AWS Certified Solutions Architect is among the most valuable and highly sought after cloud computing certifications in the world today. The AWS certification is a must-have for any IT professional, with average salaries above $100,000 USD. A certificate in AWS Cloud technology can boost your salary up to 26 percent, and the average salary for certified IT professionals is, on average, 11.7 per cent higher than those without.
I Passed this prestigious exam few months back with a score of 950 / 1000! The exam is difficult but you can certainly pass it if you focus on the services and topics which are under the domain specified in the CSAA exam blueprint.
It feels really good to achieve this certification without spending too much time and money. There are a lot of review materials right now in the market which doesn’t really help you pass the exam (or worse, contains outdated information).
I studied for 2 months and used only 1 resource (which I brought on Udemy):
AWS Solutions Architect — Associate by A Cloud Guru (ACG)
BTW, the official website for A Cloud Guru is https://acloud.guru/
I bought the ACG course and practice tests in Udemy when these are on sale so only spent roughly $30 on all of my review materials. I read all of the reviews on udemy and this certainly is the top quality material that you have to use in order to pass the exam.
Important Topics that you should ABSOLUTELY know before taking the exam:
- There is a 30 Day constraint in the S3 Lifecycle Policy before transitioning to S3-IA or S3-One Zone IA storage classes
- Redis Auth / Amazon MQ / IAM DB Authentication
- Know that FTP is using TCP and not UDP (Helpful for questions where you are asked to troubleshoot the network flow).
- Difference between S3, EBS and EFS
- Kinesis Sharding
- Handling SSL Certificates in ELB ( Wildcard certificate vs SNI )
- Difference between OAI, Signed URL (CloudFront) and Pre-signed URL (S3)
- Different types of Aurora Endpoints
- The Default Termination Policy for Auto Scaling Group (Oldest launch configuration vs Instance Protection)
Exam Tips:
Watch ACG Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break — I have my full time work so it is difficult to find time to review. What I did was to download the ACG video lectures using the official Udemy Mobile app, and play the lectures while commuting at work. I also study while eating my lunch or taking a break, or even in the loo. My point is, you have to allocate enough time for your study and this is the reason why I was able to absorb all the knowledge I need in a very short span of time.
Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready. I actually rescheduled me exam for another 2 weeks. I completed watching all of the 2019 version videos (plus the ACG quiz). Since I was able to gauge my exam readiness, I decided to reschedule my exam for 2 more weeks, to help go through the content one more time.
The official Amazon Training site is awesome and you can attend a lot of online training absolutely free — https://www.aws.training/
Additional Useful Materials list
- AWS well-architectured white papers for each of its 5 pillars - Link
- AWS official study guide (review questions only, I created a free oreilly account) - Link
- S3 FAQ -Link
- Various AWS doc/blog references provided in practice exam question explanations
- Youtube for more indepth knowledge about some of topics mentioned above.
- https://wellarchitectedlabs.com/
Soon I will write another blog post detailing about How I passed AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam…
