What is AWS Skill Builder?​

Skill Builder gives you access to 500+ free digital courses, official practice question sets, and the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course — all from AWS's own training team.

What's free vs paid​

For CLF-C02 prep, the free tier is enough — the Cloud Practitioner Essentials course and official practice questions cover everything on the exam.

How to use it alongside this portal​

• Use this portal to read and understand each service and concept
• Use Skill Builder's official practice questions to test recall under exam conditions
• Use Skill Builder's Cloud Practitioner Essentials videos if you prefer watching over reading

Both are free. Start at skillbuilder.aws.

EC2 pricing models — the most-tested billing topic​

The exam loves scenario-based pricing questions. Match the workload to the model:

Cost management tools — know which does what​

Common trap: Cost Explorer = look backwards at spend. Pricing Calculator = estimate before you start. The exam distinguishes these.

Support plans — know the tiers​

Developer  →  Business  →  Enterprise On-Ramp  →  Enterprise
    │              │                │                    │
 Business-    Production        Production          Mission-critical
 hours only   system down       system down         system down
  < 24h          < 4h              < 4h                < 15min
               response          response             response

• Trusted Advisor full checks: Business plan and above only (Developer gets 7 core checks)
• Technical Account Manager (TAM): Enterprise plans only
• Concierge support: Enterprise plans only

Free tier — exam-testable services​

Key exam tip​

"Consolidated billing" = one bill for all AWS accounts in an Organisation. The main benefit isn't just one invoice — it's volume discounts: combined usage across accounts qualifies for lower pricing tiers faster than any single account would.

What the exam focuses on​

The exam does not test deep security engineering. It tests whether you know which service to reach for in a given scenario, and the shared responsibility model.

The shared responsibility model — always on the exam​

AWS is responsible for:          You are responsible for:
┌─────────────────────────┐      ┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Physical data centres   │      │ Data encryption         │
│ Network infrastructure  │      │ IAM users & permissions │
│ Hypervisor / hardware   │      │ Security group rules    │
│ Managed service patches │      │ Application security    │
└─────────────────────────┘      └─────────────────────────┘
         "Security OF the cloud"    "Security IN the cloud"

Exam pattern: a scenario describes a breach or misconfiguration — whose responsibility was it? Almost always the answer is yours (the customer), not AWS's.

IAM — the most-tested service in this domain​

Threat detection — know what each service detects​

Memory trick: GuardDuty = threats from outside. Inspector = vulnerabilities inside. Macie = data you shouldn't have left exposed.

Encryption — know the key hierarchy​

• KMS — managed key service, integrates with almost every AWS service
• CloudHSM — dedicated hardware for compliance requirements (FIPS 140-2 Level 3)
• Secrets Manager — stores and rotates credentials, API keys, DB passwords

Exam pattern: "needs to store database credentials securely and rotate them automatically" → Secrets Manager (not KMS, not Parameter Store alone).

Key exam tip​

If a question asks about compliance reports, attestations, or audit artefacts (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS) — the answer is AWS Artifact. It's a self-service portal for downloading AWS's own compliance documents.

What changed​

Previously, the ⌘K search overlay only matched against article titles and subtitles. So searching "spot instances" returned nothing, even though EC2 Pricing Models covers Spot Instances in detail.

Now search works across all ~140 articles' full content.

How it works​

A pre-built search-index.json (404 KB) is lazy-loaded the moment you open search. By the time you've typed a word, it's ready.

Results are ranked in two tiers:

1. Title / subtitle matches — appear first, highlighted in the result title
2. Body-text matches — appear below, with a snippet showing the matching context

EC2 Pricing Models                          ← title match
AWS Pricing Models                          ← subtitle match ("Spot" in subtitle)
─────────────────────────────────────────
Amazon EC2          …Spot Instances   Spare capacity, cheapest…   ← body match + snippet
AWS Batch           …integrates with EC2 (including Spot Instances for cost…
Amazon EMR          …Spot Instances can significantly reduce cost…

Search in depth​

What's in scope​

The exam now explicitly tests:

• Amazon Bedrock — fully managed service to build generative AI apps using foundation models (FMs) from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral, and Amazon
• Amazon Q — generative AI assistant for business (Q Business) and for developers (Q Developer, formerly CodeWhisperer)
• Amazon SageMaker — for building, training and deploying ML models; exam focuses on the managed aspect, not the data-science workflow
• AI/ML managed services — Rekognition (images/video), Comprehend (NLP), Translate, Polly, Transcribe, Lex, Forecast, Personalize

Key distinctions the exam likes to test​

Exam tip​

If a scenario describes a business that wants to add AI without any ML expertise or model training, the answer is almost always Bedrock or a managed AI service (Rekognition, Comprehend, etc.).
If they want to train their own model on proprietary data, it's SageMaker.

Articles on this site​

• Amazon Bedrock
• Amazon Q
• AI/ML Fundamentals
• Generative AI Concepts

What changed​

Module detail pages previously showed a flat list of topics. Now they're grouped under labelled sections — exactly as the official AWS course organises them.

Example — Module 9: Security

This applies to all 13 modules.

Module 9 Security — full walkthrough​

Also fixed​

The Cloud Adoption Framework article was incorrectly assigned to Module 13 (Well-Architected Solutions). It has been moved to Module 12 (Migration), where it belongs per the official course — CAF's six perspectives (Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, Operations) are migration planning tools, not well-architected pillars.

What's new​

A dedicated Articles page is now in the main nav, between Topics and By Tier.

It lists all concept articles grouped by domain:

Filter chips at the top let you narrow to one domain at a time.

Why a separate page?​

Concept articles don't belong to a single module — they're cross-cutting background knowledge. Burying them inside module detail pages made them hard to discover. A dedicated page makes it easy to see what foundational reading exists and track what you've covered.

Progress tracking (read/unread) works here exactly as it does everywhere else.

Why concept articles?​

Service articles (EC2, S3, RDS…) cover what a service does. But the exam also tests whether you understand why things are built the way they are — virtualization, caching, event-driven architecture, and so on.

These concept articles fill that gap. Each one is a short, focused primer written in the same house style as service articles.

What's new​

Where to find them​

All concept articles appear in the Articles tab, grouped under their domain (Cloud Concepts, Technology, Security, Billing). They also appear on their respective module detail pages under the relevant sub-section.

What was broken​

Every multi-page view had the same symptom: content was cut off at the bottom, and the page wouldn't scroll. Article pages were also broken — long articles were stuck, the text just ended.

Root cause​

The site shares CSS with an SPA (single-page app) core that locks the body:

/* kb-core.css — correct for SPA */
body { height: 100vh; overflow: hidden; }

This is right for the SPA because it manages its own scroll inside a <main> element. But the regular pages were inheriting it and getting clipped.

Fix — multi-page pages​

Made the page body a flex column and gave <main> the scroll:

body.page {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  height: 100vh;
  overflow: hidden;     /* body still locked */
}
.page-main {
  flex: 1;
  min-height: 0;        /* critical — prevents flex child expanding past parent */
  overflow-y: auto;     /* scroll lives here */
}

Fix — article pages​

Article pages had a deeper problem: two nested flex children both missing min-height: 0, causing the inner scroll container to expand to full content height (~6000px) and never actually scroll.

Added min-height: 0 at both levels. Articles now scroll correctly regardless of length.

What was broken​

Navigating to /modules/8/ (or any module by path) loaded the homepage instead of Module 8. No error, no message — just the wrong page.

Root cause​

Cloudflare Pages has an SPA fallback: any path that doesn't match a real file gets served index.html from the root. So /modules/8/ had no matching file, fell through to the root index.html, and that's all you saw.

The _redirects rule meant to catch this was never reached — the SPA fallback fires first.

Fix​

Switched from path-based routing to query-string routing:

Query-string URLs always resolve to /modules/index.html, which exists — so the SPA fallback never triggers. The page then reads ?m=8 from URLSearchParams and renders the right module.

Clean, reliable, no build step needed.

What's included​

• 13 modules covering the full CLF-C02 syllabus
• ~130 service and concept articles with ASCII diagrams, comparison tables, Key Exam Tips, and Further Reading
• Topics, By Tier, and Exam pages for cross-cutting views
• Progress tracking — articles marked read persist in your browser
• Bookmarks and a reading streak
• Search (⌘K) across all titles and subtitles

Content structure​

Every article follows a consistent house style:

## What it is         ← one-paragraph plain-English summary
## How it works       ← ASCII diagram or flow
## Key features       ← comparison table where relevant
## Key Exam Tips      ← bullet points of what the exam tests
## Further Reading    ← links to AWS docs

Domain coverage​

Full site walkthrough​