AWS Professional Solutions Architect

Rather than just showcasing my achievement, I wanted to share my story about how I achieved it because, I searched for one before I started prepping for this. That's the question - How? This is a copy of my LinkedIn Article

Inspiration

This's where everything starts. My inspiration was to take the next best step in my career and become an architect. I wanted it as a gift to myself for my Birthday.

Preparation

* Note: This is definitely the toughest exam. I have been using Amazon Web Services in my job for 2+ years and I have pretty good understanding of what is what. If you don't have such real time experience, I'd strongly recommend to start with SA-Associate Certification. Without a proper foundation, no course matters.

Unlearn and Revise: I took algoexpert.io subscription because of the exceptional way content is organized. That's the best platform in that category I have ever seen. Clement Mihailescu's SystemsExpert course is the starting point to revisit all computer science concepts. This is required for improving Design Thinking.

Unlearn first to relearn

Pick a training course: Adrian Cantrill's AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional course in Linux Academy is an exhaustive 52 hours of video lessons that explained everything I needed to know about AWS architectures. Flash Cards in linux academy were my friends to start my day every morning. There are other Flashcard mobile and web apps as well. I used these flash cards on mobile and read them every morning during - you know when ;)

Labs were crucial because, a good hands-on experience helped me map the architectures to reality. (Linux Academy course is deprecated now. Check out https://learn.cantrill.io/. There are other famous course providers like https://acloudguru.com/ but I recommend Adrain from personal experience)

Pick a comprehensive training course with labs and do keep aside 2 hours everyday for it.

Practice Tests: One and half month for video lessons and major step completed. Now it's time to test my knowledge. I didn't want to go for AWS white-papers yet because, I wanted to test my understanding. Purchased SkillCertPro Practice Tests and followed what I called - white paper on demand approach. After I take a test, I had gone through all the questions regardless of correct or wrong, noted down all the links mentioned in descriptions which I think I need to understand more. I used the next day to read all my notes and respective documents or white papers. Followed the same approach until I completed all the practice tests. I aimed for 98% in Practice tests. That's one round.

TIP: Read FAQs for each service and do not procrastinate any concept. Every topic matters.

And in second round, I started taking same tests in descending order of percentage that I acquired in first round - This helped me identify which topic I'm doing wrong repeatedly. (I wish I could have purchased WhizLabs Practice Tests as well).

TIP: If you want to read an AWS white-paper, do it first thing in the morning for clear focus. And these papers are very informative and useful.

Practice Tests are the key to time management and practicing quick comprehension of questions.

Revision: At this time I thought I was ready and about to schedule the exam. But I didn't realize that the course I used to study was old. Then I remembered Stephane Maarek's Udemy Course that I purchased sometime ago. I used last 2 days before going to exam to complete this course (skipping basic concepts that I already knew. But this course has great details). Quizzes at the end of each chapter and diagrams used in the videos were nifty.

A non-comprehensive revision course is important and helps in revisiting the concepts

At-least 1 Week Before Exam Day

* ESL+30 accommodation gives extra 30 minutes of time for non native English speakers. Trust me, if you are a non native speaker, you will NEED it. (You must call for scheduling PearsonVUE exam with ESL+30 accommodation)

* And I read everything about the exam in AWS website and how it is scored.

* Learned about Cert Prep in AWS website. I read all recommendations and solved practice questions.

* Exam Readiness course gave me an overview of what's expected. It's insightful.

* Scheduled the exam and followed ALL the guidelines mentioned in confirmation email. Do read all guidelines and FAQs links in email thoroughly.

Before you schedule your exam, read about ESL+30 accommodation for non native English speakers.

Exam Day

It's already long enough. I'm going to end this by explaining how it felt during the exam.

It was like my brain running on 99% CPU for 4 hours. Every question is a use case to visualize.

* Consider every aspect mentioned in question while arriving at an answer. Again - understand how the exam is scored

* I believed every question is a battle to win the war ultimately. Try to win as many as possible. There will be around 75 to 80. But don't get stuck on one for long.

* If you get stuck, first eliminate irrelevant answers. Now identify what best suits the use case. Use keywords technique for this. Eg: Search capabilities for websites - CloudSearch. Do Mark the relevant answer and move on. Flag it and review at the end. Remember no penalty for guessing.

* And remember, bigger battles are better rewarded. (You'd understand this when you read about how the exam is scored).

* Use 'Flag Question' feature efficiently to manage time and don't worry about how many you are flagging as long as you think you are marking relevant answers that you think.

Well! Everything I did for this is worth it. Because, I didn't just achieve the certificate,

1. I learned how to be a better Solutions Architect

2. I observed how efficiently I solved problems in my job during this preparation.

3. I improved my focus

4. I learned how determined can I be

5. And this preparation brought the LEADER inside me out.

Wishing you Good Luck and all the best for your Certification path! Here's mine :)

Hello Everyone,

I am not a good writer but will try my best but if it helps someone to achieve their goal. I made use of following steps as explained below.

Step 1: I R & D on internet, YouTube & Udemy and chosen one Trainer.

Step 2: Focus, reviewed & completed his course by dividing into 6 parts(IAM, S3, EC2, Route53, VPC, Others i.e databases, application services, security and AWS framework).

Step 3: Created a checklist of questions that was not cleared. 

Step 4: Spend time on step 3 to get answers.

Step 5: Ask questions to team and friends and R&D.

Step 6: Start giving practice exams from different leaders.

Step 7: Booked Exam date to setup a milestone date/Target date.

Step 8: Focus and took initiative as target date was setup and given multiple practice exams to boost confidence.

Step 9: Exam of AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP-C01) has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 750 & above.

Never underestimate yourself. Hope it helps. Good luck.

Sources: YouTube, AWS whitepapers, Udemy, Trainers & Practice Exams (to name a few: Jon Bonso, Neal Davis, Stephane, Chandra Lingam), Tip: I thanked my employer for allowing me to use Udemy courses for free, All companies have Udemy account that you can use for free as an employee benefit so please make use of it. 

For more details, please write to me directly, I will be more then happy to help you guys.

Regards,

Asad.

Hello All,

This is Sanjib Behera, and gave my AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam last week. Here I am going to share my preparation journey for this exam (Actual time: 180 minutes for 75 questions). This is one tough exam and will test you to the core, hence it needs special preparation to crack the exam. The questions are more often than long like 8-9 lines or at least more than 5 lines. This exam is very different from its associate counterpart, will involve at least 3 or 4 AWS services in every question. Hence going into this exam, you have to know which service complements other services, deep knowledge in all services is often recommended. 

Content Domain for this exam looks like:-

AWS Compute services(add ECS/EKS to it), Storage services, Migration services, Database services, Account, Governance & Security services, Networking services, and Analytical services are the main service domains which will feature most of the questions. So a deep knowledge of these services is a must and will certainly help to pass the exam. Try to learn the cloud keywords and which service goes with it or goes against it. For eg. if the question refers to durable storage from storage services, it should immediately hit you that S3 is the correct option and then we can go ahead to find the best possible correct option. Since in this exam, from the answer options, there will be 2 correct or sometimes 3 correct options provided in the MCQs, but we need to find the best possible correct answer only. Also in MRQs, it can ask like to find a combination of 2 or 3 correct options. So it is very important to know which service work with another service seamlessly, like for eg. API Gateway with Lambda, DynamoDB streams with Lambda, CodeDeploy can be used to deploy in on-premises VMs, CloudFormation with OpsWorks etc. Another important suggestion is that from "New Solutions" Content domain, you may get some questions featuring Machine Learning services or IoT services, so try to learn the basics of these services and how they interact with compute services, storage services, security services, and the rest AWS services.

My suggestion will be if you are not an English native speaker, take the AWS accommodation of ESL+30 minutes. it really helped me to review all the 75 questions, as I finished my first iteration nearly around 150 minutes, so you need that extra time. Also during this pandemic times, I gave the exam from home, so I had nothing to draw the architecture diagrams, so each time, I had to read the question and then think about the diagram and try to resolve it with the given options. The given whiteboard was not handy at all for me since it often obstructed me from reading the long question.

Okay now to preparing part, first of all, read the "AWS Well-Architected Framework" whitepaper and also its 5 pillars whitepapers.

-> Cost-Optimization-Pillar/Operational-Excellence-Pillar/Performance-Efficiency-Pillar/Reliability-Pillar/Security-Pillar

Additionally, AWS has released some more whitepapers. Read them as well.

-> HPC-Lens/IoT-Lens/Serverless-Applications-Lens/wellarchitected-Analytics-Lens/wellarchitected-Financial-Services-Industry-Lens/wellarchitected-Machine-Learning-Lens

Some more useful whitepapers which I refered for the exam preparation:-

-> aws_cloud_adoption_framework/AWS_Database_Migration_Service_Best_Practices/aws_security_incident_response/aws-building-fault-tolerant-applications/aws-disaster-recovery/aws-migration-whitepaper/aws-web-hosting-best-practices/microservices-on-aws/optimizing-multiplayer-game-server-performance-on-aws/overview-of-deployment-options-on-aws/performance-at-scale-with-amazon-elasticache/practicing-continuous-integration-continuous-delivery-on-AWS/running-containerized-microservices-on-aws/serverless-architectures-with-aws-lambda.

Don't forget Social Media Platforms. Put on the notifications so that you do not miss important feed/news which can help you.

AWS regularly feeds important lessons, videos, blogs, tutorials in Twitter, official Youtube channel, and on Linkedin. Follow them to get important feeds/news which may help in gaining extra knowledge. So put on the notifications. Also, read the AWS blogs, watch "This is my Architecture" videos since you will get questions from various domains and use-cases, you may not know which videos will help you. For deep-dive lessons on any service, search for deep-dive videos or watch AWS Re:Invent videos. Also, go through the AWS Knowledge center site, it will help you to understand what were other client issues for a particular service and what was the solution. Also, the AWS Training site provides free online content for a different expertise level. Search for the free content and get trained from the AWS itself.

So after all these, I took the exam readiness video course by AWS training, and then for the first time I tried out Jon Bonso's practice test (https://portal.tutorialsdojo.com/courses/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-practice-exams/#learndash-course-content). I highly recommend it to the guys who will take the SA PRO exam in future. the question quality is similar to the actual exam and all the questions are lengthy, so it gives you perfect practice before the actual one. Additionally, use your AWS free-tier account to good use. Practice as much as you can. Try to use the different services, and create a mini project using AWS services.

So I went for 30 nights 6-8 hours all night study mode (weekends were more longer more than 15 hours) and that was it (preparation details), what it took to crack this exam.

1. Follow AWS documents of each services and it's FAQ's. 

2. Analyse FAQ's with realtime scenerios

3. And important one is case studies provided by Amazon. Which will help you in realtime scenerios. 

4.  For myself to practise continously i use deliver trainings for my students and collegues.

AWS Solutions Architect Associate was about knowing the services on individual levels while AWS Solutions Architect Professional is about which services to use in a particular scenario. The questions in the exam were not lengthy but maximum questions were scenario based and all the options were similar with very few differences. Hence make sure to read the questions correctly, do not miss a word in questions and check for the appropriate answer. Following are few pointers I feel are important:

1. Know your services - knowing the services thoroughly and being able to choose among 2 services for a particular scenario is important for this exam. I saw Zeal Vora video course from Udemy 2 times and 3rd time roughly. Read the Jayendra Patil blogs on various services. AWS documentation and white papers are too much of information and it's not possible to read all of that. The blog mentioned above is crisp and be read.

2. Time management - Like I mentioned questions are scenario based and options are very similar to one another hence it takes time to analyse the question and also the answer. I feel practicing as many practice exam papers as you can is the key. Solve the papers until you score more than 90%. Solving more papers will also give you the variety of questions and concepts being asked in exam. For last 15-20 days, all I did was to solve every paper I get. Whizlabs have 4 set of papers, Udemy has Jon Bosco papers again 4-5 sets, you will also get the practice papers from aws on their site. I would recommend to solve them all.

I took 90 days to prepare for this exam, studying 3-4 hours daily. If you study well, exam can be cracked easily. So keep pushing. All the best!

Learning path

This is the learning path recommended by AWS:
https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-architecting/

However, I already had some previous knowledge, so this is the order that I followed:

• AWS Training: I was given an "Architecting on AWS - Accelerator" course. The AWS instructors are top level experts and teachers. This course is highly recommended if you have not passed the Associate level. Also AWS partners can access to digital training videos.
• Review the exam guide and the sample questions.
• Linux Academy course: It is quite large (51h 30min) but every single video is a piece of knowledge that you should not miss. Also you can get hands on experience with the labs. There are many other courses available: A Cloud Guru, Udemy, Whizlabs
• AWS Training and Documentation: Extend your knowledge by reading AWS docs and training videos. 
• Practice exams: I recommend follow this order: first Linux Academy AWS Solutions Architect course practice exam, then Jon Bonso Practice Exames (Udemy) and finally AWS practice exam.
• Practice: create an AWS account and practice. You can play with many thing with the free tier.

Tips

• Create a course schedule: e.g. 1 hour/day on average means at least two months!
• In the course videos you can increase speed x1.25 or x1.5 if at that speed you can still understand everything.
• Before you schedule your exam, for non-native english speakers you can 30min more for your exam. Go to https://www.aws.training/Certification, then go to https://www.certmetrics.com/amazon/ , select request examn accomodations and select ESL +30.
• Even if you have a lot of experience with AWS, this is exam is really tough. 
• Some questions are even harder an longer than Jon Bonso practice exams. Be sure to pass that practice exams before taking the real exam.

During the exam

• Time control: be sure to answer one question every 2-2.5 minutes. Otherwise you will get out of time. You can also flag a question for later review.
• Understand what the are asking for exactly.
• Look for key information in the question: cost-effective, most efficient, short-term, time restrictions (RTO, RPO), etc.
• Read the answers before: some questions are too large. Try to read before the answers to understand faster what are they asking for.