How I Passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam

Despite having some experience with AWS Cloud back in 2012, it was a pretty short stint and cloud services back then was very different to how it has evolved now. I forgot about cloud when I moved to a company who does not use public cloud in application development at all. Then, I transitioned to a DevOps role which utilizes cloud heavily, and I had to re-learn everything from scratch. Six months in and I decided to sit the exam and gauge my understanding of the concepts. This is an article I wrote a few days after passing which summarizes my journey to being cloud certified.

Study, study, study.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to come to the exams prepared. I have gone through a different certification exam where I only studied for one weekend, but for AWS, it took me 1 part time week + 2 full-time weeks before I sat the exam. I've read some people passed it studying for only two weeks, but for someone like me who had less experience (Amazon recommends at least 1 year of experience in a similar role working with AWS cloud components, I just had six months in my new role as DevOps), it took me exactly that - 3 weeks. While studying, I realized that the coverage was very large and I even thought of rescheduling my exam to a later date. It was definitely overwhelming, but you just need to study to gain your much needed confidence.

Quick Tip: A lot of questions focused on: Basic Cloud Concepts (Regions, Availability Zones, Edge Locations), Security (IAM, Cognito, authentication), Compute Components (EC2, Lambda, ECS), Storage and Database Components (S3, EFS, Storage Gateway, RDS, NoSQL DBs, ETL DBs), VPC and Networking (connections, security groups, NACLs, subnets, flowlogs, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, on-premise connectivity), Dev Tools (CodeDeploy) and some newer technologies (Kinesis, SQS, SNS, Elastic Beanstalk, Cloud Formation).

I've watched the full Cloud Guru course by Ryan Kroonenburg (13 hours) and went thru all practice exams by Jon Bonso in Udemy. The Cloud Guru course helped me get an overview of several cloud components, while the practice exams helped me understand what components has more value and which I should deep-dive in. The practice exams of Jon Bonso has explanations that links to AWS whitepapers and articles, cheatsheets in Tutorials Dojo which provides a lot of value in getting a full understanding of AWS. There is also a practice exam by Pearson VUE in O'reilly (https://pearsontestprep.com/#/examsettings) which you can check out. I found it too difficult compared to the actual exam though, so you can skip this one and just use the one from Udemy.

Study to understand, not to memorize

When doing the practice exams, I tried to re-take them again and again to see if I can get the answer right the next time I take them. After doing multiple exams, I found myself forgetting the answer and going back to square one. I've read in one forum that the correct strategy is to understand the answer as well as why the other answers are incorrect and not the best solution. The exam is designed to be tricky to test your fundamental knowledge, so it is very important that you understand why you are selecting a particular component over the other. This way, no matter how challenging the question gets, you can always select the correct answer.

You will never be 100% prepared. Be calm.

As mentioned earlier, I have thought of moving back my exam date, but then I thought that I might end up forgetting everything that I have studied so I just kept it as it is. Going to the actual exam, I applied several tips I found in forums on how to pass. A lot of them definitely helped so I listed them all below:

Look for Keywords: "LEAST expensive" "MOST efficient" "HIGHLY Available" "LOW latency" "HIGHEST throughput" and associate the AWS components to them.

Do the process of elimination, this helps increase the percentage of getting the correct answer. Apply the best guess principle (using keywords) when you are unsure of the answer.

Review your answers, use the "mark for review" option of the exam to tag questions which you are unsure of so you can get back to them when you have some extra time. You will definitely have enough time left so go through your answers again. I went through my answers twice and there were about 10 items which I changed the answer to because I seem to have missed some important keywords the first time.

Eat before the exam, go to the comfort room, wear comfortable clothes, breathe. Eliminate all possible distractions and be your best self on the day of your exams.

Pray. I didn't have one year experience working with AWS. I didn't get consistent 90% scores in practice exams. But my mom prayed for me to pass, so maybe that did it. Haha!

Stressing the most important tip: study. This exam is definitely not a simple one that you can easily pass. I passed on my first take, but that is only because I studied....a lot! I hope this article helps.