AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) Exam Journey and Tips – Part 2

Introduction

In Part-1 of this series, I started sharing my experience of preparing for AWS Certified Solutions Architect (associate) exam.

If you are new to this topic, I will suggest you to first check the previous post and then the continuation in this part will be easier to follow.

We will continue with preparation area and I will share few learning and exam tips along the way.

Exam Preparation Cont’d.

Continuing from previous post, I will first talk about the AWS official Exam page for the certification which You can visit on this link.

This page contains important information to help with the following concerns:

• Who should take this exam?
• What does it take to earn this certification?
• Prepare for exam

All the things you need to know about this certificate are in this one place. Easy to find and very useful for exam preparation:

You will find many resources which are directly targeted towards this certification. These resources will provide great information, tutorials and help you fill gaps in your learning as well.

Tip-4:

Spend some time reading FAQs for different AWS services e.g. EC2, S3, SQS etc. AWS recommend these FAQs as a good source for preparing the exam and they do contain information which you will need to answer questions.

Tip-5:

Look for real world examples as a reference e.g. you can think of statefull behavior of Security Groups by analogy of Bouncer/security guard at a club. They may check your Identification to let you in, but do not care when leaving the premise. That’s similar to how security groups work with inbound/outbound traffic.

Route-53 DNS, think of it like contacts in your phone book, which maps name to a number, just like domain name to IP address in DNS.

Auto-scaling, think of a flower shop business and their need of extra delivery vans on valentines day and that spike in flower delivery needs go back to normal after the day.

I liked this technique from AWS CQ Show (mentioned in previous post) experts, when they are explaining some answers of the practice test.

Check the exam guide and other resources from the above mentioned exam page.

Here is the breakdown of the exam contents in different domains :

AWS Skill builder have a lot of courses on these topics and you can refer to other resources you may find to understand these domain areas.

You should be very clear that what is expected from you for this exam and you should have all the necessary knowledge from these domains.

Tip-6

If you remembered, the pillars of AWS Well-Architected framework, mentioned in previous part, are domain areas of this exam. That’s why I recommended to spend some time to read about the framework.

Hands-on Experience

Spend sometime in actually building the architecture in cloud. Create VPCs, private and public subnets, security groups, launch instances and SSH access via a bastian host. Use CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure using console and as well as cli.

Learn IAM policies, Resource level policies, Service control policies etc.

Deploy lambda functions, run workloads on EKS, AWS Fargate. See what EC2, Elastic Bean Stack offers with lift and shift kind of scenarios.

Deploy S3 websites, Create CloudFront Distributions and delivery contents with those.

Do a lot of hands-on exercises as much as possible.

For most of the hands-on, you are good to go with free-tier offerings.

For some of the exercises, you may need to spend some money. If amount is small and possible, go for it. For example, I bought a domain when I was exercising Route53 and ACM to work with TLS certificates. However, you don’t need to spend money on expensive exercises if those are not covered in free-tier.

AWS Community Builders can use credits offered by AWS program for these labs and I mostly used those credits for the exercises.

This certificate expect a lot of skills from you, So spend time in solid learning and practicing.

Preparing Notes and Practice Tests

If needed, prepare notes for easy reference in whichever is your natural way. Go through this material time to time.

There are practice tests available on the Exam portal/AWS Skill Builder and third-party websites.

I also saw some websites which offer practice tests on some price. Here is link to whizlabs free sample practice test.

I personally did not bought any paid tests but those can be helpful if you need more practice with exam style questions. Its totally up to you.

I will also suggest, if possible, stick to the one offered by official AWS website and try instead learn the AWS services and not focus on just easy answers for exam questions and that way you will be more prepared. Of course it will take time but its worth it and it will actually help you learn AWS and which is the actual focus of this exam.

… to be Continued

Ok, that was all about learning resources and tips to prepare for the exam.

This is the part, which you will spent most of the time. If you are busy with daily job, then find some time for this learning, spread it over months but keep going by taking one step at a time.

In Next post, we will conclude this journey by covering the actual exam taking part for this certificate, where I will share my setup on that day and the overall experience during the test, some tips which will help you with saving time and easy deal with trick questions. So, stay tuned.

Summary

AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam domains are very interesting. Exam tips and preparations aside, the actual knowledge areas covering these domains are very important for technology solutions. These are the learning we are after and when you prepare/pass the certificate you will have real appreciation of the platform and the architectural design principles behind those.

In previous post, I covered the background and first steps towards certification. Today, this post, covered the exam preparation, resources and some more tips. In the next and final post on this certification journey, I will share the exam day experience, some more tips and some resources and will that post will also summarize this certification journey. Till next time, Happy learning.