Detailed Review Of Preparation

Hello All,

This is Sanjib Behera, currently having passed 4 AWS certifications (all 3 Associate(s) & Practitioner), 1 GCE certification, 1 OCI Foundation certification & 1 Azure fundamentals certification. and to be honest 14 days are not enough to pass any cloud exam.

First of all, I have the advantage of working in AWS projects from last 2 years, so I have worked extensively on few services like EC2/CloudWatch/VPC/S3/RDS/Cloudformation etc. I had loads of handson for this AWS Developer certification using CLI/SDK during the last 14 days(Most of them sleepless nights), it was all worth it at last.  Additionally, I also have my AWS free tier account and have extensively worked on Lambda using SDK(boto3). I also work on IAC tools like Terraform & Cloudformation for spinning up AWS resources which gives me very good perspective.

Although I do not work on all AWS services i.e. required to have knowhow to get pass this certificate, 

I started reading for this exam from 11th May via the Stephane's Udemy course for Developer Associate exam, as I like his tutorials and was parallely practicing via the CLI & SDK(boto3/python). My main focus area was to practice coding with simple scenarios using python SDK and play around the API calls via boto3 SDK especially for the services like EC2, DynamoDB, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, ECS, SQS etc.

As I have my AWS free tier account, hence in the past I have played around the AWS Devops Service(s) extensively ie. CodeCommit/CodeBuild/CodePipeline/CodeDeploy/CodeStar. Also I run some personal Devops workloads in my laptop where I use Jenkins as CI Tool and collaborate (CodeCommit, ECS, ECR, CodeDeploy) Jenkins plugins in some of the pipeline jobs. So all these experiences helped me answer all the questions related to the Devops area in my exam.

Stephane Tutorial helped me in all those services, which I have never worked with like Elastic Beanstalk/SAM/Cognito/Api Gateway/Kinesis/X-Ray etc. I personally recommend his Udemy tutorials should be taken for this certification and rest AWS certifications as well. Okay so as I didn't had experience in the above mentioned services, hence I first watched the tutorial by Stephane and then I again practiced these services on my AWS account. Handson was pretty important for me, it was not only to get passed but to learn them quite well since my next target is the 2 AWS professional certificates.

We need to learn the services API's, of all the services which I have mentioned above, next is IAM roles required by the services (for example if Lambda only requires to read S3 bucket, which managed role is required by Lambda and so on and if you are required to create inline roles, you must know how to create them or have an idea about it) and also there will be many security questions. I did not faced any questions where there was code given in the exam. Most questions were API centric, hence it is important to know what each API does and what purpose is solved by it? AWS always tries to trick you with 2 similar looking answers, but having good handson and you know about the service quite well and if you read the question well, you immediately know which of the 2 is the correct answer. Like for example if you know about DynamoDB LSI and GSI and their usecase, you can easily crack the question where both of these DynamoDB features will be given as answer options and hence if you read the question and understand the requriement well, you can select between the two.

Last but not the least, as this is developer certification, the deployment options, its use case and scenario which one is to be used in which usecase, it is very important to understand, I got around 6 questions on this topic and again having the knowhow helped me to crack all these questions.

So this is it , daily dedicated sleepless 8 hours for 14 consecutive days after having dinner.

So this is my journey to pass the AWS Developer Associate Certificate.