How I Passed AWS Certified Architect - Associate Exam (2022)
How I Passed AWS Certified Architect - Associate Exam (2022)
Ahirjoy Biswas (PMP, PMI-ACP, TOGAF 9.1)
I passed my exam on 30th May’22 in my first attempt. I am sharing my learning experiences here with you and will be really very happy if my experience helps someone else to crack the examination.
Core Concepts:
i. Books - AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide, Associate (SAA-C02)
by Ben Piper and David Clinton
This is an excellent book which covers all Core Concepts in detail. Please go through the entire content at least twice. Very good for ready reference and revision. Considering the lazy person I am, I always prefer to read real books and take notes than carrying Kindle or laptop.
ii. Course - You can go through “Ultimate AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate 2022” course by Stephane Maarek in Udemy which is the most popular course for AWS Associate in Udemy at present. Almost every week Udemy offers some discount on its courses, during that time you can buy the course for Rs. 500/- only.
There are also many training providers in the market who arranges AWS certification trainings but those are unnecessarily costly and may not be needed.
Additional Reading:
i. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is one of the most critical and important topics in AWS. Without very good understanding of VPC, don’t even think of appearing for the examination. I have found the below article by J Cole Morrison is an extraordinary effort to explain VPC with analogy of a City. You will never forget the concepts. Hats off to the author.
https://start.jcolemorrison.com/aws-vpc-core-concepts-analogy-guide/
ii. AWS Whitepapers:
Please go through at least below three AWS whitepapers (the more the better). But these three are absolutely essential.
a) serverless-multi-tier-architectures-api-gateway-lambda
b) disaster-recovery-workloads-on-aws
c) management-and-governance-cloud-environment-guide
Practice Questions:
This is most important. Even if you have worked with AWS for 1-2 years, once you start solving practice test questions you will find you have so many new things to learn! After appearing for a test, analyze both right and wrong answers very carefully to learn by heart why wrong answers are wrong! For doubts, refer AWS documentation. I have found AWS has the best documentation among all cloud providers. However, if you only read documentation, you will be bored and lost very soon. That’s why its better you refer documentation for advanced doubts once you are through with Core topics. Then attempt the exams once more.
In my initial days I used to score between 55-70 (so I failed in all initial attempts!), but then gradually I started to understand the pattern.
I have used the below practice test from UDEMY,
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams by Jon Bonso.
It has 5 separate full length practice tests.
You can use the below test also as it also have good reviews, but don’t confuse yourself with too many tests.
Practice Exams|AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate by Stephane Maarek in Udemy. It also has 5 separate full length practice tests.
Is it Difficult?
It depends whether you were dedicated and smart enough during your study. AWS exam is like a sea, you need to understand numerous services, specifically their correct use cases. AWS Exam will not just ask you what is the difference between EWS and EFS, it will give you a scenario and then ask you whether EFS, EBS, Instance Store, S3 or Fsx will be best. The scarier part is often in AWS you will get questions where multiple answers are correct, but there you need to select the best based on minimum overhead or minimum cost or maximum efficiency or low latency or durability as desired in the question!!!
Please go through the below Quora Thread carefully to understand the core topics from where you will get most of the questions,
Answer to How difficult are the AWS certifications and how much does it cost to take one? by Janakiram Msv
In addition to those I also wish to add the below core topics too from my end which are very popular in AWS exams (There may be few overlaps with the above thread but that only means those topics are even more important!),
1. EC2 Placement Group Types – Which one to use when
2. Advantage of Nitro Based SSD over normal SSD? For which operations SSD and HDD are used? Which of these are bootable?
3. IP Address Range for Private Subnets
4. Strong understanding of encryption - Symmetric and Asymmetric, how the below Authentication tools are different –
Amazon Cognito (User and Identity Pool), AWS managed Microsoft AD, AWS SSO, AWS KMS, AWS Secrets Managers, AWS CloudHSM
5. What are the different DB instance classes and use cases?
6. What are the different types of DB storages and use cases?
7. Difference between Aurora Single-Master, Multi Master, Advantage of RDS Read Replicas
8. Difference between Dynamo DB Global Secondary Index and Local Secondary Index
9. Functionality of Dynamo DB DAX, Elastic Cache
10. Difference between Management Events and Data Events
11. Custom Matrices in Cloudwatch
12. Difference between Standard SQS and FIFO SQS, How SNS is different. What is the need of Kinesis Data Stream, Vdieo stream and Firehose.
13. Difference between Application and Network Load Balancers
14. Clear Understanding of the following security tools,
Amazon Guarduty, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Detective, Amazon Security Hub, NACL and Security groups, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, AWS Macie
15. Route 53 Routing Policies
16. Entire VPC Chapter – Every word! Also, Transit Gateway, Global Accelerator, Amazon Direct Connect, VPN
17. Different Types of Storages and Interfaces - Fsx for Lusture, Fsx For Windows, Storage Gateway, AWS Snowball, AWS Data Sync, EFS, S3, EBS, S3 LifeCycle Policy
18. Anything and Everything which is available in AWS documentation :-(
However, in my exam I encountered few very cutting edge/unusual topics too – Data Lake, Qlik, AWS Athena, EMR, Fargate etc. so you need to be ready for few surprises and don’t lose your cool. If you waste too much time for one question you will find that you have to leave few questions at the end which are rather easier and that could make a difference between pass and fail. I myself finished the exam just 10 minutes before and was not able to review all the questions which I had answered but flagged for review to come back later. Lucky Me!
How long does it take to prepare? How much practical exposure required?
These are bad questions but among the most popular! Everybody has his/her own strategy and timeline. For me it was around 5 weeks as I am most effective when I provide myself a hard timeline. So I started preparing after scheduling the exam! Everyday I devoted 1-1.5 hours in the night and over the weekend 4 hours as I practiced most of the hands-on over the weekends. You will not be able to attempt all concepts hands-on as many concepts are very advanced and free Tier will not suffice (like Kinesis Data Streams, Fire Hose, Data Lake etc.) but to understand concepts like VPC (Private, Public subnet, NAT Gateway, Internet Gateway, NACL, Security Group, ENI, VPC endpoint) you must have to build the pilot architecture on your own for perfect understanding.
I wish you all the best!
Very informative article!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much. Glad you like it.
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