in the scored questions.
1. Cloud concepts
24%The benefits of the AWS Cloud (elasticity, high availability, global reach), the 6 pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, migration strategies and the Cloud Adoption Framework, cloud economics: fixed vs variable costs, licensing, rightsizing.
2. Security and compliance
30%The shared responsibility model, IAM and IAM Identity Center, protecting the root user and least privilege, encryption, logs and auditing (CloudTrail, Config, CloudWatch), compliance (AWS Artifact) and security services (GuardDuty, Shield, WAF, Inspector, Security Hub).
3. Cloud technology and services
34%Ways to deploy (console, CLI, SDKs, infrastructure as code), the global infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations), compute (EC2, Lambda, containers), databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB), networking (VPC, Route 53), storage (S3, EBS, EFS), AI and analytics, and other common services.
4. Billing, pricing and support
12%Purchasing options (On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Spot, Savings Plans), data transfer costs, AWS Organizations and consolidated billing, Budgets, Cost Explorer, the Pricing Calculator, support plans and technical resources.
How to study efficiently
- Start with a course or AWS's official resources (exam guide, AWS Skill Builder) to see the whole syllabus once.
- Focus on the two biggest domains: technology and services (34%) and security (30%) make up nearly two thirds of the score.
- Practise on questions, and above all review the ones you miss: that's where you improve. Reviewing a mistake the same day, then the next day, then later and later is spaced repetition.
- Learn to recognise services by what they do: many questions describe a need and ask which service meets it.
- On exam day you have a little under 1 min 30 per question. Flag the hard ones, move on, and answer everything: there's no penalty.
Rokool does the spaced repetition for you
The app remembers every answer: your mistakes come back until you know them, and a gauge tells you when you're ready for the exam.