How I prepared myself for AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification

So, I finally got my AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. I think I wanted to get this certification about a year ago. Now, I finally got my badge hitting a 804/1000 score. So, is that all? Well, I thought it will be a good idea to share what training process I went through in case someone in the software community would like to benefit from it. Feeling interested? Follow me below.

The plan

First of all, I thought it will be a good idea to find some help online. Browsing the Internet I’ve soon arrived at this article that I later used as a guide.

Sumit, the article’s author, talks about 3 parts:

• Learn theory from a Udemy course dictated by “A Cloud Guru”.
• Test your knowledge against Whizlabs practice exams.You can find very interesting discounts for any of their products and they totally worth it. At the time I’m writing this post, the practice exams package for this certification is being sold at U$D 9.95.
• Retest your knowledge from a different source like Udemy Jon Bonso’s course.
• Book an exam and take it!

After reading this article I thought this was a good plan. Nevertheless, not everything as it is detailed there went as expected. In other words, it took me less work than that.

Plan execution

At this point, I was ready to start my training. Below I will explain how much time each step took me and give you some recommendations and, not to mention, cautions you should take.

A Cloud Guru course

This course offers a set of videos that will go over different AWS services and learn key features about each one. The total amount of video hours provided is 18. I also recommend that you take notes of every little thing you learn here because is likely you will use them as a memory reference while you’re taking Whizlabs practice exams. All of this took me about 2 weeks to complete.

Warning: Even though this course might get very interesting as we make progress, some information might be outdated. For example, in the S3 section, the author mentions that the service provides eventually consistent read. Nowadays, this service provides strongly consistent reads which is a BIG difference. Because of this, your notes might need some tweak in the following steps. How would you know if your notes are outdated? I’ll give you a recommendation in the following step.

Test your knowledge

The Whizlabs package mentioned above offers the following:

• 675 questions
• 21 practice tests
• 54 labs

The questions tests 4 topics : resilience, security, cost-optimization, and performance.

There are 2 types of practice test:

• Similar to a real exam. Currently, 65 questions that you will need to answer within 130 minutes going through all 4 topics. Note: This might change in the future!.
• A test by topic. A test like this can be consisted of 20 questions, related to one of the topic mentioned above, that you will need to answer within 30 minutes or 10 questions within 15 minutes.

You can follow the next process in order to get better and better:

1. Take a test.
2. Once you finished, read the reasons of all the questions that you had incorrectly answered. This is a key step. In here, I’m not going to say “Try to understand the why”. In fact, I’ll say “Understand the why”. Is very important that you understand WHY the correct answer is the correct one. In order to get to this understanding, you might need to read some AWS documentation (by doing this, you might observe that your notes are outdated in a specific detail), learn about computing concepts, look for information you feel you are missing, and/or do the labs. This is what will take you the most of your training time.
   You might be wondering “how would I know if I’m building the right knowledge?”. The answer for this is because you will start to see that everything will start connecting; it will start making sense (this feeling is great). If that does not happen to you, build your patience and try to read more.
3. Idem for questions correctly answered. Some of those might be right because you guessed the right one. Although, we don’t want to guess, we want to know.
4. Check your result.
5. Once you covered all the whys of all questions and updated your notes, you are ready for a next practice exam.
6. Take another exam and repeat.

You need to repeat this process until you see that you will hit constantly a score good enough to approve. In my case, I was getting constantly between 75% and 85%.

In my case, since I have been working with AWS for the last 2 years, I didn’t even needed to take all 21 tests; 16 was good enough. Additionally, I didn’t needed to do any labs because my experience covered this for me. I’ve completed this Whizlabs step in about 3 weeks.

Now that I was feeling very confident about the knowledge I built, it was time to test myself against Jon Bonso’s practice exams.

Retesting

Sumit’s article mention that the practice exams Jon offers were challenging for him and learned key stuff. Well, to be honest, this was not my case. Jon Bonso offers 6 practice test and I only took 3 hittting the 80% at the first attempt. After experiencing this, I’d noticed that the official AWS test agencies also offer a practice exam that cost U$S 20. I decided to take one and see how I do. The result, again, 80%. I was finally ready!!.

Time to get your badge

So, you finally made it. It’s time for you to book your exam. You can follow this link to learn about that process. Because of the pandemic situation, you can now take the test online. You have two options: Pearson Vue or PSI. Pick the one that fits you. I did it with Pearson Vue. They will ask you to take pictures of the place in which you will take the exam. Moreover, you must be alone, nobody should enter into the room in the entire exam period, and the desktop should be cleared of notes or any kind of electronics. They take this very seriously.

Conclusion

All this process might see long but it totally worth it. You are not going to be the same person once you get your badge. You will hold valuable information, it will feel rewarding and you might want to take another exam (like I do and plan to do). Furthermore, every person is unique and you might not need to do as much as I did or maybe you will need to do more. My intention is to give you my insight and I hope it will help you to get your badge. So, train hard and I wish you the best!!