My Preparation Journey to become an AWS Solution Architect Professional

I am sharing my experience after passing the AWS solution architect professional exam which is one of the hardest cloud certification in IT industry.

Scored 902 out of 1000.

This exam tests your Reading comprehension , English language and Time management with AWS knowledge and makes it difficult for not a native English speaker.

Exam Duration and number of questions:

The exam consists of 75 multiple answer question to complete in 180 minutes and you can get additional 30 min if you are not a native English speaker. (Please make sure opt this option while booking Exam to get additional 30 min)

Time Management: This exam is all about time management and you are always running out time. With the Verbose nature of question and answer, you are always fighting against time. Need to keep an eye on clock watch. Make a mind map of dividing 75 questions into 3 sets and have a time checker after every set. I had a target of 60 min for each set of 25 questions.

English comprehension: Somehow you need to find a strategy of reading through big question para and find the most relevant info like the most cost-effective or highly scalable or follow the best practice of AWS or serverless. I always look at the last line of the question to get an idea. This helped me to save some time and jump straight into answer options. Sometime follow the rule of elimination by removing two options on first reading and work on only remaining two options. You end up having exactly similar answer but look for the single word separating both and focus on that to drive the correct option.

Preparation and study plan:

1 AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional by Adrian

https://linuxacademy.com/cp/modules/view/id/245

 2 AWS Solutions Architect – Professional 2020 By Zeal Vora on Udemy.

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional/learn/lecture /13307762

3 AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional 2020 by Scott Pletcher on AcloudGuru.

https://learn.acloud.guru/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect- professional

4 Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Profession by Stephane on Udemy

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-solutions-architect-professional/

 5 Practice Exams

by Jon bonso Tutorials dojo

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-solutions-architect-professional-practice-exams-amazon/

6 Reinvent Videos

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukcAXSVwQ3L9cWD4QgKPCQ5S

7 Whitepapers

8 AWS Documentations

9 AWS FAQs

10 AWS Cheat Sheet

Exam Guide here:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sa-pro/AWS%20Certified%20Solutions%20Architect- Professional_Exam%20Guide_2019.pdf

Services/concepts:

AWS Organizations

Managing Organizational Units (OU)

Service Control Policies (SCP)

Difference between SCP and IAM Policy

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM)

AWS Systems Manager ( and all its sub-services: State Manager, Session Manager, Patch Manager, Automation) Cloud Migration

AWS Config

AWS Service Catalog

AWS Application Discovery Service

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS)

AWS Rekognition

AWS CI/CD Services (CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline)

and many more!

I highly encourage you to do some intensive reading on the following topics:

Cloud Migration: https://aws.amazon.com/cloud-migration/

AWS Organizations & SCP: https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/getting-started/

SCP vs IAM Policy: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/iam-policy-service-control-policy/

AWS Systems Manager: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/what-is-systems- manager.html

Serverless: https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/

Access Management: https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access.html

Web application hosting in AWS: https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-web-hosting-best-practices.pdf AWS Disaster Recovery: https://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/AWS_Disaster_Recovery.pdf

Techniques:

The following are the techniques that I used which helped me significantly to concentrate on the focal point of the questions and the answers.

1) KeyWord:- There will some questions which will ask for some particular AWS service which can be easily pointed out by a keyword.

Example- XYZ company has some sensors and is looking for ....... current architecture is ...... and want to do ..... with ..... for Clickstream data.

2) Conceptual:- Pre-requisite for using this technique is to have very deep knowledge about the concepts for each AWS services.

Example- XYZ company has millions of users ........ has the functionality of ...... looking for login solution .....

3) Picking one from the similar options- Sometime you will be confused between two of the remaining answer, that which one I should choose. In that case, I would recommend reading both of the options in reverse direction, as probably there will be some difference in their last/last second sentence.

Example:- Assuming the question is based on integrating IAM role with the architecture and you left out with two answers 1) Authenticate with .... attach IAM role .... retrieves STS credential from the instance metadata 2) Authenticate with .... attach IAM role .... retrieves STS credential from the instance user data.

Here correct answer will be option 1, as we know IAM credentials are retrieved from the instance metadata not from instance user data.

4) Elimination:- Probability of choosing the correct answer drastically increases if we eliminate most of the wrong answers, in order to use this technique one should know the limitations of each AWS services.

Example- If the question is based on Direct Connect service and has around 4 options in which two options say "Use Direct Connect gateway to connect your AWS Direct Connect connection over a public virtual interface".

You can eliminate those two answers because as we know Direct Connect gateway can only connect to AWS Direct Connect connection over a private virtual interface.

Example- If the question is based on on-premises and AWS integration with VPG and CG. Some of the options say "Connect on-premise data center with two Virtual Private Gateway in the same VPC".

We can eliminate those options, as we know "there can be only one Virtual Private Gateway for each VPC".

5) Reverse technique- If you are lucky enough then you won't face long questions with lengthy answers, but most candidates have around 4-5 questions like this. In that case, I would recommend skipping those questions initially and coming back again after finishing the rest of the question. Start reading the answers first as question is too long to read as well, eliminate the wrong answers first if you can by using the 4th technique that I discussed and try using the 3rd technique because there will a subtle difference between the similar- looking options.

Example- if a question consists of ELB service and if you see ELB options in your options. Try to look for ALB instead of Classic and NLB, because ALB is more powerful and satisfies the solution in 95% of the case, and look for "create an Alias record for ALB" instead of "create CNAME/A record set for ALB."

General Strategies