Aws Solutions Architect Associate
Recently, I passed my Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect—associate exam. While the information was fresh in my mind, I wanted to put together a post on my experience to help anybody else thinking of going for a similar certification.
I’m a technical support engineer at New Relic, and in my previous job I was a DevOps engineer. I have a good deal of experience with Amazon EC2 and Elastic Load Balancing. I’ve used hosted static websites using Amazon S3 and Amazon Route53. Recently I became interested in AWS Lambda and the Amazon API Gateway, and I’ve built a few pet projects using serverless functions.
With that in mind, here are some tips for anyone looking for advice about preparing for and taking an AWS certification exam.
Book the exam, but give yourself enough time
When I first set out to get an AWS certification, I had a few false starts. I’d be good for about a week, putting in an hour or two of study every night, but then I’d allow something to interrupt my routine. Finally, I decided I needed to set myself a hard deadline, so I actually booked the exam. This definitely made me get my a&@ in gear. I was a bit stressed in the days leading up to the exam, but had I not put the pressure of a deadline on myself, who knows how many more false starts I would have had.
Find a study buddy
Getting AWS certified is very much encouraged by our leadership. I have plenty of colleagues who have gotten certified and I picked their brains relentlessly. A few other colleagues were also preparing for certification, so we partnered up to study on occasion, which provided me much more motivation. Also we found that a little healthy and jovial competitiveness pushed us to do our best.
Learn the theory and do the labs
AWS provides plenty of certification prep and training opportunities. I found it tempting to power through all the theory material and come back to the labs later, but it was more effective to do the labs immediately after learning the relative theory. While the exams don’t have any labs, using the labs to get firsthand experience applying the theory improved my mental model and made it easier to recall the material.
Don’t expect to see the same questions you studied in the actual exam
During my exam prep, I answered hundreds of sample questions. And while the themes and required knowledge were similar, never once did I see a practice question on the actual exam. In this respect, I’m not sure learning by rote—practicing the same questions over and over again—will really benefit a candidate. With that being said, the sample questions were vital to my study because when I got one wrong, I went back to the prep material to understand why I was wrong, and thus improved my knowledge.
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