General information

AWS Certification follows industry best practices in exam development and incorporates individuals with subject matter expertise in every step. Subject matter experts (SMEs) are trained in question development techniques and are a critical part of every step of the process, including determining the content outline, writing questions, reviewing questions for technical accuracy and clarity, and establishing the passing standard for the exam.

In addition to content-level reviews prior to administration, every question is first administered in beta as an unscored question on an exam. Every test form includes a small subset of these questions so that AWS can evaluate how these questions perform when actual candidates answer them. Statistics are calculated on each question and reviewed against stringent criteria before the question can be deemed acceptable to become a scored question on an AWS Certification exam. Statistics for every question, as well as comments left by candidates, are also routinely reviewed to confirm that the question remains acceptable.

AWS Certification is reducing the reading load in some exams by using official short names of well-known AWS service names that contain initials or parenthetical information. Each of the following AWS services might appear as its short name in your exam questions.

• AWS CDK: AWS Cloud Development Kit
• AWS CLI: AWS Command Line Interface
• AWS DMS: AWS Database Migration Service
• Amazon DocumentDB: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
• Amazon EBS: Amazon Elastic Block Store
• Amazon EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
• Amazon ECR: Amazon Elastic Container Registry
• Amazon ECS: Amazon Elastic Container Service
• Amazon EFS: Amazon Elastic File System
• Amazon EKS: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
• IAM: AWS Identity and Access Management
• Amazon Keyspaces: Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
• AWS KMS: AWS Key Management Service
• AWS Managed Microsoft AD: AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory
• AWS Private CA: AWS Private Certificate Authority
• Amazon RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service
• Amazon S3: Amazon Simple Storage Service
• AWS SAM: AWS Serverless Application Model
• AWS SCT: AWS Schema Conversion Tool
• Amazon SES: Amazon Simple Email Service
• Amazon SNS: Amazon Simple Notification Service
• Amazon SQS: Amazon Simple Queue Service
• AWS STS: AWS Security Token Service
• Amazon VPC: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Potential and current candidates, as well as AWS Certified individuals, can submit general inquiries to AWS Training and Certification Customer Service by filling out a ticket with all relevant and required information. Remember that it is a violation of the AWS Certification Program Agreement to disclose or disseminate the content of any AWS Certification exam, so customer service inquiries are not permitted to include references to exam content.

Certification verification

There are multiple ways that a certification can be verified:

Digital badge:You can download your digital badge, which can be used as a verification. Digital badges can be managed and shared under the Digital Badges tab in your AWS Certification Account.

Validation number: You can access your validation number from your AWS Certified PDF certificate found under Achieved Certifications in your AWS Certification Account. This 16-digit alphanumeric code can used to authenticate the credential by anyone with whom you have shared it with at the public URL http://aws.amazon.com/verification.

Certification benefits

Once you earn an AWS Certification, you will receive benefits such as a digital badge. Learn more at our AWS Certification Benefits page.