I cleared the AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification today and it was very interesting. I have been using AWS for around 6 months now and the experience has been great. Here are some tips for the certification:
AWS FAQ
Go through the following FAQ:
EC2 FAQ|RDS FAQ |Route53 FAQ| S3 FAQ |VPC FAQ| SQS FAQ
FAQ study tip
The following method to study the FAQ works well. Go to the FAQ link and then use this converter to convert the html to pdf. Use okular to open the pdf and highlight the important lines. Okular allows you to save the highlighted/annotated pdf. The idea is to highlight parts that you would revise a day or two before the test.
AWS Getting Started and Product Details
Product Details and Getting Started guides are good ways to get an introduction to the various products and services. Go through the following product details/Getting Started guide (does not include the ones that have already been covered in the FAQ)
Elastic Beanstalk | What is Auto Scaling | Elastic Load Balancing | EC2 | Glacier | Storage Gateway |DynamoDB |Elasticache |Redshift I Redshift II | Cloudfrount | Direct Connect |AWS Import/Export | CloudWatch | SNS | EMR
Kinesis
Whitepapers
A lot of questions in the certifications exam are from the whitepaper. It will be worth going through the whitepapers multiple times. Use Okular to highlight important parts. some of the white papers have duplicate content. For example, the security whitepaper spends a lot of time introducing the various products before it delves into the security aspect. It might be worth highlighting just the security part of the product in the security whitepaper. Here are the important whitepapers:
Overview of Amazon web Service | AWS Security Best Practices |AWS Security Best Practices |Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices | AWS Storage Services Overview | AWS Well-Architected Framework | Backup and Recovery Approaches Using AWS
certification quiz and courses
One of the best ways to prepare for certification is to attempt quiz questions and attend one of the open courses. The course that I used was from acloudguru. Its a great course and covers a lot of material. The quiz in the course is quite helpful too. Some other quizes are:
The cert school – Free and paid quiz.
Jayendra Patil’s blog – Blog containing advanced concepts and quiz.
Excellent collection of questions. However, the quiz is console based.
Studytrails Articles
The following articles provide a hands-on tutorial to some of the concepts included in the certification:
AWS articles on StudyTrails.
Good luck with the certification. We will try and include some quiz questions in a few days.
I’ve just discovered your website today trying to look up something regarding Spring framework. Then I discovered that you have all these articles on other technologies as well and they are well written! Thank you so much! By the way, congrats to you on getting the AWS certification!
Thanks!
Thanks for this good information. this is useful for many people. keep up the good work.
Thanks!
I find your materials easy to understand the concepts behind various technologies. I’ve never found an easier explanation on design patterns anywhere else. Thanks to you for helping out the IT community looking for easier explanations. I request you to write more detailed materials on Spring, hibernate and other latest emerging technologies. Congrats on AWS certification.
Thanks for aggregating all the materials at a place.I will help others to look for materials for their certification.By the way congratulations for getting your certification done.