The AWS Solution Architect Professional Beta Exam

It’s the first time I ever gave a beta exam. And I was happy that I finally had the courage to give one. I was waiting for the beta exams for the professional level exams to be released. It always better to give the newer version of the exams, because they stay more relevant to the latest features of the cloud platform and to industry standards.

But the exam was as you expect the professional level exams to be. Long and hard. 95% scenario-based questions. You had to really think long and hard to decide on the right answer for the questions. I was slightly relieved whenever I got a slight direct question.

There were 85 questions in all, and to tell the truth, I lost steam around 60 questions itself. In the end that’s what made this a great challenge to take on. In the end it does not matter whether I pass or not. These exams just let you where you stand when it comes to understand how well you are capable of implementing cloud solutions on AWS.

What really helped me...

• Being certified as an Associate on AWS
• Having also passed the Security and Big Data Specialist exams. I feel it does really give you the edge to attempt the Specialist exams after the Associate level exams and then take on the Professional level exams.
• And a lot of hands on for AWS. I always play around with the platform, try to implement my own personal projects. And every little step helps.

So, the beta exam is open till 3rd December and based on seats available for the exam. For those who are planning on attempting the beta exam, here are some of the topic highlights for the exam

• AWS Organizations – This was really right at the top, because I got quite a few questions on these. So, understanding how to organize accounts, billing, using OU’s, all very important.
• Migrating On-premise data stores to AWS, especially Oracle databases. Can you achieve fault tolerance with Oracle on AWS? If given the chance to migrate databases such as Cassandra, what would you prefer as the data store on AWS.
• Networking

1. Got a real bouncer when it came to VPC Peering. An implementation diagram was given, a real time scenario with an issue.
2. Using VPC Endpoints vs using NAT gateways
3. Know AWS Direct Connect in detail – Public and Private VIF’s
4. Cost effective backup solution for AWS Direct Connect

• Security

1. You were given various architectures that companies would you implement. And you would be asked on how to secure these architectures. Points to remember, where all can you use WAF. Can you use WAF with a Classic Load Balancer? Would you consider using a WAF product from the AWS Marketplace
2. How to use AWS KMS and Cloud HSM – Core implementation on these products is important.

• Data Analytics

1. Got a couple of questions for EMR. These were choices for what would be the best solution for data processing
2. Understanding how to use Kinesis, Kinesis Firehose, ElasticSearch and Kibana
3. Know cost effectiveness when using AWS Redshift vs Athena. How do you enable continuity of your Redshift cluster?
4. Should you use SQS or AWS Kinesis for Ingestion based on the requirement

• Know when to use Cloudformation, ElasticBeanstalk and Opswork. You need to understand the core working of each of these products.
• Costing -  When to use Spot vs Reserved Instances – There are detailed scenario-based questions on these.
• Machine Learning – Got quite a few questions on AWS Rekognition.

Another key aspect is that for most of these questions, you would also additionally be requested to

• Choose which is the most cost-effective solution. So even though you might have many applicable solutions to a question, you still had to choose the most cost-effective one.
• You would also need to understand the limitations on products. For example, would you consider AWS Lambda for a process that runs for around 15 minutes? So even though this is cost effective, would you consider this as the solution.
• There were a few questions which also asked to ensure that you choose not only a cost-effective, but also the most performant and efficient solution.

Yes, this exam was tougher than I thought. But I always recommended giving the newer versions of the exams. Hope AWS moves forward with publishing the exams.