How I prepared and eased the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam (SAP-C02)

So recently I cleared my AWS SA Professional exam. Indeed it was a tough one and very long. It took me 2-3 months of study for preparing for the exam. My hands-on experience really helped me in getting the quick understanding for the architectural based questions which saved a huge time for me in the exam.

Next comes up the the preparation part, Here is a brief overview of the study material I referred for my preparation -

• a) Adrian Cantrill SA professional course for in-depth explanation of networking, security and serverless components and excellent hands-on guide.
• b) Stephen Marek SA pro course - For quick revision of the services covered in the exam.
• c) Practice Exams - Tutorials dojo, Neal Davis, Stephen Marek Practice Exams - for getting used to the actual exam format, increasing the speed and readability.(Not to mention I got 3-4 exact same questions from the test papers above)
• d) AWS Skill Builder Pro Practice Exam - Quite similar to the actual exam (I got almost same score in actual exam as in the skill builder)
• E) AWS Whitepapers were really helpful for getting in-depth insights on architectural perspective.

(Tip - Try giving these test papers again and again until you get atleast 80-85%)

Here the brief overview of the exam -

I would say the actual exam was a bit tricky, tough and somewhat similar as compared to Neal Davis and Stephen Marek Test Papers. Tutorials Dojo Test papers were very helpful in improving the speed and readability for the actual exam. I completed the exam within 2:30 hours and had one hour to review the flagged questions.

Here is a brief of the actual exam -

• a) AWS Organizations and Control Tower was heavily focused in my exam. Best practices to create and secure multi account environment, SCP's, Guardrails, IAM permissions, cross account permissions in multi-account environments etc.
• b) Migration from On-prem to AWS scenarios was also heavily featured in my exam - focus on the following terms while answering these questions - LEAST overhead, more FASTER, Cost-effectively etc. Services like Application Migration Service, Snowball, Datasync, Snowcone etc. were covered in the exam.
• c) Networking and Security - On-prem to AWS connectivity methods, DX connect, Site-to-SiteVPNs, VPN cloudhub, Client vpns, Network firewalls, Firewall Manager etc. scenarios.
• d) Serverless - API gateway and Lambda were also covered in depth in the exam, The hands-on experience really helped to ease these questions.
• e) Containers - EKS and ECS - got around 4-5 questions involving these services. Mine didn't cover EKS/ECS anywhere, outposts etc. But I have seen others who got questions around the same so be prepared for those as well.
• f) IoT core and Greengrass - Got around 2-3 questions on these along with integration of these services to KDS, KDF and KDA, lambda, s3 etc.
• g) Disaster recovery and Failover scenarios - including databases RDS, Aurora, Aurora Serverless, Dynamodb global tables etc and other storage services like s3, Fsx, EFS etc. Get yourself familiar with 7R's of migration. Improving the RPO (Recovery point objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

Here are some of the important AWS Whitepapers I referred for in-depth networking understanding, big data services overview -

1) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/building-scalable-secure-multi-vpc-network-infrastructure/vpc-peering.html

2) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-vpc-connectivity-options/introduction.html

3) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/big-data-analytics-options/aws-glue.html

Bonus Tip - The exam is quite long and Speed is a major factor , if you are not 100% sure of the answer just flag the question and move-on and for those you are 100% sure do not flag them. Make sure you have atleast 15-30 minutes at then end to review the flagged questions.

IMPORTANT - If english is not your first language then you can request for "Request Accomodation (ESL+30minutes)" for extra 30 minutes before registering for the exam. This will add extra 30 minutes in the actual examination.

Unpopular Tip - The actual exam is quite Lonnnnnnng!!!! Make sure to get proper sleep on the exam day. Also have an energy drink or a strong coffee before the exam, it really helped me in maintaining the focus during the entire exam :)

PS - This is my just my personal experience and suggestions, feel free to tweak it as per your time management, technical experience etc.