How to complete amazon solution architect – associate certification exam.

This blog post is meant to help you achieve your goal of completing the amazon certification using the best resources available with a low cost.

How to prepare for the exam ?

Being certified in PMP, ITIL, TOGAF and now AWS solution architect, the knowledge and experience of preparing for an exam helped me prepare for this exam and any of the future exams as well.

The source that helped me;

1. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam
2. A Cloud Guru’s course in Udemy.
3. Whizlabs practice tests.
4. Visiting the frequently asked question (FAQ) of each product.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam (Click here for book):
The book is a good source to understand the various products that amazon offers as well as to get a gist of the exam topics, however I am not a big fan of this book alone. Amazon adds new services and features much quickly than the book is updated. Due to new changes there is always a gap in information, which can make you less confident about the exam. I don’t mean to say “don’t read the book”, I mean to say along with the book use other resources as part of your exam preparation.

A Cloud Guru’s course in udemy (Click here for course):
The course from Ryan Kroonenburg really helped me to fill the gaps.
The reasons are;

1. Its visual and you can see while he is explaining the course. (e.g: Snowmobile topic)
2. Demos/Lab on a topic, which might actually cost you more if I want to do it myself.
3. The summary section really helps you to skim over quickly before the exam.

Go over the Q&A section of this video course as well to understand various aspects of the exam.

Whizlabs practice tests (Click here for practice test):
Whizlabs practice test is an excellent source for practicing what you learnt. The questions helps you fill the gaps in your knowledge. To me the question(s) in these tests are very close to the exam.

How & where to practice for the exam.

Quality questions are more important to practice rather than any questions.

1. Taking notes
2. Practicing questions as often as possible.
3. Reading FAQs & make best use of the free account which amazon provides.
4. Practice my free udemy AWS Solutions Architect–Associate 2018 Practice Exam (Free)

Taking Notes:

One of the key to pass or fail on an exam depends on how well notes is taken while studying, take notes while you are reading or recollecting. Writing notes in my own words helped me a lot to recollect when the exam date is near by.

Practicing questions as often as possible:

Once I finished my studying, I started attempting 10 to 60 questions every day until the day of the exam so that it became quite easier on the day of the exam.

Reading FAQs & Practice using the amazon free account (Click here for questions):

Read the amazon FAQs, to understand the frame of reference rather than as a study material. Read them when you have a free time, e.g: Waiting for bus. During break.
Going FAQs helps answer some questions in the exam.

Practice my free udemy exam (Click here for the free exam):

Use the coupon code: FREEAWS
Exam URL: https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-practice-test-free
I have created this free exam to help students to practice quality questions before the real exam.

How do you know you are ready to take the exam ?

It’s very simple. When you are consistently getting 80% plus in the practice exam results you are good to go.

How difficult is the aws exam and how long does it take to prepare ?

The answer is, it depends. The exam covers wide range of topics in the amazon ecosystem. Reading the exam blue print will help you understand the weightage of topics that are covered in the exam. With a full-time job and 3 hrs commute to work, it took me close to 3 months to get certified. The exam is 55 questions with time limit of 80 minutes. Question format can be either multiple choice or multiple answer questions.

Key points:

1. You should know VPC inside & outside. You should be able to configure a VPC from your memory like subnets, availability zones, nat gateways, bastion hosts, CIDR, routers, route tables, security groups. You should at least  plan to create a VPC by hand once so that lot of questions on the exam will be easier.
2. Provision various types of EC2 machines, SSH/RDP into EC2 using keys. EC2 instance types.
3. You should know what is SQS, SWF, SNS services. API gateways, Lambda.
4. Load balancers, elastic load balancer, application load balancer, classic load balancer.
5. Understanding of S3, creating static sites using s3. Elastic block store (EBS), Elastic File system (EFS).
6. Understanding of RDS & NoSql. Focus on Dynamo DB.

Finally cost, close to $200;

• AWS Exam: $150
• A Cloud Guru’s course in Udemy: $10
• Whizlabs practice tests: $20
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: $30

Best of luck with your certification. Hope this helps.