The What, Why and How

This short article is for those of you interested in taking AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate.

What is AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate?

its a certification after taking the practitioner and before taking the pro :). click on the link above for the official website.

The complete list of the certification is as per below image:

as you can see below, I took the CCP on 20th Mar 2020. When I passed the CSAA, the expiry date of my CCP become May 27th, following the CSAA expiry date.

This is my 4th Cloud related certification, previously I passed Azure Fundamentals and 70-535 exam.

Why you take the certification as Architect, I thought you are a sales?

Soon after my 1st month in AWS, I realized that AWS has so much features and products that sometime hidden behind on so many good things that we released every month. My colleague, Petra, has great post like this in linkedin.

When I interacted with customers and partners, I realized that to have a certain level of knowledge will be useful to help them better when visioning the use case and possible high level solutions. Selling is about understanding customer better, and able to find the right solution.

Soon after completing the Cloud Practitioner, as much it was an eye opener, I thought that my real sweet spot will be the Solution Architect - Associate.

so following the working backwards method to be able to understand better my customer needs, to ask a better questions, to be able to summarize in the customer language and also filling my curiosity about AWS solutions, I decided to set a date.

The date was the exam date. It was 6th May 2020. It will be 46 day after me passing CCP and I thought I will have enough time to prepare. I was not quite accurate :).

How do you prepare for the exam?

I started reading materials and videos from LinuxAcademy.com, AWS whitepapers etc. Aimed to complete at least 8 hours every weekend and 1-2 hours every night for the preparation, reading and hands-on labs. I chose the easier/more familiar topics first before going into uncharted waters like Lambda, Kinesis, etc. (note that I worked for 21 years in mostly Microsoft based workload). Getting myself familiar with Function, serverless, Containers, step functions, and the different between "Accounts" and "Users" was pretty interesting learning and had some "aha" moment.

After week 3, i was stressed because the more I read and try, the more I found out I know very little about the rest of the solutions. AWS has so much features and capabilities, even inside a common workload like EC2 or S3 or even the Route53. I also felt quite happy after uncovered this hidden "gems" of features. I guess my geekyness kicks in every time to time.

I started to create a note. note in Bahasa Indonesia, so when I repeat the study, I will have less workload in my (limited) compute power to process english into Indonesians :). In the end, I have an 81 pages note in Bahasa Indonesia to summarize my understanding about the workload.

Apparently, linuxacademy.com has about 100 videos (or at least I felt like it) in the CSAA course and I finished about 98 of it. The speaker has quite soothing voice ( @adrian cantrill). I took 80% of the hands on lab too. I find it was quite ok session.

Now about 1 week before the 6th of May, I realized I just completed 60% of the materials, so I braved myself to change it to 27th of May, to give me enough time to read, test and digest the meaning of the lessons. so its.... 67 days after my CCP.

My daughter helped me with the study. She created a table for me matching the EC2 instance type and the naming convention (as per below). She also created a table for the 5 well-architected pillars.

About a week before, I asked around of those passed the exam, and they told me about Whizlabs.com. I quickly signed in, took all the 2020 test exam, each exam took about 1.5 hours to complete, maybe in total about 1000 questions worth of non-having-a-holiday-at all.

About 1 day before the test, a colleague pointed me to a website called Tutorial Dojo that created some comparisons table between the different services, and I found this was a good refreshing method to understand. Still, you need to read and practice more.

One of the concerning moment taking an on-line proctored exam were 2 things for me. One was my internet connection. I used a provider that was known for not so reliable connectivity, so I asked my whole family, including my house helper to not using internet during the exam time. My son decided to move house instead to continue his holiday gaming moment. (mind you GTA V was given away for free).

the 2nd concern was the inability to go to restroom when needed.... I dont know about you, for me this was a major concern :). This was strongly against online proctoring rules from Pearson-Vue.

Well, in the end, the guide, practice, hands on lab from the 3 sites I mentioned, helped me familarize with the terms, the usage, the keywords that we need to quickly identify in the questions and the story. I was able to finish the exam with 59 minutes left.

It was well worth the effort. Planning to take the security specialty maybe in the next 6 months, to continue my passion in security related topics.

Goodluck with yours!

Frequently check AWS online sessions, you may learn tips and tricks there. Check Petra Barus blogs and Doddi Priyambodo useful site!.