After recently passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate level exam several folks had asked what I did in preparation for the exam and whether I had any advice. Figured I might as well just post this for others who may be interested.
By blocking out 2-3 hour chunks of focused time every few days I figure about 1.5 months is a safe ballpark figure on how long the prep work took between ~15 hours of video lectures and a 14 chapter certification guide + lab exercises.
One thing I do have to say about this particular industry certification is that its never been so easy to quickly gain access to the end product that you are learning and prepping to certify on. I mean lets be honest, the ease with which you can quickly spin up resources to practice and tear them down when you are done all while minimizing the cost of certification prep is indeed a perfect illustration of the power and value of cloud computing.
A couple of suggestions:
1.) Go and open up an AWS account so you can get in and gets some real stick time. You can utilize a lot of services in the free tier just to get your feet wet. Remember, for the stuff you create that is not free, it will only need to exist for a few mins which results in minimal damage to the wallet as you are learning.
2.) Know the core services inside and out. You really have to understand things like VPC Networking constructs, S3/Glacier, RDS, CloudFront, Route53, Auto Scaling and ELB.
3.) Understand how to secure what YOU put into the cloud. Know the differences between what you need to manage the security of versus what AWS manages the security of.
4.) Understand AWS best practices as this is a large part of the exam. As a Solutions Architect you are expected to be able to design highly-available, scalable, fault tolerant and cost-efficient systems. When you take the exam pay very close attention to these themes as you answer the questions. The right implementation choice answer absolutely depends on the theme mentioned.
5.) If you do get the certification guide spend a solid day before the exam reviewing the end of chapter summaries of the key concepts for the exam. If it takes you as long as it did me to get through all the material (while still managing my day job and being a sports parent) then a quick refresher will certainly help.
The following are the particular test prep resources that I decided to use:
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam
A few people left crappy reviews for the book, but I found it to be a very good in depth look at AWS in general. For someone who is looking for some organized guidance this provides a solid outline for what concepts you will need to know for the exam. There are quizzes at the end of each chapter and several chapters have hands on exercises at the end. If you decide not to do all of the available exercises in the book I would suggest you at least do the exercises at the end of Chapter 14. Ch 14 is pretty critical as it ties together all of AWS’s recommended best practices which are a large part of the exam.
Pluralsight Courses
Architecting Highly Available Systems on AWS
AWS Security Fundamentals
AWS VPC Operations
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate