After about 5 weeks of steeping myself in the AWS ecosystem and platform, labbing like crazy, and attending a compressed AWS training course, I finally sat the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam last week and passed.
I’ve described my experience and thoughts on the exam itself here:
#AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam Prep & Experience
Study Materials
In preparation for the exam, I used the following study materials:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level Exam Blueprint
- This is always the go-to document for almost any current industry certification, and should be used as your primary guide for resources and areas to study. In the case of the AWS Solutions Architect Exam Blueprint, they actually also direct you to specific white papers to review as well as the content areas to study.
- ACloud.Guru Solutions Architect Associate training course
- This is an excellent quality training course which I would say is designed to teach you the content, but with a specific focus on passing the certification. I completed the course in advance of attending my QA course (below), and having given me a strong base knowledge of the AWS services, I was able to get far more out of the course. If you are brand new to AWS, I highly recommend it. This course was also very useful in the final days leading up to the exam, as I will describe later.
- The course has around about 12 hours or so of content, but I would say it took me 40-50 hours in total between all of the lab work, coming up with my own scenarios to practice configuring different elements, completing the quizzes, and researching any areas where I got a quiz answer incorrect or wasn’t sure of the reasons for a specific answer.
- Ryan has a great conversational style with plenty of examples, reiteration of key points, etc. If I had to give one bit of constructive criticism it is that he sometimes has a tendency to read his slides, when I would prefer that he talks through the content and I can read the slide myself. Either way, I would still give the course an unreserved recommendation and have already purchased other content from their site.
- QA AWS Accelerated Architecting Associate and Professional compressed training course
- I believe this was a first time for QA. Myself and a number of colleagues completed both of the 3 day architecting courses (standard and advanced) in a rather intense, but very informative 5 day week! Having spent time preparing by completing the ACloud.Guru Solutions Architect Associate course, the first half of the QA week was mostly solidification of knowledge and concepts, plus rounding it out and filling in the gaps of things which may not come up in the exam, but are still very important.
- The second half of the week (Advanced Architecting) was an excellent course and if your budget will only stretch to one or the other, I would probably recommend the advanced course. Just make sure you have done as much self study / video training in advance as you can, or risk being overwhelmed! Not only did this course give a fuller picture beyond the basic AWS services, but it also gave loads of advice on the dos and don’ts, best practices, cost saving ideas, use cases and design patterns to use in your architectures.
- White Papers
- There are 5 recommended white papers in the Exam Blueprint. I read the first two in depth, then (due to time constraints) I skimmed through the last three, and reviewed Ryan’s overview of key points in his ACloud.Guru Solutions Architect course. This did feel a bit like just “reading the crib notes”, but I felt that I had covered most of the content in these through the ACloud.Guru and QA training courses.
- The security white paper was so painful I wanted to eat my own eyeballs!
- AWS Overview
- Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes
- Storage Options in the AWS Cloud
- Architecting for the AWS Cloud: Best Practices
- AWS Risk & Compliance Whitepaper
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Practice Exam and Sample Exam Questions
- Although I would say this was maybe only about 75% as tricky as the actual exam, it did give a good idea of the kinds of subjects and style of questions for the actual exam.
- FAQs
- Other Articles and Resources – The AWS documentation site is an absolute goldmine of information, and most of the articles are well written and easy to consume. Significantly more so than some of the best known “kb” and documentation sites in the industry IMHO. The following is a list of some of the articles I dipped in and out of while researching for the exam as well as my AWS Tips and Gotchas blog series:
- Amazon EC2 Security Groups for Linux Instances
- AWS EC2 Query Requests
- How AWS CloudTrail Works
- PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS
- MySQL on Amazon RDS
- DB Instance Class
- Using the SOAP API
- Amazon AMI Types
- Detaching an Amazon EBS Volume from an Instance
- EBS CreateSnapshot
- Sharing an Amazon EBS Snapshot
- How do I create a snapshot of an Amazon EBS RAID array?
- RAID Configuration on Linux
- SQS Access Policy Key Concepts
- Elastic IP Addresses
- VPC NAT Instances
- Route 53 – Choosing Between Alias and Non-Alias Resource Record Sets
- Controlling Which Instances Auto Scaling Terminates During Scale In
- Auto Scaling Lifecycle
- Elastic Load Balancing Announces Cross-Zone Load Balancing
- Using DNS with Your VPC
- Gateway-Cached Volume Architecture
- Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI)
- Configuring a Windows Instance Using the EC2Config Service
- Instance Metadata and User Data
- Tagging Your Amazon EC2 Resources
- Lab Time
- If I had a penny for every time I said hands on beats any other study method, I couldn’t retire, but I’d have at least 50p! Over the past 5 weeks I spent somewhere in the region of 40-50 hours or more inside the AWS console.
It’s always far easier to remember how to do something for an exam, if you have actually done it!
- If I had a penny for every time I said hands on beats any other study method, I couldn’t retire, but I’d have at least 50p! Over the past 5 weeks I spent somewhere in the region of 40-50 hours or more inside the AWS console.
- Other resources I didn’t use but have heard are good or are recommended by AWS. I will be going through many of these in prep for my Professional exam in the next couple of months (time and wife permitting!)
- Amazon Cert Guide – I wish I had found this one sooner!!!
- Amazon Self-Paced Labs aka “qwiklabs” – One of my colleagues has tried these and said these are of a decent standard. I always say hands-on will teach you more than most courses!
- Other Whitepapers:
Best of luck with your exams!!! 🙂
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam Prep & Experience
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