Tips from my Journey to an AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification

AWS CSAA — Challenge Accepted!

One of my last year’s goals was to achieve a formal certification in AWS. I’ve been dealing with AWS for a while, however, getting accreditation for the knowledge you have is always nice. As a technical guy — challenge accepted! ??

After achieving the certification recently ??, I’m sharing my personal insights about the process, which I hope you find useful and inspiring.

So, where to begin?

It’s wise to start with the formal AWS overview and recommendations. AWS maintains a comprehensive set of whitepapers that spread the underlying services and their methodology vividly. The whitepapers vary in depth and details, thus it’s better to prioritize which to read based on your prior knowledge.

After reading many whitepapers, I think that some should be recommended for any solutions architect. Whether you design solutions for the cloud or not, the documents below include beneficial practices and design principles that can be useful for other domains:

• Architecting for the cloud
• Well-Architected framework
• AWS Security Best Practices

Besides the whitepapers, other sources of knowledge were useful and assisted me in organizing the required information. They all completed some missing knowledge, which was essential for passing the final exam.

AWS official training (or: learn from the origin)

AWS invests a lot in their training videos, which available for free. If you’re not the type that reads whitepapers, I strongly recommend watching the training videos since they summarize the whitepapers' content very clearly. Although it is repeating the same topics, it can give you subtle insights into things you might have missed, and thus some topics became clearer. That can be the X factor.

These videos are time-consuming, whilst time is your most precious resource, so picking the relevant videos to watch is essential. In my view, the length of these videos is their only downside.

Podcasts (or: how to utilize time wisely)

I don’t have much free time. Working full time managing an on-going project while having a family keeps me fully occupied. Furthermore, reading articles or watching videos demands your full engagement, so time management is critical. Therefore, I find the podcasts platform very useful for me.

Listening to podcasts while commuting to work is a fantastic solution to imbibe more knowledge. You’re already captivated in public transportation or at your car, so use the free sense you have - hearing ??.

I found two entertaining podcasts that allowed me to catch up with AWS existing and new features:

• AWS TechChat: this podcast summarizes AWS new technologies. Very useful for refreshing knowledge, while the content is conveyed is a light-weight atmosphere.
• AWS Podcast: latest and greatest news from AWS, featuring guests that share their AWS experience.

Cheatsheets (or: back to school. How to consolidate all the knowledge?)

There are websites that consolidate a lot of material about AWS services and their features. They seem like a good reference for learning. Personally, I found it hard to read them systematically, but they are very useful for summarizing certain topics.

However, in my opinion, two caveats are worth mentioning pertaining to these websites' content. Firstly, AWS changes rapidly, so the content might be outdated. For example, if you read that multi-region VPC Peering is not supported, but that is not true anymore. Secondly, the content may not be fully accurate, as it was written by someone that might not be an AWS expert. Therefore, my recommendation is to use these websites wisely and not take them as an ultimate source of truth.

In order to bypass these caveats, I've decided to prepare my own cheat sheet. I knew it will be a time-consuming task, but on the other hand, I knew that the content is reliable ??.

The significant side effect of preparing my own cheat sheet was absorbing the knowledge better. Once you write something yourself, the brain stores it better. So, by summarizing I was able to review the material easily without trying to figure someone else’s summary.

Hands-on (or: learn through your fingers)

I saved the best for last. I have experience in AWS, but for achieving a certification that was not enough. AWS is composed of many services, so most likely working with this platform on a daily basis leads you to focus on some specific services rather than experience others. You become an expert in your domain, but you may lack the vast features beyond. Understanding this nature is important for keeping the focus on where to invest your efforts.

Try to concentrate on the services you have less experience with. For example, if you’re a developer using AWS CodeStar services, you might not have experience with setting a VPC from scratch; if you work with IoT devices you may be defining Kinesis Firehose, but you might not be familiar with creating an AMI from a snapshot in another region. Thus, your cloud knowledge needs to be enhanced. The best way to achieve it is via exploration and practising.

To tackle this part, I ranked the areas that I deemed my knowledge should be sharpened and then built a mini-lab around each topic. For example, I defined a CloudFormation template, built an environment, and manipulated its EC2 instances.

This experience contributed the most for exploring AWS services from a new perspective. It gave me an opportunity to discover new features, ones that I didn’t use before as part of my standard work with AWS. In fact, that was the most enjoying and fulfilling part of the study. That is the main benefit of this certification.

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To recap, in my view, you must practice and expand your experience if you want to pass the exam with a high score and gain expertise. There isn't only one source of knowledge that covers all topics and nuances. A combination of reading, tests, and hands-on experience will improve your skills, so you will arrive prepared for the final exam.

The dilemma is balancing; how much time to invest in each medium over the other. That's a mini-project you need to manage in order to meet your goal. As an advocate of agile methodologies, my advice is to improve through the game-days. That’s one of AWS design principles ??.

The end is only the beginning

Congrats, you have achieved the desired certification! Now what?

This journey is a never-ending one, as the cloud technologies evolve and so are you. The skills you attained need to be retained and cultivated.

I keep on publishing AWS hands-on blogs on various topics, and you are more than welcome to read and follow.

Keep on clouding ?

— Lior