AWS Cloud Certifications Road Map -Complete 2026 Guide
AWS certification path has organized into four levels: Foundational, Associate, Professional, and Specialty. This comparison table helps you choose the right AWS certification for your career path based on cost, experience level, role, and budget.
AWS Foundational Level Certification
Compare AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and AI Practitioner Certification Cost , exam duration and more
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification | Foundational | $100 USD | 90 minutes | Beginners, non-technical stakeholders (sales, finance, PMs), or engineers entirely new to cloud | Enroll Course → |
| AWS Certified AI Practitioner Certification | Foundational | $100 USD | 90 minutes | PMs, analysts, and engineers learning Bedrock and GenAI fundamentals | Enroll Course → |
Associate Level Certification
Compare AWS Certified Associate Level Certifications cost, duration and more
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Certification | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | The default first AWS cert for most engineers. Covers compute, storage, networking, security, and cost optimization | Enroll Course → |
| AWS Certified Developer – Associate Certification | Associate | $150 USD | 130 minutes | Developers writing Lambda functions, integrating SDKs, and shipping to ECS or API Gateway | Enroll Course → |
| AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Certification – Associate | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | Platform/SRE engineers running production AWS workloads day to day | Enroll Course → |
| AWS Certified Data Engineer Certification – Associate | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | Building pipelines on Glue, Athena, Redshift, Kinesis, EMR, and MSK | Enroll Course → |
| AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Certification – Associate | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | Engineers shipping SageMaker and Bedrock models to production. Replacing the older ML Specialty as the default ML cert | Enroll Course → |
Professional Level Certification
Compare AWS Certified Professional Level Certifications cost, exam duration and more
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Solutions Architect Certification – Professional | Professional | $300 | 180 minutes | Architects designing multi-account, multi-region systems. The hardest of the role-based exams | Enroll Course → |
| AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Certification | Professional | $300 USD | 180 minutes | Senior platform engineers owning CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and observability across many services | Enroll Course → |
Specialty Level Certification
Compare AWS Certified Specialty Level Certifications cost, duration and more
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Security Certification – Specialty | Specialty | $300 | 170 minutes | Security engineers, GRC professionals, and architects responsible for AWS security posture | Enroll Course → |
| AWS Certified Advanced Networking Certification – Specialty | Specialty | $300 USD | 170 minutes | VPC topology, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid networking, and Network Firewall | Enroll Course → |
