AZ-900 vs AWS Cloud Practitioner: which cloud fundamentals cert?

Side by side

From the official Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals page and study guide, and the official AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam guide. Prices vary by country.

What each exam tests

AZ-900: three domains

Describe cloud concepts (25 to 30%), Describe Azure architecture and services (35 to 40%), and Describe Azure management and governance (30 to 35%). The architecture domain carries regions, availability zones, resource groups, subscriptions, and the core compute, networking, storage, and identity services, with Microsoft Entra ID as the identity service. Governance covers cost management, Azure Policy, and resource locks.

CLF-C02: four domains

Cloud Concepts (24%), Security and Compliance (30%), Cloud Technology and Services (34%), and Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%). Security gets its own large domain here, anchored on the shared responsibility model and IAM, while the services domain covers EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, VPC and the rest at an identify-the-right-tool level.

The real differences

• Length. AZ-900 gives 45 minutes of question time; CLF-C02 gives 90 minutes for 65 questions. AZ-900 is the quicker sitting.
• Renewal. Microsoft fundamentals certifications do not expire. AWS certifications, including Cloud Practitioner, are valid for three years.
• Emphasis. CLF-C02 puts 30% on security and compliance; AZ-900 puts a third on management and governance.

Difficulty is close enough that it should not drive the decision. Both are recognition exams: read a scenario, pick the concept or service that fits.

Which should you take?

If the cloud is not decided for you, look at the job listings you actually want and count which cloud they name. Taking both is cheap and the concepts transfer, since cloud models, pricing, and shared responsibility work the same way on each; the second one mostly means learning a new set of service names.

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