AWS Associate SysOps Administrator

I Passed aws sysops administrator exam on my first attempt with an 884 score and it was a long journey to achieve this certification. I took more than 5 months to get this certification.

I strongly recommend before writing a sysops certificate please prepare for other associate level certificate courses as well. If you are writing an exam or not but have to prepare below patterns it will be helpful to clear the exam on your first attempt.

Cloud Practitioner or Solution architect associate -- > Developer associate --> finally sysops.  

Below is my journey to sysops certification

1. I started at initial time aws foundational course which is aws cloud practitioner course 

Resource: Linux academy(which is now A cloud guru).

2. Once I get confidence in fundamentals of cloud and I started preparation solution architect courses

Resources : Linux Academy - Andrian cantril(His courses are now in legacy mode but you can get updated course at https://learn.cantrill.io/ &  Udemy -stephane maarek ) - this courses helped me to build high confidence to go to next level preparation.

3.Same resources I prepared for Developer associate courses honestly I skipped a few topicsin course which were already covered in Solution architect courses.

4.Sysops related topic courses  I prepared from Linux Academy 

Below courses helped me to build more knowledge on aws content.

SysOps Cources:

https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-aws-certified-sysops-administrator-associate/

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate - SOA-C01 (LA) -- Linux academy

Configuring and Monitoring Governance of AWS Deployments? -- Linux Academy

ECS Deep dive in -- Linux academy

IAM Deep dive in -- Linux academy

Lab course --  Learn AWS by doing -- Linux academy.

5 Practice exams to test my knowledge where I was in preparation and I took Tutorials dojo and whizlabs which helped me with time management in exams.
6. Notes taken from FAQ's of AWS services and Whitepapers as well.

NOTE :AWS accommodation(ESL+30) which gives extra 30 min for non English speakers and I selected the option and total exam time 160 min.

PS: It is a long journey to learn and prepare  for me as I am working in a company whose infrastructure architecture  helped me alot as well..

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1.    I cleared my AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate exam with a score of 819. Below is my prep journey:

a)      This is my 4th AWS Certification till date after Certified Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect - Associate & Developer - Associate exams - cleared them in the same order.

b)      I used Stephane Maarek's Udemy Course - https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-aws-certified-sysops-administrator-associate/

c)      And Jon Bonso's practice exams (https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-sysops-administrator-associate-practice-exams-soa-c01/)

d)      I DID NOT use any other course/practice tests.

e)      I don't have any work experience with AWS. So, I had to lots of hands-on on the different services that were taught in the course.

f)       It took me around 5 weeks for my entire prep.

g)      Since the test centers around me were not open due to COVID-19, I attended the exam online through Pearson VUE. PSI was not providing an option to attend the exam online till the date I booked the exam.

h)      I had ESL+30 accommodation enabled for my AWS exams. In case you're not aware of ESL+30 -> if you're not a native English speaker, AWS allows us to request for ESL+30 (English as Secondary Language + 30 minutes) accommodation, which allows an additional 30 minutes in addition to the allotted exam. So, the total allowed exam time for AWS Associate level exams is 130+30=160 minutes.

i)       Since ESL+30 was enabled for me, Pearson VUE system did not allow me to schedule the exam. To book for an exam with ESL+30, we must call them over phone (more info here - https://home.pearsonvue.com/About-Pearson-VUE/Company-information/Locations.aspx) and when I did, I had to wait for more than 45 minutes twice and was hung-up during my second call without my issue getting addressed. So, I finally decided to do this exam without ESL+30.

j)       To get your ESL+30 cancelled, you must raise a request to AWS from the certmetrics website (where you would schedule for your appointment). My request was closed within 12 hours.

k)      The exam questions were so tricky. Please make sure you do a lot of hands-on. We must understand what each service is for and what they can & cannot do.

l)       Also, I felt this one as the most difficult Associate level exam. This was my lowest score out of all my 4 exams.

m)    I strongly suggest you attend the exam in the test centers, if they're open nearby your location, where you can have ESL+30 minutes (for non-native English speakers). I felt 130 minutes were not enough for this exam, since there were 65 questions in total and we have only 2 minutes for answering each question. I finished answering all my questions only with around 2 mins left. So, I could not revisit the flagged questions.

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Courses available in Udemy  (ACloudGuru & Stephane Maarek) are really good, easy to understand and practice online. These courses are sufficient to pass the AWS exam.

 

However, you want to learn in depth and score better than the below-mentioned books are really helpful. It takes much longer to read the books but the knowledge gained will be really helpful in real-life projects. Books are also having online practice exam.

 

 

 

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Study Guide: Associate SOA-C01 Exam (English Edition) 2nd Edition, by Brett McLaughlin, Sara Perrott

 

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate All-in-One-Exam Guide (Exam SOA-C01) by Sam Alapati

 

 

 

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I passed Solutions Architect and Developer on the first attempt. Not with SysOps Associate. It is the trickiest of all the associates and really tests how well you understand the concepts.

I went through all the courses on Linux Academy, acloudguru, and stephane Marrek on Udemy. Practice tests from Jon Bonso/Tutorialdojo, Braincer, and whizlabs. I even read the offical studyguide and did not pass the official exam.

Reviewed the areas where I "needed improvement."

I kept going through the practice exams and the supporting documentation. Especially on cloudformation and bucket policies. Did labs and more labs.

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Before I start writing the review let me inform that i dont have any prior experience on using aws services and in my first attempt i failed this exam. I gave the exam after attending one week course and studying some material. I only have theoretical knowledge and i believe thats the reason i could not clear in my first attempt. Good that i realized my mistake and made some changes in the way i prepared for this exam and passed in my second attempt.  

To pass the exam one should have handson experience. Even if your current job doesnt involve any aws services, better to create an AWS account and start using their services. Atleast better to have handson experience with some important services which are widely covered in the exam like EC2, Lambda, RDS, EFS, VPC, S3, EBS, IAM, ELB, Route53, and cloudwatch. Not all are covered under free tier but its better to pay rather than fail the exam, however I suggest to enable the billing alerts for your account before using these services. For my account i setup cloudwatch alarm to send notification if my bill excceds 10USD. 

Other than the above mentioned services which are widely covered, should also have knowledge on services and topics like cloudformation, elastic beanstalk, dynamoDB, couldtrail, config, systems manager, inspector, WAF, shield, cost explorer, budgets reports, cost & usage reports, SQS, SNS, SWS, opswork, athena, KMS, kinesis, directconnect, storage gateway, snowball, snow mobile, snowball edge, API gateway, redshift, organizations, service control policies, personal health dashboard, service health dashboard. These services not neccesary to have hands on experience but should have knowledge on different types and used cases.

I read on internet that better to learn how to create vpc with atleast two subnets (one public, one private) and associate IGW, create natgateway (Not covered under free tier as this requires an elastic IP) and create custom routes (main routing table not recommended to have public route), custom NACL (Do not use default NACL it will allow all inbound and outbound traffic by default rather create a custom NACL and only allow those ports required), and security groups. Deploy EC2 in each subnet and see how the communication works between ec2's and over the internet. All this i mentioned should be done by memory. If you can do all of this without following any instructions any question related to networking is easy to answer which covers 14% in this exam.

Along with this preparation, I also bought the course on udemy from Jon bonso, aws sysops associate practice exams. Total 5 exams. The best part about this pratice tests is the explanation he gives for each option. He explains with proper reference from aws site why its the correct answer and also explains why the option is incorrect and what i is used for. There is huge scope of learning when we go through review exam. While doing the review test better to write down the important topics instead of just reading, another important thing is not to give the same exam right after the review. You wont get the exact same questions from the practice test but similar questions. Most of the services and topics i mentioned in my third paragraph are covered in this course with proper explanation.

Good luck!!! 

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I have passed AWS solution architect — Associate exam first. Then I pass AWS SysOPS Administrator, If you are planning to do AWS Certification I prefer to take Solutions Architect exam first.

SysOps -Associate exam is a bit tough than Solutions Architect. to pass the exam the best course for study is by "A Cloud Guru". This course provides the key insights to pass the certification. To pass the exam in your first attempt you must take the practice exam course either by Whizlabs or any other resource. It will help you in areas where you are lacking knowledge.

I will share some important questions which they have asked in exam.  

To pass the exam you must know the following key points.

 

FOR EC2 -

EC2 appears in many questions with other services e.g load balancers. Troubleshooting of EC2 instances. For example "InsufficientInstanceCapacity" and "InstanceLimitExceedederror". Difference between High Availabity and Fault Tolerant solutions. EC2 with ALB and ASG.

For AMI's -

to share AMI with other account and to other region. "To copy an AMI that was shared with you from another account, the owner of the source AMI must grant you read permissions for the storage that backs the AMI, either the associated EBS snapshot (for an Amazon EBS-backed AMI) or an associated S3 bucket (for an instance store-backed AMI).

"you can copy an encrypted AMI that was shared with you from another account. if the underlying snapshot and encryption key both were shared with you"

For S3 -

View the format of bucket policies. Server side and client side encryption of S3 using KMS, and Versioning.

For EBS -

Custom and Default metrics of EBS for CloudWatch, Encryption of EBS Volumes intransit and at rest. ( To encrypt existing EBS volume , take encrypted snapshot and attach the volume to instance).  If EBS responce is slow or high wait time for SSD => increase IOPS. For EFS (you can't encrypt existing EFS, make a new EFS enable encryption and copy data to the new encrypted EFS).

For RDS- 

Multi AZ is for Disaster recovery , Read Replicas are for high availability. Encryption of RDS. For Aurora (If write operations are high increase instance size, if read operations are high increase increase read replicas).

For VPC-

Primary and important service of AWS for any exam. Important thing to look for SysOps are Nat Gateway, Security Groups and NACL, Direct Connect, VPC Peering. Public and Private Subnet. (If ipv6, use egress only internet gateway), VPV flowLogs, and VPC endpoint.

For CloudWatch -

Very Important topic for SysOps. Focus on what are Default metrics and what are custom metrics of AWS CloudWatch for other services. ( EC2, EBS, ALB mainly)

MUST LOOK THESE SERVICES ( AWS Budget, AWS COST_EXPLORER,  AWS Cost and Usage Reports, AWS Cost Allocation Tags) You must know the difference between these services. AWS Organizations ( must question about this service , also check what is Consollidated Billing.) there are 5 to 8 questions on these above mentioned services

For CloudTrail - This is used for logging. IMPORTANT , how to secure Logs in S3 buckets ( using bucket policies, MFA delete, IAM Policies , and Cloud Trail Log Validaion)

IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES 

AWS Inspector vs Trsuted Advisor ,,  AWS Shield vs AWS WAF ,, KMS and Cloud HSM

Other Very Important services 

Basics of AWS System Manager , AWS Config, Security Token Services (STS), Elastic_Cache. Troubleshooting of ASG, ALB

CloudFormation ( 5- 6 questions about Cloud Formation are must may be more. Read Faqs of each service but for Cloud Formation read FAQs twice before taking exam.) important points for cloudformation are, ( what is resources, parameters, mappings, outputs, change_sets , stack_sets , Rollback on Failure).

I may miss some other points for Certification, but the course of A Cloud Guru is pretty awesome to prepare for exam. Must read AWS FAQs before exam. and check the AWS exam guide and sample questions here https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-sysops-admin-associate/.

 

Thank You, 

Best of Luck for the exam.

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First and foremost, practice makes everyone perfect. You have to take the labs on linux academy. The best thing is that you can have your own AWS account for free and use it. If you need AWS credits, sometimes people are selling those on ebay or amazon.com. Check them out. SysOps is the toughest of all three associate exams and most questions i had were scenario based, so if you haven't done any real setting up of your infrastructure, you would find it tough to clear the exams. The acloudguru and linux academy courses are just enough to understand and clear the exams. As you might know, there is a lot of overlap in the associate exams, so the knowledge from developer and architect exams comes in handy. This was my last associate exam. Good luck!

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I used Stephane Maarek's course on Udemy for AWS SysOps Administrator course. I also used following channels for practice tests - braincert.com exam-topics.com whizlabs.com...

Udemy Course by Stephane Maarek. I also used following channels to take tests - Braincert.com https://www.examtopics.com/exams/amazon/aws-sysops/ https://www.awslagi.com/...

It took a while to dive deeper into the complexities associated withe certification. I used the udemy course by Stephaane Maarek and also took additional tests from the following sources - braincert.com https://www.examtopics.com/exams/amazon/aws-sysops/ https://www.awslagi.com/...