-UPDATE!- Passed the Solutions Architect C03 exam! ?? ?? Cloud & Proud

Cloud & Proud!

What do you call two monkeys sharing an Amazon Prime account? Prime mates. And what do you call me? A certified cloud architect! WAHEY! ?? As of this morning, I'm absolutely thrilled to have passed the SAA-C03 exam for Amazon Web Services (AWS) ; can't wait to sow this accolade onto my Frosties swimming-badges towel!

Truth is, the journey to get here wasn't at all simple. There's no shortcuts in passing this exam, practically binding me to my books & labs by spending ~5 hours daily for the last 3 months. Some highs, plenty of lows, but always with the resolve that good things happen to folk who work their arse off. To live is to risk it all, and this day is a HUGE win!

First thing's first, of course I'm going to relish in a quick victory lap with you my fellow subscribers, because success unshared is a failure. So, cheers! ?? My mind is pacing with all the special thanks & mentions that I'd like to give, but in fear of turning this post into an hour-long Adrien Brody acceptance speech, instead let me offer an overview of my roadmap along with the hints & tips which helped me pass this exam.

The nature of discussing my journey might come off as self-gratuitous, but I assure you that I'm steering this article away from outright cajolery. Many of my own decisions were informed atop the shoulders of those before me who detailed their own experiences; some excellent perspectives which I simply couldn't have succeeded without. To be 'exam-ready' is a ragbag of mental tickboxes that come in & out of focus, but always fixed in place. Certainly, only you can be aware of your own preparedness, but there's a unified stream in tackling the behemoth of Cloud as an absolute beginner. And if an ape like me can become Cloud certified, it just amplifies my conviction that this episodic process works.

My Cloud Wikihow

"A goal without a plan is just a wish" writes Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Personally, I prefer the circulatory yet profound "aim at nothing, and you'll hit it every time" quip which my head of sixth would often bellow at us during lunchtimes. So it's important to buckle up a plan & place a roof over your expectations. For me, I took a crash course with Google Calendar to record all the milestones for the upcoming weeks, as well as locking in a date to take the exam. Project management tools, such as Goole Calendar, Trullo or AnyDo, will aggressively keep your work-life balance in-check. In contrast to just winging it, honouring a management tool keeps a tab on materials covered, visualising your progress through an objective lens. It's known as 'Gamification' in teaching circles, and demonstrably works. Treat your calendar like a compass. Starting on day 1, trawl through the official exam guidelines to familiarise yourself with the 4 cloud domains (Resilient/High-Performing/Secure/Cost-Optimised architectures) and break them down by week & day.

Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP)

From the get-go, I allowed myself 30 days to pass the Cloud Practitioner exam. So that's 30 days to cover 4 domains and pass the exam. I'll save you the trouble of rummaging for your scientific calculator ??; one week to cover each domain (+2 days buffer to take the exam). As I soon came to realise, studying domains aren't episodic enough to easily divide content delivery per week. You need a good mix of videos, books, whitepapers, labs & discussions to wrap your head around this beast. Variety is the spice of life here, because a single resource is unlikely to cover a topic well enough for you to get it in one go. Nevertheless, a big shoutout to Neal K. Davis for his excellent introductory course on Udemy and accessible introduction. His material is lean, welcoming and coveted by all who've accessed it.

So first of all, get Certified Cloud Practitioner locked in. Get those feet wet. Don't let the foundational by-line fool you; any first steps into a new field presents its own set of challenges & cerebral gymnastics. Though it's a brisk walk through many Cloud services, often barely scratching the surface, the range is still substantial! This covers AWS at a high-level, and tests you like the Aldi supermarkets' catchphrase - spend a little, live a lot. Expect to repart your attention across things well beyond scope. Even if you've never conjured up a "hello world", you'll need to know the corners of AWS making this possible (CodeCommit).

Naturally, there's plenty of overlap between CCP & SAA. If you keep an eye towards expediency, then there's an argument to be made about setting your sights on SAA from the very start, raising your knowledge profile to the Associate level and then taking both exams at once. But I'd still advise against that - particularly since myself, and I think indeed many others, have no formal IT background. Scary stuff. It's a radical shift in thinking, and I really believe that you can't replace these fundamental insights gained from trial-and-error and self correction. So I'm wary of jumping into the midway point, in favour of tapping Aesop's mantra of slow & steady. Even if you've got a Mensa Members' clubcard in your wallet and do the Metro newspaper crosswords unironically, your infinite brainpower can't magically invoke a novel skill. Tech jargon is particularly unforgiving and ever-changing, so get that foundational knowledge first along with the confidence to carry that momentum onwards; otherwise you'll be fortifying your castle in a sinking swamp.

In any case, the two Sybex study-guide books were a neat introduction to almost all the services covered in the exam. It's not exactly a 'light read' to idly jab at whilst sunbathing -and this summer was sweltering- but aim to cover 1-2 chapters a day, one book after another if possible. Attempt the summary section questions at the end of each chapter, as well as the whole rigmarole of accessing bonus flashcards & extra questions on their own website. Personally I didn't use the bonus material much given that there are dedicated vendors for this. Point being that there's a wealth of information out there, and extra reading never hurt anybody.

In 28 days exactly, I passed my Certified Cloud Practitioner exam from inception. A quick turnaround for a total novice!

This cert is highly focused on definitions, acronyms and distinguishing between different offerings. It's the first step in achieving higher certifications, such as the Solutions Architect Associate/Professional, which was always my target since the start of June.

One of the great lessons to come out of this phase was recognising how I learn new concepts and skills.?Wandering eyes might not be ideal for a monogamous relationship, but it certainly helps when you surround your study-space with inescapable notes and diagrams:

At this point, it became clear why pursuing the certification tree is vital to professional growth. AWS certified engineers are in high-demand with a salary to match. Most notably in AWS consultancy partners (such as Scale Factory) who need to amass a certain amount of AWS certs to retain their coveted consultancy status. AWS certified engineers are a hot commodity because being the go-to-guy in your organisation improves your clients' Cloud posture and helps them differentiate their business. Dare I say...even change the world? In any case, ears only start to perk up from the Associate level onwards.

Logically enough, my next step was the Solutions Architect Associate level. This I knew would take longer than a month. I read the Sybex book in a few days, then purchased the Tutorials Dojo practice papers...quickly realising that I didn't know Jack Stanbury S***. After some soul searching and trawling through r/AWSCertifications, I decided to cave into the relentless recommendations of Adrian Cantrill 60+hour course. Adrian this, Adrian that, Adrian Adrian Adrian...It's like a Rocky Balboa cult of personality out there, what gives? Can www.cantrill.io really deserve this much praise? Short answer, yes. I soon switched from the review sections in TutorialDojo papers (inside which I was often second-guessing because the book simply didn't go into enough detail) and instead begun focussing on digesting all the theory, diagrams & hands-on that Adrian's course offered. Here's why I'm bumping him up from a recommendation, to 'AWS gospel':

• ?? Adrian Cantrill is a natural instructor who earns his reputation by building fundamental understanding in isolation, then brings knowledge together with countless demos, instructions and diagrams. It's essentially a piecemeal story told by an impassioned narrator.
• ?? The diagrams alone are the best in the game. THIS is the crux of good?architecting! All available on his Git repository (https://github.com/acantril/aws-sa-associate-saac02)
• ?? His delivery method keeps an eye towards expediency. The script is snappy, rigorous and lean. 50+ hours, and not a single minute of waffle?? Any repetition in his script is solely to reinforce something well worth remembering. For example, a portion of my brain has permanently etched Kinesis streams as 2MB p/second in read throughput. No doubt my brain would've passed this tidbit through like a pasta strainer were it not for the reinforcement strategies in this course, slapping on concepts to what's just been previously discussed like an memorable layer of paint.
• ?? It's brutally efficient. No stones left unturned. I've watched rival courses & read books cover-to-cover; and yet it's Adrian who's consistently first to draw attention to a crucial part of the puzzle, which otherwise I would've missed altogether. To think that I passed the Cloud Practitioner Exam without ever hearing of Border Gateway Protocol - not unlike painting the Mona Lisa without learning to first open your eyes.
• ?? He's omnipresent.?Reddit?threads,?Slack?channels, LinkedIn communities - always timely, never turns his back on students. We've had a few good back-and-forths, even though he's busy in Australia. I tend not to take criticism from somebody whose advice I wouldn't take - so I absolutely appreciate the curated responses he gives out to students.

Hands down this was the bulk of my studying, whilst peppering in actual experience after each lesson with the appropriate Quiklabs for actual hands-on experience in the console. Say that I've just completed a lesson on Step Functions using Lambda, then I'd immediately trawl through labs to convert this into muscle memory. And for those architectures which stay within the free-tier, I had a crack at implementing myself within my actual AWS account. (https://promptomaticmarco.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ - here's a serverless reminder application which I built to save my instructor the trouble of repeating himself to encourage collaboration in our study groups! It won't work unless I aggregate your email/sms to the trusted accounts first, but it does work as a proof of concept)

The course is priced at 48USD, which to me was a no-brainer given that you don't weigh the price of the spade when digging for gold. Clearly he's put a tonne of effort into his courses, and he has something of an eidetic memory to provide real usage hints & tricks at every corner, alongside feature rich diagrams to help commit these concepts to memory.

On the whole, after writing a dissertation in notes a few times over (90k+ words plus in typed up notes after a few months), sticky notes all over my walls and Quiklabs exercises, I was beginning to have feverish dreams and night terrors about AWS. No kidding, it's the weirdest thing. I'll probably never know what an EBS volume physically looks like in the real world, but my subconscious was passing the notion around, mixing it with things that made no sense at all once I'd woken up...definitely burning out by this stage. Took this as an indicator that my brain was doing some important cataloguing behind the scenes, permitting me to begin trimming down my absolute UNIT of notes, structuring them a little and reshaping them into something that didn't exceed my Evernote account's free tier (I'm still not paying for that, lol).

Another place I used to familiarise myself with AWS in a practical sense, along with its associated services & use cases, was to visit the AWS subreddit. It's not a study guide in any sense, but I 'Extracted Transformed and Loaded' some great insights from peoples' discussions on just about anything. Service outages, Kubernetes headaches, you name it. From there, I took notice of people's hot takes, slapped on my investigative IAM role cap and did some own digging in the product related FAQs [https://aws.amazon.com/faqs/]. For example, lots of mentions of VMware Cloud on AWS (not really featured in the exam domains, but people out there already performing this job are talking about it so we should have the initiative & navigational know-how to do these look-ups ourselves). The FAQs help to understand the service availability, service definition, config options, integration and a whole bunch of other things.

Now, I was in full swing. I felt fairly confident that I could pass the Solutions Architect Associate C02 before August 28...however the exam code was updating in order to complement the internal state of AWS. Lots had changed in a few years - especially one as rapidly growing as Cloud Computing - so naturally the exams would need to shift their goalposts also.

This is where I had to make a choice. The first option was to cram before the end of August for a quick certificate before the exam update. If my aim was to have a quick certificate, and spend weeks convincing employers that I'm still capable with a deprecating exam code, then sure. But I saw no real reason to hurry aboard a sinking ship, certifying me for an exam that was most relevant in ~2018. Chances are that I'd barely scrape through interviews, and be out of my element on day 1 with all the updated services & features which have occurred since. Not ideal for me, or my workplace.

So I purposefully waited for the exam code switch into SAA C03 (effective from August 28th onwards). The exam domains reshuffled less than an average 5 minute window in Truss' cabinet, so that wasn't a major concern. But there was a greater emphasis on machine learning & databases which did feature in the exam. The precise changes are enumerated on the AWS's official exam guide, so definitely worth validating your own knowledge against that every so often. [ Jon Bonso has an excellent post on the revision changes here: https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-saa-c03/]

• Trust the official exam guide, read it from cover to cover, including each Task Statement of each domain, then focus on the AWS services listed in the Appendix section of the test. That's a biggie. [https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/]

At this point, with my SAA C02 knowledge in the rearview mirror, I took a final swipe at a video series, this time using Stéphane Maarek 's Udemy course for C03 for fresh face & leaner, faster and comprehensive wrap-up of everything that I'd covered so far (plus the additional C03 updated content). It's hard not to like him, reminds me of a geeky Charles Leclerc.

Feeling like it's now or never, I booked the exam for a few days in advance. Lucky Tuesday the 13th, it seems! Went through the Pearson Vue portal to take the exam at my nearby testing centre.

The way I see it, my entire attention span should be on the exam content itself. So opting for a 'fully managed' exam experience is less load on your mind compared to a hawk-eyed exam invigilator watching your every move. That, and 英国电信集团 had a service outage a few weeks back in my area, and I was taking no chances.

So, scheduled my test for 11am. Good night's rest, full of beans and peak energy level to focus on the exam ahead. Quite laid back attitude in the centre - I left for a bathroom break at one point which you can't do in a proctored exam at home. They let me start the exam a little earlier, offered me some noise-cancelling headphones and a whiteboard to jot down my thoughts. That's not afforded to you with a proctored home exam, so take every advantage you can!

Anyway, I was told that I'd expect to hear back within 5 working days about a result. Lo and behold, it was the next day - this morning! Very quick turnaround, so happy! ??????

Absolutely thrilled with this result! Passing both exams on my first attempt ?? AWS's own official recommendation is to attempt this exam with 1 year of experience on Cloud, though with the right guidance I've managed it in under 4 months.

Insights whilst they're fresh in-cache

I signed a waiver to say that I'd not distribute the exam questions or share my answers with anyone - which in fairness, I wouldn't even be able to do since my memory is abysmal. All I've taken with me is my own experience from my own range of questions, which will certainly be different than yours.

What I do recall from my exam is the oddballs outside of the usual S3, VPC, RDS etc etc. It's all publicly accessible information anyway, literally in the official guide, so I doubt that I'm forfeiting my sworn oath to do no harm by commenting on my own headscratchers. So here goes:

• Aurora vs DynamoDB. Often having to choose between them, and disambiguate which is best for a scenario. Databases feature often in general, but in my case there was certainly an emphasis between the types of clusters in each
• - CloudFront distribution. Especially origins, OAIs and field-encryption
• - Automatic rotation of keys
• - SQS vs Kinesis Data streams (make a mental note of RCU & WCUs)
• - Firehose into Dynamo or RDS.
• - VPC endpoints (definitely pay attention to interface endpoints & gateway endpoints)
• - Lambda inside your vpc
• - Site to site VPN
• - Trust relationship policies (didn't read any JSON code, mostly broad strokes about trust relationships and so on)
• - Parameter store Systems Manager vs Secrets Manager
• S3 cross-region KMS keys
• SSL certificates

Those are just the ones that stood out to me, forcing me to flag the questions and revisit for review after attempting the rest. Especially since the wording of the questions might ask about 'MINIMAL management overhead'...but that doesn't necessarily mean going fully serverless, but going for a less cumbersome option? I don't know, but I wish that I'd taken another look at the well architected pillars before heading into the exam to refresh my memory.

The machine learning stuff is ridiculously high level stuff anyway, most of which are just mentioned in-passing. There was definitely no need to do a Quiklabs on setting up an Elastic Transcoder to parse videos into Rekognition - that was a mistake and a very avoidable panic attack.

-What's next-

I'm still processing the news and unsure of where to take things next. A few projects that I've had rummaging in my head for a while now, which I'll outline in future posts. Upskilling myself is always the goal, so the SysOps > Solutions Architect Professional stream looks tempting.

I'm regularly tuning into GoCloud 's livestreams to hear Michael Gibbs 's mentorship on interview training and professional growth. One of the best out there, and I can't recommend him enough!

My quarter-life prospects looked fairly glum just a few months ago. But, the first step in solving a problem is recognising that one exists; we are who we are because of consequences, and mine rung like a reversed Tony Bennett song. Let's sidestep the X-Factor sob-story leading to this point because the details don't matter & the subtext is always this - when you can't change your situation then it's time to change yourself from within.

Investing in knowledge will pay the best returns. Given the surge of Cloud's adulation and industry value, it was a no-brainer to pursue a career from within. My special thanks to e-Careers for the encouragement, they've truly changed my life!

-Cloud 9 mentality-

If you've followed me this far along into the article, then perhaps you'd like to hear my parting nuggets of Stoicism to get you through a difficult time.

Know that you never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have. Notice that you've survived 100% of your bad days - that's an impeccable streak! I'm ecstatic to begin my cloud-career, but it hasn't been easy. This isn't magic, it's a tremendous amount of due diligence - and if you're able to believe in Santa for a few years, then we must also believe in ourselves for a few moments. We can do this ??

I wish you all the best in your own study paths, and look forward to coming back with the next big news. Cheers!

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