Prerequisites
- Basic familiarity with cloud computing terms
- 2-4 hours of focused study time per day
- Willingness to review wrong answers immediately after each quiz
Study Schedule
Day 1Cloud Concepts and AWS Global Infrastructure
- Review cloud value: agility, elasticity, pay-as-you-go, and economies of scale
- Study Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations, and data residency
- Review the AWS Well-Architected pillars
- Take a 20-question Domain 1 quiz
Day 2Shared Responsibility, IAM, and Compliance
- Memorize AWS vs customer responsibilities for EC2, S3, and managed services
- Review IAM users, groups, roles, policies, MFA, and least privilege
- Study AWS Artifact, KMS, Shield, WAF, GuardDuty, Inspector, and Security Hub
- Take a 25-question security quiz
Day 3Compute, Serverless, and Containers
- Compare EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, ECS, EKS, and Fargate
- Review EC2 pricing options at a high level
- Study when serverless reduces operational overhead
- Take a service-selection quiz
Day 4Storage, Database, and Networking
- Compare S3, EBS, EFS, FSx, Glacier, Backup, and Storage Gateway
- Compare RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Redshift, DocumentDB, and Neptune
- Review VPC, Route 53, CloudFront, Direct Connect, VPN, and PrivateLink
- Take a mixed Domain 3 quiz
Day 5Monitoring, Management, Migration, and AI/ML
- Review CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config, Systems Manager, CloudFormation, and Trusted Advisor
- Study migration services such as Application Migration Service, DMS, Snow Family, and Migration Hub
- Review common analytics and AI/ML service purposes at a high level
- Take a 40-question mixed practice quiz
Day 6Billing, Pricing, and Support
- Study Free Tier, Cost Explorer, Budgets, Cost and Usage Reports, and Pricing Calculator
- Compare On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances
- Compare Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support
- Take a full 65-question timed mock exam
Day 7Final Review and Full Mock Exam
- Review every missed question from the previous mock exam
- Re-read IAM, shared responsibility, S3, EC2, VPC, billing, and support cheat sheets
- Run through flashcards for weak topics
- Take one final 65-question timed mock exam
Study Tips
CLF-C02 is mostly service recognition and cloud fundamentals, so avoid diving too deep into configuration details.
When in doubt, identify the service category first: compute, storage, database, networking, security, monitoring, or billing.
Practice under the real 90-minute timing so pacing feels natural.
Review AWS vs customer responsibility until it feels automatic.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with CLF-C02 practice questions.