AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Session One

December 26, 2025

I am taking the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam in approximately nine days and want to ensure I am prepared. This series will serve as non-exhaustive note taking for the information that I am internalizing as I go.

Study materials:

• Free Code Camp Preparation
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Practice Tests
• AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials
• AWS Documentation
  • What is Cloud Computing?
  • Shared Responsibility Model
  • Regions and Availability Zones
• ChatGPT

Notes:

Tactics

• Some questions are structured as “Your customer is looking to xyz,” and then proceed to be very wordy, likely meant to throw the reader off from what the customer is looking to accomplish. Remember for this style of question to come back to “What’s the goal of the customer?” before answering.

S3-IA Storage

• IA: Infrequent Access.
• Designed for data that you don’t access often, still need to retrieve quickly.
• Storage costs for S3 Standard are higher than S3-IA.
• Access speed remains the same.
• S3 Standard use cases: Active apps, content
• S3-IA use cases: Backups, disaster recovery

Glacier Storage

• Long term data you rarely access
• 3 tiers: Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, Glacier Deep Archive
• Much cheaper than S3-IA
• Slower Access (minutes to hours)

Automation Timeframe Example

• 30 days -> S3
• 60 days -> S3-IA
• 90 days -> Glacier (Ex. Compliance)
• 2 yrs - Auto-delete

As of today, unlike some of the legacy study material, S3 is strongly consistent for all HTTP methods.

What does this mean, in practice?

• Before consistency developers had to do sleeps / retries, stale reads, edge cases, etc. )Think like database consistency… think of it like a distributed database) With strong consistency, S3 behaves predictably.
• Ex. PUT -> 200 OK, GET -> Returns content
• Ex. DELETE -> 204 No Content -> 404 Not Found immediately