The blueprint: five domains, one production system

Lesson 2 of 4 in The AIP Exam: Blueprint, Logistics, Strategy.

Five content domains, weighted 31 / 26 / 20 / 12 / 11 — and like every AWS blueprint, the bureaucracy hides a single picture: one production GenAI system, read end to end. Domain 1 is the foundation (design, model choice, data, vectors, retrieval, prompts). Domain 2 wires it into applications and agents. Domain 3 makes it safe, Domain 4 makes it affordable and fast, Domain 5 proves it works and finds out why it doesn't. Place any question on that system and you have already eliminated two options.

The AIP-C01 content domains, their weights, and where this path teaches them
Domain	Weight	What it tests	Your stations
1 · Foundation Model Integration, Data Management, and Compliance	31%	Requirements → architecture and PoCs (1.1), model selection and resilience (1.2), data pipelines for FM consumption (1.3), vector stores (1.4), retrieval (1.5), prompt engineering and governance (1.6)	Five modules on this line — the one you are riding
2 · Implementation and Integration	26%	Agentic systems on AgentCore and MCP, deploying models and throughput, enterprise wiring, FM APIs and streaming	Build and integrate — four modules
3 · AI Safety, Security, and Governance	20%	Guardrails on inputs and outputs, GenAI data security and privacy, governance and responsible AI	Make it safe — three modules
4 · Operational Efficiency and Optimization for GenAI Applications	12%	Token economics, caching, latency engineering, GenAI-aware observability	Make it efficient — two modules
5 · Testing, Validation, and Troubleshooting	11%	Evaluation pipelines and quality gates, diagnosing misbehaving GenAI systems	Prove it — two modules and the capstone

How to read the exam guide’s numbering

Inside each content domain the AIP-C01 exam guide splits the material twice. First into task statements — a professional responsibility written as a sentence, such as "Design and implement vector store solutions." Then each task statement is split again into numbered skills: the specific things you must be able to do under it. A two-number id reads domain · task statement; a three-number id adds the skill beneath it.

You never need either number. The guide publishes a web anchor for each task statement but none for the individual skills, so a skill number is a label that links nowhere — which is why this path tells you what the guide requires instead of pointing at where it is written. Where a claim does rest on a named task statement, the source line under the quiz answer prints that task's own title and turns its number into a link straight to it in the official guide, so you can check anything here in one click. No exam question will ask you for a number.

Interactive checkpoint quiz (2 questions) — open this page in a browser to take it.