How To Prepare For AWS certification – AWS Solutions Architect Associate Level

Exam Overview

1. 55 multiple choice questions
2. 80 minutes
3. 65 is the pass percentage.
4. Multiple choice questions.

I passed AWS certification for Solutions Architect – associate level with 87% marks. I completed the exam in 40 minutes.

Questions were quite easy, but the options were tricky. So, I will explain the steps I followed to get this certification. Note: The exam has been updated for 2018. make sure you cover the new services

Hands-On Experience

Hands-on experience is a must for this certification. Most of the questions asked in the exam are scenario-based.

It will be really tough to pick the right answer unless you have hands-on experience with the core services. I signed up for an Udemy course for AWS certification.

It helped me a lot. I was able to have good hands-on sessions and got good conceptual ideas about AWS services.

Also Read: Why Every Techie Should Have a Tech Blog

If you are a newbie and you don’t have any hands-on experience I would suggest you, sign up for the Udemy AWS certification courses. Even though I had hands-on experience with AWS services, the Udemy course gave me an in-depth knowledge of the core services.

Note: Take notes while watching the video course.

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RECOMMENDED COURSES

 AWS Certified Solutions Architect (2019)

AWS Certified Developer Associate level (2019)

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate (2019) 

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If you want to get more confidence and final preparation for the AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate exam. Then you can go for AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate Practice Tests only after completing the AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate Course. 

For getting more confidence in preparing for the final preparation in the next level of AWS certification that means for AWS Certified Developer- Associate certification, you can go for  AWS Certified Developer – Associate 2019 (Practice Tests) only after completing the AWS Certified Developer Associate Course.

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Whitepapers:

You should read all the white papers recommended by AWS. It is really hard to read the whole AWS documentation while the white papers give you an overall conceptual idea about the services.

In fact, there were few questions from the white papers. Read about the recommended white papers and sample questions here

Re-invent Videos:

Watch the Amazon-reinvent videos for core services like VPC, RDS, EC2, and S3 from YouTube. You will gain good knowledge about AWS services if you watch those videos.

Link: Reinvent VPC video

Reading FAQ’s:

Every service has an FAQ section in its documentation. Read those FAQ’s. It won’t take much time, but it has answers to lots of confusing questions. If you read the FAQ you will be able to answer nearly 4 to 5 questions. You can eliminate the billing section.

Documentation:

AWS has really really good documentation for all their services. You can refer to this documentation to get started with the implementations.

Use cases:

Try to learn about the use cases of every service like SWF, SQS, SNS, SES, etc…

Architectures:

Go through all the reference architectures provided by AWS on this page. Understand clearly, under what scenarios, particular services like ec2, SQS, and elastic cache are used.

You might have read those blog posts saying, that VPC is the part where you get most of the questions, That is not true. Questions will be there from almost all core services. In VPC, you should learn about NAT, public, and private subnets, NACLs, security groups, and route tables.

Important services to cover:
EC2, VPC, RDS, S3, Route53, CloudFront, Cloudwatch, ELB, autoscaling, SWF, SQS, dynamoDB.

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Practice Questions

Once you are familiar with the important services, you can search for apps in the Play Store and app store for practice questions. There are a few apps available for practicing AWS certification questions.

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