My Journey: AWS Solutions Architect - Professional

A couple of months back, my journey towards getting my professional AWS certificate was published in Deloitte's Data & AI newsletter. It was very well received and I was glad to hear that my journey could provide insights and guidance to others on the same path.

Today, I am sharing the same here with my wider network in the hope that it would encourage and guide those who are on track to get this coveted badge.

My first stint with AWS was in 2011 when I was exploring options for setting up a common Redmine server for project teams in Japan and India. We needed a solution fast, and going through all the approvals in traditional data centre setup required a lead time of 4-6 weeks. That was when we created our first AWS account and setup our own Redmine server within a day using AWS EC2. Thereafter, we could spin up new machines on demand and perform POCs as and when required without waiting for days and weeks. This was huge.

Since then I have been involved with AWS on and off for approx. 5 years until 2017 when I worked on a full-fledged cloud project. I realized that while working on a project we focused on limited AWS offerings such as EC2, VPC, ELB, RDS, IAM, EBS, S3, etc. However, AWS offered more than 100 services and I thought of getting a certification as a way to get myself across those services which I was not using hands-on.

I cleared my first AWS certification, ‘Solutions Architect - Associate’, in March 2018 and thoroughly enjoyed the learning which came along this badge. After almost a year I decided to go for Solutions Architect - Professional certification. While I found the associate-level certificate to be simple and easy to achieve, the professional level certificate was much more difficult than I expected it to be.

Today, via this article, I want to share my learnings and tips to achieve the AWS professional-level certification.

First things first

Familiarizing yourself with the exam format is the very first step to ensure that your action plan is aligned with what is required in the exam. The professional exam is a 3 hrs long exhausting exam and is a big jump in terms of difficulty from associate level. AWS has done a great job of providing a clear format and sample questions to help candidates familiarize themselves with exam content. Refer to the exam guide and sample questions.

Tip: Question #7 and #9 are quite close to the real exam questions in terms of length and complexity.

Learning Resources

A Cloud Guru: A cloud guru is a very well-presented online course to get yourself started with AWS services in a structured manner. However, it alone is not enough and requires additional studies and practice to get through the exam as outlined below.

FAQs: AWS has done an amazing job to write its FAQ pages for almost every service. Going through FAQs resolves a lot of doubts especially where some services appear difficult to distinguish. FAQs help to cement the understanding and differences between similar-appearing services such as kinesis data stream and firehose or SWF and SQS.

Whitepapers: In my experience, these are the most valuable resource for not only preparing for the exam but also understanding the underlying logic and concept behind different services. In particular, Well-Architected Framework and Security Best Practices whitepapers require thorough understanding. ?

Re-Invent Videos: AWS publishes annual re:invent videos on YouTube and these are invaluable to learn directly from the team building the services. For the professional level, particularly make sure to go through the deep dive videos on EBS, Direct Connect, VPN, ELB, IAM, and CloudWatch.

Hands-on: Learning by doing is the best way of cementing the concepts. AWS offers a one-year free trial which is more than enough to practice most of the exam content. Having hands-on experience in different scenarios is indispensable for learning and boosting confidence. For starters, try the following scenarios:

• Create a static hosted S3 website and integrate it with CloudFront and Route 53
• Deliver S3 access logs to a bucket in another bucket in another account
• Remove the ability for images to be served publicly to the site and then use signed URLs with expiry dates for accessing
• Restricting Access to Files in CloudFront Edge Caches
• Create an ec2 hosted web server which takes files directly from S3 and publishes using bootstrap scripts
• Create an autoscaling group with and without ELB
• Create a serverless website using lambda, API gateway, S3, IAM, route 53
• Build a VPC with ELB having 2 public subnets, 1 private subnet, S3 endpoint, NAT gateway and Bastion host

Practice/Mock Exams: If you already have an associate-level certification then you can claim a practice exam at a professional level for free which is otherwise 40 USD. This practice exam is useful but not enough for practice. I personally found the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Practice Exam by Jon Bonso” to be very useful for my practice.

Discussion Forums: A cloud guru’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional 2020 discussion forum is very useful to get insights on the latest exam reviews and discussing doubts.

Exam Day: Having gone through all the learning and practice resources mentioned above it is time to go for the exam. It is a 3 hours exhaustive exam and almost all the questions shall be scenario-based and a minimum of 4-6 lines long. To ensure you choose the right option, look for what is the central ask, such as is it “High-availability” or “Cost-optimization” which is more important for the scenario. A solution could look very promising but if it is not cost-effective then it might not be the right answer. Similarly, there could be a scenario where cost is secondary and disaster recovery within a strict RTO is more important, which might lead to an expensive solution to be correct.

Overall, I would say the journey to achieve AWS professional certification is challenging and that is what makes it enjoyable and valuable.

?Thank you for reading and all the best for your journey!!!