Certification guide
MLS-C01AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty: the honest guide
Everything Amazon Web Services (AWS) publishes about MLS-C01, in one place: what the exam asks, how the domains are weighted, and what it takes to be ready.
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See everything published on Machine Learning SpecialtyWhat the exam actually asks you to do
Multiple choice and multiple response only. No simulations, no labs, and nothing to configure.
Item formats
- Multiple choice
- Multiple response
Nothing here needs a lab. Reading carefully and eliminating options is the whole skill. AWS, Machine Learning Specialty exam guide ↗
Domain breakdown and official weightings
From the official AWS exam guides. Modeling is the heaviest domain at 36 percent, followed by Exploratory Data Analysis at 24 percent.
- Data Engineering20%
- Exploratory Data Analysis24%
- Modeling36%
- Machine Learning Implementation and Operations20%
What comes after passing
AWS certifications last three years. Recertifying means passing the current version of the exam, or a higher one in the same track, at full price. The 50 percent benefit voucher from your last pass applies.
Costs across the full renewal cycle are on the Machine Learning Specialty cost page.
Frequently asked questions
How mathematical is MLS-C01?
Conceptually mathematical, not computationally. You will not derive gradients, but you must know why precision beat recall for a described problem, what regularization changes and which algorithm fits a data shape. Modeling alone is 36%.
MLS or the newer ML Engineer Associate?
MLA-C01 covers building and operating pipelines; MLS-C01 adds theory depth: algorithm internals, tuning strategy and evaluation design. Practitioners increasingly take MLA first and MLS when the role demands the theory.
How much of the exam is SageMaker?
A large share. Built-in algorithms, training configuration, endpoint options and debugging appear constantly, with the classic data services (Kinesis, Glue, S3) carrying the data engineering domain.
Keep reading
- Machine Learning Specialty exam overview
The format, the domain weights and the renewal terms, sourced line by line.
- Machine Learning Specialty exam format
How many questions, how long, what the items look like, and how long it stays valid.
- Machine Learning Specialty passing score
The exact cut score, what kind of number it is, and the retake terms.
- How hard is Machine Learning Specialty?
An honest difficulty read from the format, the clock and the weights.