August 10, 2026 · IT Practice Exams
AZ-900 vs AWS Cloud Practitioner: Which First Cloud Cert to Take
az-900aws-cloud-practitionerazureawscertification-comparisonstudy-strategy
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) are the same idea from two vendors: a foundational certification that proves you understand cloud concepts and can name the platform’s core services without being able to build on it.
They cost within a dollar of each other, they take a similar amount of study, and neither is a prerequisite for anything. So the comparison people want is not really “which exam is better.” It is “which one should I spend my first cloud study cycle on.” This post answers that, and gives you the verified details on both.
Side by side
Both columns were checked against vendor documentation at publication: Microsoft’s AZ-900 study guide (skills measured as of July 20, 2026) and the AWS CLF-C02 exam guide (Version 1.0).
| AZ-900 | CLF-C02 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Microsoft | AWS |
| Level | Beginner / Fundamentals | Foundational |
| Cost | $99 USD | $100 USD |
| Questions | Not published by Microsoft | 65 (50 scored, 15 unscored) |
| Time limit | Not published by Microsoft | 90 minutes |
| Passing score | 700 or greater | 700 on a 100 to 1,000 scale |
| Prerequisites | None | None |
| Certification validity | Fundamentals certifications do not expire | 3 years |
| Delivery | Proctored, Pearson VUE or Certiport | Proctored, test center or online |
Two rows deserve a note.
Microsoft does not publish a question count or time limit for AZ-900. Numbers you see quoted elsewhere are candidate reports, not vendor policy, and Microsoft states the exam may include interactive components. Treat any specific count you read as unofficial. AWS, by contrast, publishes both figures in the exam guide.
The validity difference is real and underrated. Microsoft’s renewal page states that Fundamentals certifications do not expire. An AWS certification is valid for three years, after which you renew by passing the current version of the exam or by maintaining it through an AWS Skill Builder subscription. If you want a credential you earn once and never revisit, AZ-900 is structurally the cheaper long-term commitment. Prices and policies are current at publication and can change.
Domain weights
The two exams divide their content differently, and the split tells you what each vendor thinks a beginner should know.
AZ-900
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| Describe cloud concepts | 25 to 30% |
| Describe Azure architecture and services | 35 to 40% |
| Describe Azure management and governance | 30 to 35% |
CLF-C02
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| Cloud Concepts | 24% |
| Security and Compliance | 30% |
| Cloud Technology and Services | 34% |
| Billing, Pricing, and Support | 12% |
The headline difference: AWS gives security and compliance its own 30% domain, and gives billing and support a dedicated 12%. Azure has no standalone security domain. Identity, access, and security sit inside the architecture and services domain, while cost management sits inside management and governance.
In practice that makes CLF-C02 slightly more explicit about security as a topic, and AZ-900 slightly more explicit about governance tooling like Azure Policy and resource locks. Both test the shared responsibility model and both test service identification heavily. The overlap in pure cloud concepts, meaning IaaS versus PaaS versus SaaS, public versus private versus hybrid, and consumption pricing, is close to total.
The question that decides it
Not “which platform is bigger.” The useful question is narrower:
Which cloud does the job you want actually run on?
Open the job postings you would realistically apply to in the next twelve months, in your city or your target remote market, and count how many say Azure versus how many say AWS. That count beats every general argument about market share, because you are not hiring the whole market. You are trying to get one job.
Some reliable patterns to check your count against:
- Organizations already running Microsoft 365, Windows Server, and Active Directory tend to build on Azure, because identity and licensing already live there. Government, healthcare, education, finance, and large traditional enterprises skew this way.
- Startups, software companies, and digital-native businesses skew AWS.
- If you are already the Microsoft person at work, meaning you administer Windows or Microsoft 365, AZ-900 extends what you know and Microsoft Entra ID will feel familiar immediately.
- If you are targeting DevOps or software engineering, AWS vocabulary appears in more job descriptions and more tooling documentation.
If your count comes out genuinely even, take AZ-900 first for two reasons: it does not expire, and its governance emphasis transfers cleanly to how the rest of the industry talks about cloud management.
What neither exam does
Setting expectations matters more here than in most certification comparisons, because both of these are marketed hard as career-starters.
Neither certification proves you can do a cloud job. Both are explicitly non-technical at the task level. The AWS exam guide lists coding, architecture design, troubleshooting, and implementation as out of scope for the target candidate. Azure Fundamentals is a “describe” exam, and every single objective in the study guide starts with that verb.
What they do is get you past the first filter, give you the vocabulary to follow technical conversations, and prove you finished something. For a career changer with no cloud experience, that is genuinely useful. It is not a job offer. The associate tier, meaning AZ-104 on the Azure side or Solutions Architect Associate on the AWS side, is where employers start reading a certification as evidence of capability.
Taking both
A reasonable number of people do, and it is not redundant if you sequence it correctly.
The cloud concepts material overlaps heavily, so the second exam costs far less study time than the first. Doing both takes roughly $200 and signals platform-agnostic cloud literacy, which is a real advantage for consulting, sales engineering, and analyst roles where you cannot control which platform a client uses.
The sequence that works: take the one matching your job market first, get the benefit immediately, then add the second one later if a specific reason appears. Do not take both back to back at the start. The second certification is worth much more once you have something concrete to attach it to.
Study time
Plan two to four weeks of evening study for either exam if you have some IT background, and longer if cloud is entirely new. They are comparable in difficulty. AZ-900 has more service names to keep straight relative to its size, and CLF-C02 asks more security questions.
Free full breakdowns of both are in our Study Libraries: the AZ-900 study guide with the full Azure Fundamentals library, and the CLF-C02 study guide with the full Cloud Practitioner library.
Verdict
Take the one that matches the cloud in your target job postings. If that is a tie, take AZ-900, because a certification that never expires is worth more than one that needs renewing every three years, and the study transfers either way.
Whichever you pick, what determines whether you pass on the first attempt is how many exam-shaped questions you have worked through and understood beforehand. Our AZ-900 practice bank and AWS Cloud Practitioner practice bank each carry 1,250+ original questions mapped to the current objectives, every answer explained, with a flashcard deck for the service names both exams keep testing, $59 once with lifetime access for the life of the exam version.
Still deciding? Start with the free 15-question test on either bank and see which platform’s vocabulary clicks before you spend anything.