My experience and some tips 🔗

Last Friday I finally undertook the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. It was pretty tough and I’d spent nearly a year in preparation. I thought I’d failed but over the weekend I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’d passed.

Why put myself through this? Well our self-taught team had recently carried out a migration of our analytics platform from on premises to AWS. It would have been good to have at least taken the certification training courses beforehand. Moreover, our organisation now requires that anyone administrating a cloud platform has these kinds of certification.

Preparation 🔗

There are plenty of courses and practice exams available. They all require time and most of them — certainly the best ones I found — require money.

I took two separate courses to prepare myself. The first was the certification path on Pluralsight. This provides some good coverage of the topics. In fact there are many courses here, I barely scratched the surface.

The second was the associate course from A Cloud Guru. This not only has good, concentrated coverage (over 36 hours) but also a set of mock exams. They also have handy features like a readiness calculator depending on how much time you’re spending. However, these turned out to be rather easier than the actual questions I faced in the exam.

I spent some money on other mock exams. Of these I’d say the Tutorials Dojo practice exams by Jon Bonso was the best. I also did a few of Stephane Maarek’s practice exams on Udemy. These were tougher than the Cloud Guru questions. I suspect that are more up to date than the Cloud Guru questions. TODO links

Each of these mock exams and practice tests take an hour or so, like the real thing, and require some dedicated focus time. I spent an hour a day on these, especially in the last few weeks before the exam. My day job often got in the way. I supplemented this with questions on the CloudPrep app every now and then. This presents itself much like Apple’s “fitness” rings, although as you see below I didn’t get perfect fitness before the exam:

The Exam 🔗

I took the exam remotely, that is to say, at home. I don’t live or work anywhere near a test centre. The setup for remote proctoring is quite rigourous. One has to choose a space where you will not be interrupted and cannot reach for any assistance (ie books or devices). One also has to photograph and video your space to demonstrate its suitability.

The exam as tough. Expect to be asked about pretty much any topic covered by the certification. I spent a lot of preparation focussing on my weakest spots, like networking (which is one of the most important topics I think) but there were only one or two questions on it.

I spent two hours on the exam. The first time through I flagged a number of questions for review but in fact I reviewed every single question again.

By the time I was finished I was half-convinced I’d failed, and was already planning my second attempt! But fortunately the next day I received notification that I’d passed.

Tips 🔗

Practice Exams From Multiple Providers 🔗

The Cloud Guru course had some pretty great presentation and what seemed like a good set of questions. However, I think they are out of date. Of course they may not be by the time you read this! But I think it’s best to have as wide a selection of exam providers as possible.

The Reddit group /r/AWSCertifications has good discussion here. It is how I discovered the Tutorial Dojo and Udemy courses. Folks post their experiences there.

Schedule Practice Time 🔗

If you have a day job you need to set aside time not only for the courses but quality time for the mock exams. This is doubly true for the real exam of course!

Don’t Get Certified 🔗

Actually do, if you want to! I needed to for my employment, and it certainly won’t harm my resume. But it costs time and money.

The courses I took are valuable in their own right. If you can find free courses, and if you can relate the knowledge to your own work this is much more valuable than a credential. After every section of the course I would see how that related to what we had done in our migration, and what we could have done differently.

Assuming you do proceed with the certification, then the best of luck to you!