AWS Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02: what's on the exam

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam (CLF-C02) is the entry-level AWS certification. It does not ask you to build anything. It asks you to recognize what AWS services are for, who is responsible for what, how AWS charges, and what the basic ideas of cloud computing are. That makes it a recall-heavy exam with a lot of look-alike answers.

This page lays out the format, the four domains and what is inside each one, how scoring works, and what changed in the current exam guide. The course described here is unofficial and is not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS.

The format

Two details matter for strategy. First, the 15 unscored questions are not identified, so you cannot skip any of them safely; treat every item as real. Second, multiple response items ask for two or more correct answers out of five or more options, and an unanswered question counts as incorrect, so there is never a reason to leave one blank.

Compensatory scoring means you pass on your overall score, not by clearing a minimum in each domain. A weak domain can be offset by a strong one. Because the score is scaled, 700 is not the same thing as answering 70% of questions correctly. If you want to see how many questions you could miss at a margin you choose, the exam pass score calculator does the arithmetic; treat the target as your own safety margin, not an AWS rule.

The four domains and their weights

Cloud Technology and Services and Security and Compliance together are 64% of the exam. If you are short on time, that is where the points are. The study plan for the exam is built around those weights.

Domain 1: Cloud Concepts (24%)

This domain covers the vocabulary of the cloud and the reasons companies move to it.

• Cloud fundamentals and benefits. The service models, the deployment models (cloud, hybrid, on premises), the six advantages of cloud computing, and the difference between elasticity, scalability and high availability.
• The Well-Architected Framework. The six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization and Sustainability.
• Cloud economics. Fixed versus variable costs, total cost of ownership, licensing, rightsizing, and why automation and managed services change the cost picture.
• Migration and adoption. The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, the migration strategies (rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, retain and others), and the services that move servers, databases and data.

Domain 2: Security and Compliance (30%)

The largest single block of "who is responsible" and "which security service" questions.

• The shared responsibility model. Security of the cloud versus security in the cloud, and how the split shifts between EC2, RDS, Lambda and S3. The shared responsibility model explained walks through it.
• Compliance, governance and logging. AWS Artifact, encryption in transit and at rest, and the monitoring trio of CloudWatch, CloudTrail and AWS Config, plus Organizations for account governance.
• Identity and access management. Users, groups, roles and policies, the root user, multi-factor authentication, least privilege, and IAM Identity Center.
• Security services. GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, Detective and Security Hub, plus AWS WAF, AWS Shield and AWS Firewall Manager, and resources such as Trusted Advisor.

Domain 3: Cloud Technology and Services (34%)

The widest domain, and the one most about matching a description to a service name.

• Global infrastructure and access. Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations, and the ways to reach AWS: the console, the CLI, SDKs and infrastructure as code.
• Compute, storage, databases and networking. EC2, containers, Lambda, Auto Scaling and load balancing; S3 and its classes, EBS and EFS; RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB and analytics services; VPCs, security groups and network ACLs, Route 53 and CloudFront. S3 storage classes compared covers the storage side.
• AI/ML and other categories. Machine learning and AI services, application integration, management tools, and developer, business and IoT services.

Domain 4: Billing, Pricing and Support (12%)

• Pricing models. On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Spot and Savings Plans, data transfer and storage pricing, and the free tier.
• Billing and cost tools. Budgets, Cost Explorer, the Pricing Calculator and cost allocation tags.
• Support. The support plans and the technical resources and partner programs AWS offers.

It is the smallest domain, but its questions are easy to prepare for because they are narrow: a tool name for a job, or a plan name for a feature.

What changed in exam guide v1.3

The guide has been revised several times: version 1.0 is dated 2026-06-24, 1.1 is 2026-08-28, 1.2 is 2026-09-24 and 1.3 is 2026-10-29. The domain weights did not change, and the exam is still 50 scored plus 15 unscored questions with a pass mark of 700. What changed is the list of services in scope.

Newly in scope in v1.3:

• Amazon ElastiCache as the in-memory database example, and Amazon DocumentDB.
• Amazon Quick for analytics (QuickSight now sits inside it as Amazon Quick Sight), plus Amazon Q and Amazon SageMaker AI in the machine learning list.
• Service Quotas.
• Networking: AWS PrivateLink, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Site-to-Site VPN and AWS Client VPN.
• Migration Evaluator.
• Amazon Inspector as part of security in a VPC, next to network ACLs and security groups.
• AWS WAF, AWS Firewall Manager, AWS Shield and Amazon GuardDuty as the named examples for protection services.
• A support list of Basic Support, AWS Business Support+, AWS Enterprise Support and AWS Unified Operations.

No longer listed: services such as Amazon MSK, AWS Data Exchange, AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength, Amazon MemoryDB, AWS CloudShell, Amazon Kendra, AWS Network Firewall and the Snow Family. Older study material still teaches several of these, which is a good reason to check any third-party notes against the current guide. Likewise, the older Developer, Business and Enterprise On-Ramp support plan names are legacy names as of November 2026; learn the current four first.

How to use this

Read the guide itself once, then study by domain weight. The Encodr AWS Cloud Practitioner flashcards are built on guide v1.3: 17 units, 58 chapters and 1,302 study cards, with the card count in each domain following the exam weights. Flashcards are recall practice, not a substitute for time in the AWS console, so open a free account and click through the services you are memorizing.

For the method, the testing effect explains why answering from memory beats rereading, and how to build a study schedule before an exam turns an exam date into a plan. When you want to see what a question looks like, the AWS Cloud Practitioner practice questions post has 17, grouped by domain. If you are weighing this against Microsoft's entry exam, AWS vs Azure: which cloud cert first compares them.