Detailed Review Of Preparation

Hello everyone,

I am here to tell you how I passed my AWS Developer exam with a score of 904/1000 in my first attempt.

I initially started off with A Cloud Guru, this one is very precise and gets right to the point in terms of the basics things you need to pass the exam. In my opinion it covers around 80% of the topics on the actual exam.

Second I did Stephane Maarek course, this was recently updated and has over 29 hours of pure content to help you pass the certification. This one is the best option out there because it has detailed information of almost everything you need to crack the certification. Stephane is a great instructor and he really knows his stuff. 

Lastly I took practice exams from Whizlabs and from Tutorialsdojo, and Jon Bonso practice exams from Udemy . 

Whizlabs exams are ok and they have good explanations on the topics cover in the exam, however I strongly recommend going to Jon's at least twice because they are harder and the content is similar in difficulty on the real exam. His explanations on each topic are top and this one for me was the most important part on the learning process. Read each explanation and not memorize the answer. Make sure you really understand the reason behind on selecting that choice. 

Personally I did the exams twice, the first one I got 63%, the second one I got 64%, I passed the third one with 75% and the last exam I got 83%, nevertheless I repeated every exam and got 100%, 98%, 100% and 96% respectively, so make sure you really understand every question. 

Aditional Tips to take in consideration

Make sure you understand the principal topics in the exam:

1 - DynamoDB : understanding indexes, read/write throughput capacity (how to calculate), streams, query vs scan

2 - Cognito: user pool vs identity pool, anonymous access, web identity and be able to describe when to use IAM and when to use cognito

3 - Encryption: at rest, on transit, how to encrypt S3 (cliend side, server side, headers), how to encrypt existing EBS (its a whole process, not as simple as s3 ), KMS (resource policy + IAM policy)

4 - Lambda, X-ray, CloudWatch events, S3 Access logging, CloudTrail, etc...

That's it folks, I hope this information could help you pass your certification with flying colors as well as it was the great help for me.

Cheers