I decided to rush through both the preparation and certification exam process, taking the AWS free online course on Saturday, December 21st, and scheduling the exam for Monday, December 23rd. According to the certificate (see below), the course duration was 7 hours.

I think that is a fair assessment relative to the course length. Since the (CLF-C01) Exam Guide lacks depth relative to the technical aspects of how to operate in an AWS virtual environment, and the online course didn’t provide an opportunity to complete hands-on labs in the AWS cloud environment, I felt safe not having actually spun up a single EC2 instance or create a single bucket (it’s likely you need to know those definitions but not how to use them). My sense was rewarded with an exam result indicating I had passed.

What I can tell you without violating any NDA is there simply wasn’t a need for me to spin up a single EC2 instance or create a single bucket. What was necessary, is completing training like the online 7-hour course, so I could identify roughly what AWS services were related to specific situations or needs. That’s pretty much it.

Next in the queue is the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals free online course. While a little bit longer than the AWS Practitioner course, I’m thinking I’m going to try to get both the course and the certification exam done by the end of December. Given I managed to effectively do that in three days for the AWS Practitioner, I should be able to meet that goal.