AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) Exam Journey and Tips

Introduction

Recently, I’ve passed the AWS Solutions Architect (associate) exam and now want to share this experience as it may help answer some questions for those who might be interested or already preparing for this exam.

I am going to arrange the information in following sections

• Background
• Preparation
• Exam

Now, everyone has their own way of learning technology and stuff. While I am sharing the steps and process I followed, feel free to use your own preferred method of arranging tasks.

I’ll try to keep things as much as possible focus on the topic and I hope that this post will help you in some capacity for the AWS certification exam.

Throughout the posts, I will share some of the exam tips and important points which I found useful and will also share the resources, I used for the exam preparation.

Kindly note, these are my personal thoughts and experiences and no way shall be considered a short recipe to pass the exam. Neither does these shall be treated as a complete source. You shall look on other resources, capture such tips but not solely rely on these while preparing for exam.

Background

To start with, I have a solid software development background and most of things regarding programming languages, coding, databases comes naturally to developers. I don’t know about you but I did not had similar expertise in networking and the likes.

I had some experience with Azure cloud in the past, but there too, I was mainly dealing with application side of the things e.g. Azure Web App service or launching a virtual machine etc.

Later, I started exploring AWS cloud services. Started with simple things, like launching EC2 instance from console and CLI, writing simple lambda functions, setting up VPCs, wiring up Internet gateways, and experimenting with managed services like Cognito, SQS, RDS, EKS etc. Actually I have written posts on all these topics as well which you can check if you are interested.

I was later accepted to the AWS community builder program and it introduced me to many good resources which were helping me building knowledge about this awesome cloud platform. Same time I was also involved with couple of AWS cloud based projects and again this helped a lot in understand the mechanics of AWS services and design concepts behind those.

So, what I am trying to say is that I had some real hands-on experience before I started considering certification exam. Off course I didn’t knew at that time that how much useful this experience gonna be when actually sitting in the exam, a situation where an exam clock is ticking and you are presented with scenario based architectural questions (more on that in later sections).

Tip:1

Be ready to spend time and effort to learn AWS cloud concepts at some advance level. This preparation will take time as it is not going to be an easy exam about AWS basics. It will test you on advance level and hands-on experience is very much needed as there are certain questions in the exam which you can only answer if you have good understanding of the platform, services capacities, limitations and same time have experience in using these in your solution. You don’t have to be expert, but if you are missing theses skills, then find some time to learn these.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam

Now, AWS offers a practitioner exam which can help you speed up your journey on road to AWS certifications. Actually it is the first exam in AWS certification path and if you are in early stages of your AWS learnings, then you can may be start with this exam first.

This credential helps develop talent with critical knowledge related to implementing cloud initiatives.

It will provide you with the foundation which will be useful for the other exams. I, however, did not took this exam yet and for now I am thinking to take it as my last exam in the certification path 🙂 You can find more information about this exam on this link.

Preparation

Let me repeat, the solutions architect exam preparation will take time. Depending of your preferences, you might want to get certified by some target date. Its up to you how you plan and find time to learn.

Now even if you have build some solutions on AWS and that experience gonna help you a lot, but once you decided to go for the certification, you have to start preparing for the things from exam point of view and same time you can fill in gaps in your learning.

I found certification a very pragmatic way of learning. I came across some services, I wasn’t even aware of before but found about those during the exam preparations and then spend some time in learning about those.

There are great many resources in form of online tutorials to hardcopy books. Following are few of the resources I used during my exam preparation.

AWS Skill Builder

I would like to mention AWS Skill Builder platform. It is a great resource with a lot of video tutorials for various level of difficulty.

You can filter the videos based on domain, language and other preferences:

They also have resources to help you check your exam readiness and also if you want to prepare for the exam.

AWS Certification Quiz Show

The second great resource for the certificate preparation is AWS Certification Quiz Show (CQ Quiz Show). You can find all the episodes (8 at the time of writing) on the same AWS Skill Builder portal.

I watched all the episodes. I wasn’t in rush and generally watched one episode a day. These episodes will help you with what to expect in the exam, sample questions and tips for exams.

In every episode, CQ team, invites an expert from AWS and then go through few sample questions and discussion on various possible options and selecting the right answer in a given context. This will help you a lot in the exam, for example some of those exam tips really helped me in how to quickly identify wrong answers and how to manage time while answering the questions.

Tip-2:

Watch all the episodes of AWS CQ show. Focus not only on the explanation of the correct answer, but also pay attention to the details of wrong answers. This shall help you to later answer the questions in which scenario is different and a wrong answer in the earlier scenario may be the right solution for a different use case.

Tip-3:

Try not rush to learn things.

Let the things naturally sink-in. Be consistent, relax, slow-down and take your time. You’ll notice patterns which are not only applicable to AWS but are general design principles. To see things this way, your mind should not be rushing towards just to pass the certificate.

AWS Well-Architected Framework

If you are serious in learning architecture best practices in AWS. Then a very clear understanding of AWS Well-Architected framework is needed. These are design principles, questions, guides and same time a tool available to us, free of cost. A lot of effort went to putting together that information and it is going to be a powerful tool for you.

Check the documentation on this link. It should be very much clear to you what are the pillars of technology solutions and how this framework help us build, test and evaluate our solutions following best practices and recommendations from AWS.

To be honest, this was one of the most important area which helped me connect many dots and how to balance things and make certain tradeoffs when designing solutions. I mean, sure, I knew about the framework, but never went into much details before. But during exam prep, I got a chance to read and understand the framework and I was happy that did not ignored this part for much longer.

This framework is not needed directly for the exam, but you will see topics related to this part again and again throughout your preparation for the exam and in my opinion, it is very important to have the understanding of this framework for any AWS cloud architect or AWS cloud developer.

Again, take a step by step approach, learn a little bit daily and resume learning next day.

… to be Continued

Ok, we were just getting started with the preparation part, but this post is getting longer. So I will pause at this point and we will resume our journey in the next post.

I will be sharing how you can structure contents for easy reference and what other resources you can find, which can help you with learning and exam preparations and more exam tips.

Summary

AWS Certified Solutions Architect (associate) exam is not very difficult, but its not an evening walk either. It is also a very pragmatic way of learning about the AWS and anyone can do it.

In this post, I wrote about my initial steps in this certification path and I will share more information in the upcoming post. Stay tuned and share your certification experience and exam tips as well. Till next time, Happy learning.