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 AWS 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 Preparation journey was a mix of patience and restlessness as I had scheduled my exam and somewhere I was feeling if I will be able to meet the deadline but 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 this exam.

• I registered for my first training course on learn.cantrill.io. I found the course content very nice especially the examples 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 Practice tests are very well explanatory and also linked to the course videos wherever required.
• Once I was set with the theory and practice assessments from training courses I decided to attempt mocks on the tutorial dojo. The Same course is also present on udemy.com
• Frequently asked questions on AWS are also very helpful aws.amazon.com

Other Exam Strategies

1. List down the use of 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
2. Make Utilization of complete 130 minutes during your exam
3. Follow the approach of removing wrong answers based on the Keywords present in questions
4. Mark for review those questions you are not sure about and come back later once you have attempted all the questions.
5. Keep patience and stay calm.
6. Crack the exam with flying colors.

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. 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. 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. Route 53 as a DNS

10. 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 one to use for UDP

13. EFS, FSx, EBS, instance store

14. Different types of EBS 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

All the best for the Exam. You can connect with me on my LinkedIn profile if need more assistance linkedin.com

I started my certification journey for AWS Solution Architect Associate exactly 6 weeks back. I was completely new to AWS, having no clue about Cloud Infrastructure. 

All the AWS terms & terminologies were new to me. I started off with ACloud Guru training sessions. These training sessions are very good for beginners. It took me 2-3 weeks to understand the concepts and complete one round of the going through the course content. During the 3rd and 4th week, i was focusing on the end chapter quizzes, practice tests of ACloud Guru. However, please note that the ACloud Guru tests are only good for beginners and is not enough to clear the AWS SAA exam. It includes lots of questions which are theoretical and based on memorization. All the questions in the AWS SAA exam are scenario based and these extensive preparation. I then took up Udemy practice tests which consists of 6 practice tests. These are on par with the AWS SAA exam. I took up 5 of the 6 practice tests and could clear only one with 72% marks and failed in the remaining ones. However, that did not deter my confidence and i decided to go ahead with the AWS SAA exam on 6th July. I also made good use of the Udemy Cheat sheets which comes along with the Udemy Practice tests. The explanation given for each of the questions in the Udemy Practice tests are extremely detailed and needs thorough reading. I utilized Weeks 5 & 6 for these tests. During the last couple of days, i once again focused on refreshing the basic concepts from ACloud Guru along with the new topics that are introduced for AWS SAA 02 exam (Topics such as AWS Microsoft AD, AWS Shield, AWS WAF etc.).

On the exam day, i logged in 30 minutes before the scheduled start. It took 15 to 20 minutes to complete the check-in formalities and then i was all set to start. I found the questions in the exam extremely challenging and confusing. Most of the choices were very close and there was a very thin line to chose the right answer as expected by AWS.  As i was answering the questions, i was unsure of my answer and i was almost certain that i will not be able to clear the  test. However, i did not lose hope and i continued to focus on each and every question and did my best. Focus is the key in all such exams. Even answering one question correctly / incorrectly can make lots of difference. 

After, i submitted the test, it was a big relief for me to see the final result as "Pass",  I could score 725 marks out of 1000, and this was the reason i stressed earlier that every single question matters in the end.

The overall journey was full of learning and clearing the test was a cherry on the cake.

For any further guidance / suggestions / help, please reach out to me.

Unlike most people who take cloud certifications because they need it on job, I took this certification to break into a cloud career. I hold a MS in Software Engineering form an American University. I have worked as a JAVA developer for few years and then more in a PM role for the last 3 years. However, I wanted to come back to a technical role about which I am more passionate. I did review quite a few technologies  to enter into and found that Cloud was probably the best. Cloud engineering is the latest, most in demand and is slated to grow for the next few years. Cloud engineering is also the most transformative of all the technologies out there. You can pretty much do any IT job on cloud. This in itself is marvellous enough. 

So, basically, I began my journey as a cloud novice. I do not have any practical experience in cloud engineering. So my first thought on getting in to this field was to get certified. I did some quick analysis on what certifications to start off with. AWS Cloud Architect Associate was the obvious choice as that would show potential employers about deep skill set baseline. Also, I chose AWS because as it is the leader in the cloud space and far ahead of its peers - Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

So to begin with, I read up on the net about various preparation material. Few popped up such as Acloud guru, Udemy, Linux Academy etc. I began with Acloud.guru. I studied for about a month and completed the entire lecture series. Then I looked for few practice question papers and found few on Udemy. I purchased Jon Bonso's practice papers and Whizlabs practice question papers. I took one Whiz labs practice test and failed miserably. Upon further analysis, I realized that Acloud.guru's materials was outdated. They did not have the latest material , but the practice exam had a lot of things that were not covered in Acloud.guru. So I decided to move away from Acloud.guru and decided to check other sites. Acloud.Guru did give some important info, but unfortunately as of April 2020, their material was outdated. They may have updated later on, but I am unable to verify that. After some analysis(based on many reviews and articles), it became clear that Stephane Maarek's Udemy course for Solution Architect- Associate was the best.  Stephane has a very good and easy way of teaching. All his materials are absolutely updated and good for both the 2 versions(One retiring and one new version) of the architect exams. It took me a good 60 days or two months to complete the material studying about 2- 3 hours a day. Once I was done with the lectures, I just used the course slides to review. There are 660 review slides. I would revise about 220 slides each day and finish the entire material in 3 days. Once I had reviewed the slides about 3 times, I decided to take the practice exams. I first completed the Whiz labs question sets on Udemy and on all the 6 tests , I consistently scored between 81% - 83%. After the exams, I reviewed all the wrong answers in those practice exams in thorough detail. In between when I had completed the 3rd practice test, I booked for the actual exam. I had planned to complete Jon Bonso's pactice tests, but unfortunately, I ran out of time.  

Instead of cramming for the exam and taking Jon's practice tests , I decided that it is probably better to not stress out and be more relaxed during the last two days to exam.  I had read some great reviews about Jon Bonso's exams, but just ran out of time. 

The day before the exam, I made sure to skim the slides once more. I paid particular emphasis on VPC, Security/Encryption, EBS, Database. These topics are really important for the exam.

On the previous day of the actual exam which was an online proctored exam, I had to prepare my room according to AWS guidelines. 

About the actual test though, I don't have some great opinion. If possible, I recommend you take the exam in person at a test center. The online proctored exam has some stringent guidelines. You cannot make any lip movements(even if your lips are dry) , all the time your face has to be visible in the camera( if you move out of camera view, the exam can be terminated). It is very difficult to sit in front of the web cam for 1 hour(I took 1 hr to complete the exam. The actual duration is 2 hr 20 min) stiffly and also working on the exam.  

Inspite of all this, I passed my exam with 81% marks. The actual test was very similar to the Whizlabs practice exam papers on Udemy. So I did not find the actual test any different. My score on the Whizlab exams and the actual exams was similar. I highly recommend Whizlabs practice exams on Udemy. My score would have been better, if I had attempted Jon Bonso's papers. I will be glad to share any more  details on the exam. Please connect with me on Linkedin. 

My Linkedin profile : https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghavendrajoshius/

Hello there, I am so very happy to share that I PASSED the AWS SAA-C01 exam.                  

And now that I have passed my exam, I share my exam preparation study plan and study tips for the benefit of all.

KINDLY TAKE NOTE: This is my personal self-study preference plan for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Certification (SAA0-C01) Exam, recently passed in March 2020.

1. The study plan was spread over 3 months from mid of December 2019 till the date of my exam on 20-March-2020. This was a bit relaxed study plan period. You can get ready early or late subject to the study time available with a job.

2. Read the AWS CSAA Official Study Guide ver. 2 and also ver. 1. The ver. 1 reading is much recommended by me and also preferable, to get an elaborate understanding across all the domains and clarity of the foundational concepts.

3. Below are the Udemy Course links to purchase (currently available +/- Rs. 500/-) and study online at your own time

A. Updated in March 2020 for AWS SAA-C02 and this is my personal MOST preferred CBT

                Stephane Maarek - Udemy CBT for AWS Solutions Architect Associate

B. Updated in March 2020 for AWS SAA-C02 and this also is my personal EQUALLY preferred CBT

                Neal Davis - Udemy CBT for AWS Solutions Architect Associate

C. Not yet updated for AWS SAA-C02 but this is the next good option CBT by Ryan Kroonenburg

Ryan Kroonenburg - Udemy CBT for AWS Solutions Architect Associate

Below are the Udemy Practice Exams updated test sets links to purchase (currently available +/- INR Rs. 500/-) and have a hands-on exam stimulation to gain the confidence of near to real exam experience.

Neal Davis - Covers AWS SAA C01 & C02 – 5 Sets of 65 Qs each, 1 set of 250 Qs

Jon Bonso - Covers AWS SAA C01 & C02 - 6 Sets of 65 Qs each  

4. AWS Free Tier Labs, Whitepapers, FAQ's – For Hands-on labs practice and read for appropriate clarity. You may find them useful if you get stuck up for functional aspects of any domain, or seem weak and for conceptual clarity.

5. Now the most important part :). Questions, which I got for my individual-specific exam. Actually I would say in general, I got questions on most of the aspects across the 5 Domains and nothing seems to have been missed out.  

6. VERY IMPORTANT Lookout for simple and very clearly highlighted Key Words in the last line of the Exam Qs itself.

MOST Preferred, LEAST or MOST Expensive, COST Effective, SUGGESTED Solution, BEST Storage, CUSTOM Metric, etc.

That is all to share in a summary and WISH YOU ALL THE BEST to clear your exams with success. 

Hello everyone, I am going to share with you some tips that helped me pass the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification in my first attempt.

It took me around 90 days to prepare for the exam, the first resource that I used was A Cloud Guru course by Ryan kroonenburg. It is a very straightforward course which has around 85% of the topics you will need for the exam with very helpful tips and exams to practice. 

The second resource I used was Stephane Mareek course from Udemy which is very complete and has covered most of the topics to the exam.

The third resource I used was a free course done by Andrew Brown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia-UEYYR44s&t=12294s) CEO from Exam Pro. It is a very useful course which has all the topics to pass the exam. It has a very good cheat sheets which I used in order to study the most important things about each topic.

For practice I took Jon Bonso practice exams from Udemy, as well as Neal Davis practice exams from Udemy and Whizlabs practice exams.

I did not read any whitepaper although it may be good for you to read the Well Architected Framework. 

That's it, that was all I did in order to pass the exam. Lots of hands on also are recomended to pass it and practice everyday at leas half an hour.

I hope this has been helpful for everyone, goodbye and good luck in your exam! 

I'll keep my journey brief to what's required:

• Started with the A Cloud Guru's Course present in the Udemy portal to learn the fundamentals.
• Complete all the lessons in the course and perform the labs to get a firm grip on the basics and to understand how the Amazon's Cloud Services interact with each other.
• Go through Joe Baron's Study Guide For AWS CSAA. The study guide provides a comprehensive explanation of the environment.
• Fair warning depending on the edition you purchase the information in it could be outdated. Though the basic working of a service might be the same it's limitations would vary.

Up until now your focus should have been to gain knowledge on the environment and how to implement it.

Exam oritented preparation: 

• Give the practice papers present in the tutorial dojo's udemy module. There are 6 papers and make sure to go through all the explanation provided while reviewing your test. 
• Go through the tutorial dojo's cheat sheet for recollection and quick glances before the exam
• Best practice would be to note the topics or questions you're not confident in while taking the practice paper and read through those topics  briefly.

I wrote my AWS SAA-C01 exam on 16th March 2020. Before sharing my experience, I would like to say that believe in yourself. 'You can do it.'

The challenges which I faced when I started preparing for the exam were from where to study and how much to study. The answer to the first thing is the AWS documentation, A Cloud Guru Course at Udemy, Tutorials Dojo (links are given below) and the answer to the second thing is the practice tests by Jon Bonso.

I'd like to share how I used the above resources to prepare for the AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate exam. I started with A Cloud Guru Course. I got an overview and introduction about Cloud Computing as wells as AWS Cloud services. For reading and getting detailed knowledge, I referred to AWS documentation. I spent approx 4 hrs a day and completed the course in 15 days.

Post that I studied AWS FAQs. Believe me, they are really helpful and will make lot of sense after the course. You will start relating things and memorizing the services and concepts. I made notes alongside watching videos and reading as initially, it was very hard to remember things. It took me another 10 days.

Then I started giving practice tests framed by Jon Bonso on Udemy. They are really good and of immense help. They cover each and every aspect of the possible questions in the exam. The best part is there is an explanation for all options given in the answer to the questions. Do not miss the explanations as they will be an answer to another question. Additionally, there are reference links and cheatsheet links.

Please bear in mind that there are ONLY a few questions with direct and straightforward answers, most of them are scenario-based so make sure you read each and every word before answering and select the best one.

I must say, those were immensely helpful and I can assure that it was one of the main reasons for me to pass the exam. The practice tests by Jon Bonso are worth a lot since it will provide you with definitions as to why a certain answer is correct and why the rest are incorrect. Make sure you read all the explanations as they will be an answer to another question. The Cheatsheet by TutorialsDojo is also a must as you will definitely come across a certain important point that you would have missed.

I hope it helps.

Refer to the below links for the resources that helped me to pass the exam.

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-amazon-practice-exams-saa-c02/

https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/

https://aws.amazon.com/faqs/

I have completed AWS certified Solutions architect associate exam recently in my first attempt.

Because of working, I studied only during in my week offs and completed this certification in 4 months. I took cloud guru Ryan Kroonenburg, AWS architect course from udemy and started learning it, spent hardly 6 hours in my weekly offs. The Content is good with detailed explanations. I have maintained my own notes while preparing along with practice labs which had helped in ease of this certification.

Completed Ryan Kroonenburg course in 2 months, after that I took Jon bonso practice exams from udemy. These practice exams are bit tough and all are scenario based questions on resiliency, fault tolerant, security practices etc. I have practiced it more where I felt lag, I have noted it in my own notes, concentrated more on my mistakes during these exams.

After 2 months of these practice exams,lab preparations. I have decided to enroll a date  for the final AWS certified exam. honestly, the main certified exam is not tough at all and it is easy with some moderate level questions compared to the tough practice exams.

From my learning experience over this certification, if you learn and practice more the final AWS exam will be very easy to crack it in first attempt.

All the best and keep always learning!!

You can contact me in my LinkedIn profile, if you require any suggestions over this exam.

(nagaraj pokala)

Hi All,

Passed SAA-C01 exam on 4 March with lot of efforts on these test sets and STEPHANE MAAREK AWS and Cloudguru course, The Exam is not very easy and questions are very typical

My Preparation experience and suggestion who are going to appear for exam

1. Fully learn  STEPHANE MAAREK AWS course on udemy ,

    https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-saa-c02/
   
2. Go through the 6 Practise Test given in this course

   https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-amazon-practice-exams-saa-c02/
  
 I found it is better than Cloudguru Course in Udemy

Also I found two very useful links ( 3rd and 4th ) which is like summary or notes on each aws service to go through on last revision phase and there are others as well

3.https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes
4.https://qr.ae/T6zGg1
5.https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/
6.https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/
7.https://jayendrapatil.com/aws-solutions-architect-associate-feb-2018-exam-learning-path/
8.https://free-braindumps.com/amazon/free-saa-c01-braindumps.html - Important:only 10-15% question can be from any dumps online so just refer do not complete rely, This link is updating free dumps here which are exactly matching with paid dumps

If you do these things  and if get around 80% in all 6 sets then I bet  you will 100 pass the exam
Finally Thank You Stephane Maarek,Cloudeguru Ryan Kroonenburg,Jon Bonso,Jayendra and Tutorials Dojo !!

I'd like to share how and what i used to prepare for the AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate exam. There are a few and most important resources you should not miss out to pass the exam without a hassle - I have listed them at the bottom. Please bear in mind that there are ONLY few questions with direct and straightforward answers, most of them are scenario based so make sure you read each and every word before answering and select the best one.

When you start reading the options, you will select an answer as soon as you feel like that is the right one, but that does not always work - Don't do it guys, read all the options and rule out the ones that are wrong and then select the right answer. 

I have been preparing for the exam for around 4-5 months around 2-3 hrs a day, sometimes more and the whole weekend. I studied most of the FAQs and noted the important point so that it helped me to memorize whenever i looked at the notes. The FAQs bear alot of useful information that will definitely help in answering most of the questions. So make sure you read them thoroughly and note down the important notes. 

I followed a course from aCloudGuru and a set of practice tests by Jon Bonso - TutorialsDojo, Whizlabs and some free dumps as well. I must say, those were immensly helpful and i can assure that it was one of the main reasons for me to pass the exam. The practice tests by Jon Bonso are worth alot since it will provide you with definitions as to why a certain answer is correct and why the rest are incorrect. Make sure you read all the explanations as they will be an answer to another question. The Cheat sheet by TutorialsDojo is also a must as you will definitely come across certain important point that you would have missed.

Below are the main areas I got questions from :

• High Availability Architecture (HAA)
• Serverless Architecture
• VPCs
• Auto-Scaling
• ELB
• RDS / DynamoDB / Aurora / Redshift
• SNS / SQS / MQ / SWF / Step Functions
• LAMBDA / API Gateway
• Route53
• CloudFront
• Elasticache
• IAM
• CloudFormation
• Cloudwatch / CloudTrail
• ECS
• S3
• EBS/EFS
• Storage Types and differences between them and when to use them and when not.
• When to use which EC2 instance type.
• When to use which AWS services depending on the requirement.
• Shared Responsibility Model

Best of luck guys, Happy studying. :)

Refer the below links for the resources that helped me to pass the exam.

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-amazon-practice-exams

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/

https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/

https://github.com/undergroundwires/AWS-in-bullet-points/blob/master/README.md

https://aws.amazon.com/faqs/

My Approach

The Length of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Level course on Linux Academy (LA) is 54:22:31 at the time of this review.  However, I probably spent more than 100 hours learning from this course.  On average, I would say I spent between 3-4 hours studying every day for about 30 days.  Here are more specifics that helped me pass this exam:  

Steps

1. Main Monitor => Microsoft OneNote
2. Monitor 2 => LA Training Course
3. Monitor 3 => One of the following: One of my personal AWS Account(s), a LA Playground AWS Account, or a LA lab AWS Account.
4. Watch, take notes, and practice.
5. For each practice exam/quiz, I wouldn't allow myself to use my notes or search Google for answers.
6. When I missed a question on the practice exam/quiz I dedicated more time to learn that topic.
7. After about 30 days, many practice exam/quiz reviews and retakes, I felt ready.

Tips

• I really took my time to practice, research, and learn anything that Adrian, the training architect, covered.
• If I didn't completely understand what Adrian was explaining, I would restart the topic he was describing and watch it over. 
• I made sure I completed each practice exam/quiz after each section.
• I really took my time to review most of the material Adrian suggested to review outside of the course. 
• It's actually a good thing to miss questions on the LA practice exam/quiz - This means you need to learn more about that topic so don't try to memorize the LA practice exam/quiz questions.  Really focus on the topics that you miss so you are better prepared for exam day.  

Additional Thoughts

In my opinion, the $50/month subscription for Linux Academy is a steal.    

• The labs were fantastic - Even the labs that were a bit outdated as they required me to solve a few additional problems which helped me retain more information. 
• My favorite labs were "Building a Serverless Application Using Step Functions, API Gateway, Lambda, and S3", "Implementing an Auto Scaling Group and Application Load Balancer in AWS", and "Custom Logging Using CloudWatch and CloudWatch Logs".
• The interactive diagram for the course helps visualize new content after you finish the lesson.
• Having the ability to spin-up an environment for practice was very helpful. 

Based on how each of us has "grown-up" in our IT careers we may find different sections to be more challenging than others.

• For me, the initial VPC section was far more challenging compared to the advanced VPC section or any other section.  I watched the initial VPC section at least twice and made sure I understood the differences between Internet Gateways, NAT instances, NAT Gateways, and the impacts of security groups and NACLs. 
• In my opinion, Adrian does a fantastic job reviewing "Product Fundamentals" towards the beginning of the course. I recommend that all IT professionals, interested or working with AWS, complete this course. 

This was my first review submission for reviewnprep.com I hope this review was helpful to others in the community.   

My (real) journey with AWS started at work.

My new project was helping in some AWS administrator tasks on the local company account. This was on May 2019. Because of that, they provided me with official AWS in-class training about SysOps. It was 3 days 7 hours each. Honestly, I lacked the skills to understand part of it due to my reduced know-how about all AWS Services. At the time of the lecture, my current knowledge was some CodeCommit, EC2, used some SDK and CLI, created a DynamoDB table - basic stuff that everyone does on a free-tier account. I did my best to understand but understood that the ocean was vast bigger than I imagined.

After the in-class I went back to my job and I actually did something with what I've learn on the training (things about interacting with all EC2 instances to change something) but I started to do other activities, like interacting with lambda functions, some SNS and CloudWatch. More than that, I started working with terraform and CloudFormation. That helped me on understanding many services and how they connect to each other. Got to give some credit to my senior at the time, he understood very well the concepts of VPC/Subnet/IGW/NAT and everything related so I try my best to learn from him.

When that project finished, I went to client and my hands-on died there. Actually, I had some home project but stopped it due to unexpected billing. That project was built only with CloudWatch alarms (every month, every day, every min) and lambda functions. Not worth talking much.

I'm already in October (5 months later) and I thought: I have to schedule my exam or I'll never make it. After some days thinking about it, I've decided to schedule it to the December - 2 months preparation is enough for this.

Since I'm not very good on reading slides my other option was taking more lectures so I enter udemy and bought some 4,5 start or more lectures. Got two, one about aws architect and other about aws Developer. I start reading the underlying topics before buying them and the interception was very small.

From that day on my nights where on Udemy watching videos one after the other (sometimes I skipped, I’m human too). If I didn't understand something I go back and watch it again until I do. If I felt that I was distracted during the lectures I just take the quiz and check if it is true. I did 0 hands-on on my computer. Only watched them doing it.

In parallel, I started answering some questions of the book - I had the answers hidden, did all questions of 1 section (e.g. EC2) and then checked what failed and checked why. If I didn't understand why, google it until I do. Tracked the scores for each section and try to master them all. 

Day after day I learned something new, something useful, something confusing, etc. My scores on the questions where passing from 8 to 18 and full score (usually its 20 questions per section).

At one point I've decided I should book right away the Cloud Practitioner so I've payed it and booked it 1 week after the first one (20 Dec).

Getting to the exam date (SysOps, 12 Dec), I've already had much time of videos, a way way far knowledge of when I've started and I felt I was (kinda) ready.

The exam was hard except the sysops questions – very basic actually. Very hard on the network and security and regular difficult on EC2 questions. I was so nervous that when I start review had only 20 min left, which is hard since I had so many Review marked questions.

In the end the screen show “PASS”, stress is gone and I’m already thinking: maybe I know more than I think. Anyway, exam results came out and by my math, 2 questions and I’ve failed the exam. I looked to that chart with topics and area of improvement, and only 1 bar was on the need improvement side. The % of questions was exactly the score I’ve missed.

Now its focus on Cloud Practitioner (which its more basic). I’ve actually over study it because I’ve keep watching my videos and they are way over. It was easy “PASS”. Was more about shared responsibility; Which aws team you call for <something>. Not much about technology.

Having two certifications it is time to think about when take the others. I was in Asia, moving back to my country after New Year so there where some conditions. I could not let Jet Lag or something of that sort get in the way.

From December until 10 January night I did more of the same but now using the Developer videos on Udemy. Here I really learned a lot. It is such an amazing experience watching all those small services coming together in managed services. Very nice topics. I also focused on the topic I failed the most on the SysOps certification – I was sure that those questions could come out again.

On the week of the certification I was so tired of watching so much videos but I knew that my knowledge is incredible vaster than ever. I felt like I could help anyone migrating to cloud and improve they application. When I got out of the exam, with another “PASS”, I wasn’t surprise. Got surprised when score came out and understood that there is a subject I totally failed (like SysOps). But, like SysOps, it’s just something I need to study more for the professionals.

The 4^th and final, solutions architect, was on the 13 January, 2 days after the previous one. Was hard yes, but was just an exam like the SysOps without the SysOps questions. I knew that I was going to probably fail but I was buffed and just felt right timing. I was right so it wasn’t as scary as it could be. Anyway, I’ve finished it in 50 minutes using 40 going answer by answer double checking. In the end, another “PASS” screen. Like all the previous ones, on the Score analysis an area for improvement.

Big conclusion for me – Having a score 750/800/850 score in the exam is a good score – good enough to pass it. AWS is a very big system and the more you know the better. Yes, for some certifications you should see specific stuff, but knowledge is power. You might don’t know what is a certain service, but if you learn a service that somehow uses the service you don’t know, you start knowing it better and sometimes for an associate level certification using the type of knowledge is enough to pass.

Never the less, I recognize that my scores could be better but with 3/4 months hands-on + 30 hours of videos + 130 Q/A I think I did pretty good.

Exam Info

The link below is the home page for Solution architect associate exam. We can find all information related to the exam on this page. The exam guide and sample exam questions are also available to download on the page.

AWS-certified-solutions-architect-associate

Resources

Udemy Courses

Acloudguru Course: This is the best seller course on Udemy and it is good. Since I have taken the exam, I can say it covers only the 70% of the exam. There are a number of exam topics which are not covered (sometimes in details and sometimes absent altogether) from this course. However I don't think any course covers all the topics since the exam is so vast.

There are couple of other courses on Udemy which are supposed to be very good. At the time of writing, course by Stephane Maarek was the best rated course on Udemy for the Solution Architect Associate exam.

Practice Exams: I bought a practice exam course also. It had 6 mock exams and had very detailed explanations for the answers. However the questions were quite verbose. But the mock exam is totally worth it price and I would highly recommend it.

aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-amazon-practice-exams

The exam guide also lists a number of whitepapers. These can be downloaded in various formats and are also available to download on Kindle (for free) for leisurely reading. Highly recommended to go through these.

For the hands on training and practice, AWS offer free tier accounts.

Other resources: I heard from couple of friends that the courses on Linux Academy are also extremely good but I did not take them myself.

Actual Preparation

The exam feels theoretical however it is not. One has to be hands on. The main services, S3, EC2, VPC and Databases require practice and requires lots of learning. Unless you can do things on your own in the AWS console from memory, I wouldn't recommend to sit on the exam.

I followed the following strategy:

• Completed the A cloud course above. It took me longer as I had to do that in my own personal time which was short because I had a new born at home who took all my time and energy. People can definitely cover this faster. It had lots of hands on tutorials. I would definitely recommend to go beyond tutorials and play with things in the free tier accounts. Things get clearer once we do things on our own in the console. The course does a good job in covering the below sections:
  1. S3
  2. EC2
  3. VPC
  4. Load Balancing
  5. Autoscaling
• However after taking the mock exams and the real exam, in my opinion, it lacked in details on the following sections:
  1. IAM integration with Identity Providers, On premise LDAP
  2. Kinesis Streams
  3. ALB
  4. DynamoDB
  5. Some small services like Containers on AWS, AWS workflow etc
• Only attempted the Mock Exams after I had completed the course once. The mock exam course mentioned above is quite tough and the level is very near to the real exam. If you fail the mock exam, don't get disheartened, identify the weak points / topics and go through them again.
• Sometimes during preparation and mock testing, one may feel that there is a discrepancy in the course content or exam question. In all such cases, AWS documentation itself has the last word. It is the single source of truth for anything and everything related to the exam. The documentation is extremely detailed, so it is not possible to go through everything. However make sure to have the FAQs for main services covered completely.
• I covered the above missing details (in the acloudguru course) through the details provided in mock exams answers, AWS documentation and by playing with things in AWS console.
• Exam is multiple choice format. We have to choose 1 out of 4 or 2 out of 5 options provided. I noticed in the real exam sometimes all the given answers could have solved the problem. But we have to choose the most cost effective and performance efficient answer. That is where I feel this exam was different than the previous certification exams I have taken.

So this was my journey of AWS solution architect associate exam. I wish everyone reading this best of luck in theirs.