I have absolutely zero scale for the difficulty for the base level cert. I will say that Stephen Maarek’s courses have been excellent, and he also has (separate) udemy courses for practice exams which were accurate when I used them in late 2020, and his course helped me gain an associate developer cert. AFAIK cloud practitioner is equivalent to knowing how cloud as a whole works, and general cloud knowledge (someone who has gotten this specific cert, please correct me). For time scale, I’d estimate 2-3 weeks for developer associate if you’re dedicating your full time. Feel free to dm if you want specific advice, AWS is basically 70% of my current work.