CLF-C02 & SAA-C03: AWS Cloud Practitioner + Architect

AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Bootcamp Overview (CLF-C02 and SAA-C03)

This AWS bootcamp is a five-day, instructor-led path from no AWS credential to two of them: CLF-C02 for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and SAA-C03 for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate. Both exams are taken while you attend. The pairing is deliberate. The foundational exam gives you the vocabulary, the service map and the commercial model of AWS, and the associate exam then asks you to design with it. Learning them back to back in one week is far more efficient than sitting the foundational exam, going back to work, and rebuilding the context months later for the associate one.

The camp is taught using two official Amazon courses rather than third-party material: AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials and Architecting on AWS. The first covers AWS cloud concepts, the global infrastructure, core compute, storage, database and networking services, the shared responsibility model, security services, monitoring, billing and pricing. The second moves into architecture: building an elastic and secure VPC with public and private subnets, layered network security, selecting compute and storage for a given business case, high availability and auto scaling, monitoring and automation, VPC peering and hybrid networking, containers, serverless, edge services, and backup and recovery.

Both exams are the current versions. CLF-C02 runs 90 minutes with 65 questions and a passing score of 700. SAA-C03 runs 130 minutes with 65 questions and a passing score of 720. Each certification is valid for three years, and passing SAA-C03 is itself one of the routes AWS accepts for keeping the foundational credential current.

Who This AWS Course Is For

AWS positions the Cloud Practitioner credential as independent of any single job role, and that is what makes this camp broad at the front and specific at the back. The foundational half suits anyone who has to be credible about AWS without necessarily building on it: people early in an AWS career, and the account managers, project managers, procurement and finance staff who sit alongside cloud teams and have to understand what is being bought and why.

The architect half is aimed squarely at the solutions architect role. It suits systems, infrastructure and network administrators whose environment is moving to the cloud and who now have to size EC2 instances, choose between S3, EBS and EFS, lay out VPCs and subnets, and decide where a database belongs. It suits developers and operations engineers who deploy onto AWS and want to understand the architecture underneath their application rather than inherit it. And it suits anyone whose next job title contains the words cloud or architect, since SAA-C03 is the credential most commonly asked for at that step.

What You'll Learn in CLF-C02 (AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner)

CLF-C02 validates overall knowledge of the AWS Cloud across four content domains, in Amazon's own weightings:

• Cloud Technology and Services (34%): the largest domain, covering the core AWS compute, storage, database and networking services, the global infrastructure, deployment and operating methods, and how to identify the right service for a common use case.
• Security and Compliance (30%): the AWS shared responsibility model, security and compliance concepts, access management with IAM and multi-factor authentication, and the security services AWS provides.
• Cloud Concepts (24%): the value proposition of the AWS Cloud, the design principles of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, the benefits of migrating to AWS, and the economics of cloud versus on-premises.
• Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%): AWS pricing models, account structures and billing, and the support and cost management resources available.

What You'll Learn in SAA-C03 (AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate)

SAA-C03 validates your ability to design solutions on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, again across four weighted domains:

• Design Secure Architectures (30%): secure access to AWS resources, secure workloads and applications, and the data security controls that protect information at rest and in transit.
• Design Resilient Architectures (26%): scalable and loosely coupled architectures, and highly available or fault-tolerant designs that survive the loss of a component.
• Design High-Performing Architectures (24%): choosing high-performing storage, elastic compute, database solutions, scalable network architectures, and data ingestion and transformation solutions.
• Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%): sizing storage, compute, databases and networking so that cost is a design input rather than an afterthought.

Hands-on labs run throughout the architect half, including building a core AWS network, adding an EC2 instance to a VPC you built, installing an RDS instance and an Application Load Balancer, building a highly available auto scaling database layer, building a serverless infrastructure, and deploying Amazon CloudFront over an Amazon S3 backend. The camp closes with a facilitator-guided project designing a highly available, secure architecture against a business problem.

Why Choose This AWS Camp

Two AWS exams in five days works because the material genuinely stacks. You cover concepts, services and pricing, sit the foundational exam while it is fresh, then spend the rest of the week designing with the same services and sit the associate exam before you leave. The common alternative is a foundational certificate earned online and an associate exam that never gets booked.

• 5-day accelerated format: two courses, two exams, two certifications, one trip.
• Taught by an Amazon Authorized Instructor (AAI), not a generalist.
• 95% first-attempt pass rate, with a retake voucher for each exam if you need it.
• Two official AWS exam vouchers included for CLF-C02 and SAA-C03, with no hidden exam fees.
• Two official Amazon AWS courses, AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials and Architecting on AWS, plus official AWS hands-on labs and vetted practice tests.
• Exams delivered by Pearson VUE, onsite at the training facility or online.
• 90 days of extended lab access after the camp ends.
• Classroom live in Sarasota, FL, or remote classroom live, the same instructor-led class either way.
• Classes run as scheduled, with no cancellations, so you can book travel with confidence.