How I passed the AWS AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional Exam SAP C01
I passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional (SAP-C01) exam few weeks ago in First attempt with a score of 901. This is currently one of the toughest certification in IT industry so I know it would be hard bit it turned out to be even harder.
This is my 2nd AWS certification. Read here — How I passed my AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate certification.
My Study Material which I used for
LinkedIn Learning has many courses on individual topics.
Most questions were around 2 paragraphs and few even longer. Most answer choices were 1 paragraph. There were around 5–10 simpler questions. Simpler meaning directly asking what the right option for this combination is. Lot of the questions were about combining multiple products together. And their interaction. The questions were related to fastest option, lowest cost, easiest implementation, not necessarily the correct option. So, the answer has to match the criteria, You have 2 minutes to understand and comprehend the question, and answer choices. And approximately 30 seconds to pick the right answer. Note you don’t have more than 2 minute & 30 seconds for each question and you cannot afford to leave/not answer any of 75 questions if you want to pass.
Some General Tips:
1. Practice reading the long questions and figuring out quickly the keywords of what is being asked. Keywords such as highly available, cost-effective, etc.
2. The questions are usually split into 3 sections — the scenario, the question itself which is usually a one-liner, and the multiple choices. For me, it’s faster if you read the one-liner question first like “What is the most cost-effective solution to meet the requirements?”. Then browse the choices quickly and look for keywords. If you see Lambda and serverless and the others are auto-scaling with EC2s, you already have an idea what to eliminate. Then read the scenario to understand the full requirement. I got this tip from one blog and it worked for me.
3. In the mock exams, understand why the other choices are wrong. This can help you practice and quickly eliminate the wrong answers in the actual exam. It really helps if you Know the service concepts, their limits and their use cases. For example, in an identity federation type of question and you see creating users or access keys and secrets, it’s usually wrong and can be eliminated.
For everyone who will also be taking it soon, here is some REAL information you can use:
— Know the difference of Service Catalog and CloudFormation. Like for enforcement of services and tags and such across different AWS accounts
— Know how you can use AWS Organizations, CloudFormation Stack Sets and IAM/SCP to manage what infrastructure resources your team can launch
— Know how to do blue/green deployments in Elastic Beanstalk
— Know how to create a CI/CD pipeline and integrate this with ECR/S3
— Know how you can speed up DynamoDB performance (Do you use auto scaling? Or put an ElastiCache in front? Or use DAX?)
— Migrations were a HUGE part of my exam. Know when to rehost or re-platform or even re-architect a legacy infrastructure with a database.
— Brush up on your math because some scenarios will ask what is the best migration scheme (S3 acceleration with fast internet speed? Use existing DX line but with slower speed? Use snowball even though the size of the data is a bit low). You’ll either choose your best answer depending on cost or urgency of the task.
— When connecting multiple VPCs to a central VPC using a dedicated DX line, know when you have to create VIFs or create a DX gateway or create a transit gateway. These questions really made it difficult for me since I have little experience with transit gateway and DX.
— Know how to combine CloudFront and load balancers to re-reoute traffic to different origins.
— Does NAT Gateway support IPv6? Nat gateway vs Nat instance vs egress only internet gateway for your private subnet?
— How to mitigate DDOS and application layer attacks (CloudFront + WAF, NLB +WAF, autoscaling with WAF, CloudWatch with Shield, combinations like that)
— Questions about authentication using ldap or sso or sts
— Migrating small applications — Would you rather use SMS or VM import or just reinstall it in beanstalk (supports the app’s prog language) as a cost efficient measure?
— Some question regarding IBM db2 that you’re supposed to migrate cost efficiently, but I can’t exactly remember the details
— This one was tough one for me — You have a desktop application + some other stuff, and you need to boost its performance. It’s a multi answer question, and you had to pick between a service that doesn’t really boost performance + Workspaces vs CloudFront + Appstream
— AWS workdocs also came up
— How do you properly migrate a local data analytics server to redshift? This question involved so many steps and I wasn’t sure on the answer since I didn’t have experience on this
—If you have a small RTO window, like 5 minutes but an RPO of one hour, what is your best but most cost effective DR plan? Do you go pilot light or warm standby or multi AZ?
— Know what the difference between ecs task execution role is and ecs task role
— Know how to resolve lambda timeout errors in a serverless stack. Increase the memory, increase the timeout, etc
— This one was a bit tricky. If you have an app that runs scripts on a dataset and it runs for X mins on a day’s worth of data, how do you optimize the setup so that the script instead runs as data comes in. Compare EC2 auto scaling, lambda, and ECS containers.
— How do you quickly test your newly deployed app and quickly revert to the old version if errors are encountered?
— I also had questions that included Fargate, but only for general use cases like using it for container management and the likes
— Know how to be cost effective with redshift master node and task nodes. Yes you will use reserved and spot fleet combination, but it’s more of deciding HOW and WHEN to do it
— There were couple of question that involved CLI option & using cloud development kit. Other option I can remember is AWS amplify. These were MOST confusing and hard for me as I don’t have much experience working with them.
As I said above, it was super hard to answer 75 questions in 3 hours in a cold room, and at the end I had 5 mins to review and around 25–30 questions flagged. I think that’s just the thing with these professional exams where it feels like a question can have two answers, and it all just depends on how you will Architect it. The worst part is reading the long questions & options and comprehending everything in short time. And you have do it over and over again for 75 times :)
Many people flag tough questions to comeback later. I don’t recommend “I’ll return to this later and flag it for now” tactic. You don’t want to be re-reading long questions and answers many times. Instead, give each question a full thought, and only flag it if you are past your desired pacing for each question, or if you just have totally no idea on the correct answer.
The exam only focuses on the technical side of the equation. It can broach subject areas that start to pull away from core AWS technology such as networking concepts (e,g, BGP routing) or say best practice migration technique, but you won’t be tested on areas such as how would you sell and promote AWS as the preferred platform and solution for your business. Think of the exam as only approaching the technical questions after the business decisions have been made. In the real world, the sort of professionals who would be attempting this exam would need to deal with both the technical and the business, it certainly is in my case.
To end, if asked if I would recommend doing this exam and the associated head and heartache, I would say yes. The exam is completely focused on the technical aspects of designing and architecting solutions within AWS. Like all exams it doesn’t take everything into account, but at a technical level at least it sure does come close. If you really want it, you will get there. I might sound like a motivational speaker; however I truly believe it. The level of detail and appreciation you will receive from going through the experience, in my opinion is absolutely worth it.
