How to prepare for AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification (SAA-C02)?

I started my cloud journey in 2019 when I heard so much about different cloud providers and I decided to start with Amazon Cloud.

There were a lot of comparisons between Amazon Web Services and other Cloud Providers I read on google and it made me go through different tracks of AWS.

I completed my third and final AWS Associate level certification on 27th Sept 2020.

The AWS Solution Architect Preparation journey was a mix of patience and restlessness as I had scheduled my exam but somewhere I was feeling if I will be able to meet the deadline.  However, I motivated myself and finally, when I saw my exam result I found hard work always pay you back.

Below are the steps I followed to prepare for Amazon Web Services Solution Architect Associate Certification Exam – SAA C02.

  • I registered for my first training video course on learn.cantrill.io. I found the course content very nice especially the examples the author has used in the course to describe various AWS services.
  • Once completed I attempted practice tests present in the training course and found the gaps in my preparation.
  • My Second course was from udemy.com. The practise questions are very well explained and also linked to the course videos wherever required.
  • Once I was set with the theory and practice exams from training courses I decided to attempt mocks on the tutorials dojo. The same course is also present on udemy.com
  • Frequently asked questions on Amazon Web Services official website are also very helpful aws.amazon.com

List of Services I found at most of the places in Real Exam

1. RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora, Redshift:  When to use as per availability, latency

2. S3 bucket policies: The Examples were simple majorly on EC2 and DynamoDB

3. Internet Gateway, VPC-Peering, Transit Gateway, Site-to-Site, Gateway Endpoint, interface endpoint: When to use and how to use. Which one is effective on the public internet and How to connect multiple VPCs and VPNs together

4. AWS organization and SCP: How to restrict the access present with AWS Admin role

6. IAM roles and IAM policies

7. Amazon S3 storage classes: Its usage, time to fetch the objects in each storage class, Use cases for each storage class.

8. S3 transfer acceleration and CloudFront

9. Amazon Route 53 as a DNS

10. Amazon Cloudwatch agent, cloud watch logs, cloud trail: When to use CloudWatch Agent, How to set up CloudTrails

11. AWS Shield and AWS WAF: Use cases and scenarios

12. NACL and Security Groups: When to use NACL and when to use Security groups

11. EC2 user data and metadata

12. Application load balancer, Classic load balancer, and Network load balancer: Which load balancing option to use for UDP

13. Amazon FSx, Elastic File System (EFS), Elastic Block Store (EBS), instance store

14. Different types of Elastic Block Storage: gp2, ioc1, sc1, st1

15. Different types of encryption and various scenarios to use them – KMS, CloudHSM, SSS-S3, SSS-C, server-side encryption, and client-side encryption

16. Relational and NoSQLs data storage options which include RDS , DynamoDB , Aurora and their use cases. Understand Read Replicas and Multi-AZ

17. Have a basic understanding of CloudFormation, OpsWorks

Other Exam Readiness Strategies for AWS Solution Architect Associate

  • Create a cheat sheet of all AWS services during your preparation and compare them with similar services used for achieving the same functionality. One example is Site-to-Site and AWS Direct Connect
  • Utilize complete 130 minutes of your exam
  • Follow the approach of removing wrong answers based on the keywords present in questions
  • Mark for review those questions you are not sure about and come back later once you have attempted all the questions.
  • Keep patience and stay calm.
  • Crack the exam with flying colours.

All the best for the AWS Certification Exam SAA-C02.

Author: Jatin Goel is a cloud enthusiast.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn for more assistance linkedin.com

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