Introduction

I must have spent the last two years pondering over doing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam. I’ve never really been one for taking exams to be honest, even as I relive the feeling I had on the morning of my driving test I am starting to break out in a cold sweet.

Whenever I’ve thought about doing a certification in recent years I have tended to end up talking myself out of it with one excuse or another. It’s usually a combination of me convincing myself that I don’t have enough time, combined with that subconscious dread of having to go through an exam. That probably accounts for why my last certification exam was over 5 years ago now! I’m not really sure where this misguided fear of exams comes from, perhaps it’s my inner self worrying what people might think if I fail?

Well, fast forward a bit and we’re about 6 weeks into the COVID lockdown. I’m slowly going crazy, stuck in our small 1 bed flat and not able to go out due to the lockdown restrictions. Pre lockdown I had be training for my first “Half Ironman” triathlon and seeing all those 5am winter’s mornings at the swimming pool going out the window was pushing me to breaking point. My constant moaning was slowly driving my long suffering girlfriend to despair, I was in desperate need of a distraction. Something I could absorb myself in and a goal I could start working towards.

Studying for a certification wasn’t the distraction that immediately jumped out at me. I was already having a hard enough time managing the work life balance during the lockdown. Logging in as soon as I woke up in the working and switching off the laptop late into the evening, studying for work just seemed like another thing to extend my working day. The point was made to me by my girlfriend everyday though - if you don’t study for an exam now while you are at home and you have the chance, you’re going to regret it if you start having to go back into the office with any regularity. So I finally committed, I would study for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate…

Why this exam and how long will it take?

For most people with previous exposure to AWS, the recommended path to certification glory seems to be starting from the Architect Associate exam. The Cloud Practitioner was another option but upon looking into it further, it just didn’t look like it would offer me the depth and the challenge I was looking for. Not only did I hope to gain a certification out of this process, I also hoped I would learn a whole load of new stuff.

I had to think realistically about how long I thought it would take me to study for this certification. Truth be told, I didn’t have a clue. Based on my previous experience of studying for the CCNA back in 2014⁄15 I could only hazard a guess at around 3 months of study with a minimum of 1 hour per day dedicated to the task. Would it be enough? I guess only time would tell…

Study Resources

The market is swamped with resources and courses for IT certifications and training. Whether you’re looking for AWS, Azure, GCP, K8’s, Terraform or Docker, you can be pretty sure that you’re going to be spoilt for choice. Sounds great I hear you say! Well, not really to be honest. From what I have seen and tried personally, there are only really a few solid resources out there that you can use to pass the exam. I won’t waste your time by going into which vendors I wouldn’t recommend but two trainers who I can wholeheartedly say are more than fit for the job are Adrian Cantrill and Stephane Maarek.

Adrian (who as many of you remember used to be at Linux Academy) now produces his own AWS courses over at https://learn.cantrill.io/. Although this is a relatively new venture for him, he is certainly not new to the certification game. The guy has a near wizard like reputation within the community and it’s no wonder when you see the courses he produces. They are without doubt the most complete and comprehensive set of resources on the market for the exam. With 50+ hours of content there is a good chance you’ll have a few grey hairs on your head by the time you finish, but it will be well worth it when you ace the exam. The bloke even has a 100% pass rate, you can’t argue with that now can you?! More importantly the labs and demos give you that real world experience you’ll need to go into the exam with confidence. You could argue that his courses are a little on the pricey side but that being said, not as pricey as failing the exam and paying twice!

Stephane Maarek is also very well know for the content he produces. All his current courses can be found in Udemy for a very reasonable price and are a perfect alternative to Adrians series if you are a little bit tight on cash. From what I recall, Stephane’s course comes in at around 25 hours including demos. Compared with Adrian that sound a little bit light but I can assure you that it is absolutely more that enough to get you through the exam. Many other vendors are offering courses at only 10-12 hours in length, these I recommend that you avoid. If you’re interested then you can find his complete content offering here: https://courses.datacumulus.com/#aws-certifications.

Studying

Now for the fun part, the studying! I used both of the above resources, starting with Adrians course and finishing off with Stephane’s. I went through both courses in the intended order, labbing it up along the way. I’m not much of a note taker but I would keep a note of things like exam tips or timers/service limits etc.

Quickly I started to go past my intended 1 hour per day of study, clocking up 2 hours most weekdays and then 6 hours over the weekend. I was fully immersed in it by this stage. I can’t stress enough how crucial it is for you to get hands on and complete the labs. You will really struggle with the scenario based questions otherwise but more importantly, you won’t have that hands on experience that employers are demanding of perspective candidates.

I won’t go through every section of the syllabus but it can be found here https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/. My advice is to really be comfortable with the big scoring items, EC2, ELB, ASG, S3, IAM, RDS etc. Get your generic cloud knowledge on point, elasticity, scalability, fault tolerance etc.

Roughly 6 weeks after beginning, I had watched both courses end to end and completed all of the labs and hands on exercises. I knew it was time to bite the bullet and get the exam booked so I excitedly logged into the AWS platform and scheduled it for two weeks later.

My main thought now was to refine what I had learnt and practice in an environment where I can simulate exam conditions. Enter Tutorials Dojo https://tutorialsdojo.com/. I had never heard of them before if I can be completely honest, I sort of stumbled across them getting shout outs on LinkedIn from students who had used them to help prepare for their exams. Essentially, they offer fairly tough practice exams and as I would soon learn, they are a hidden gem!

I worked my way though every single one of there practice exams, doing most multiple times. At the beginning I was scoring in the low 70’s but by the time exam day was upon me I was scoring in the mid to high 90’s each time. These practice exams are invaluable. Don’t be fooled into thinking you can buy these and memorise the questions, they are similarly difficult but NOT the same questions you get on the exam. No brain dumps here.

The exam

The NDA means that of course I am unable to disclose any details from the exam but I will try to give you a brief overview of my experience.

I found the whole online proctoring setup to be fairly seamless. Initially I had a few technical difficulties but they were easily rectified. I would say this however, make sure you run through the pre check procedures well before exam day. There isn’t anything difficult in it, but it’s not something you want leave to chance. There isn’t anyone there to help you, if you can’t get the software working on your machine then there is only going to be so much that the proctor can do.

You can begin your exam 30 mins prior to your start time, I would suggest you do this and give yourself the freedom to go through the process with plenty of time. Once you have done all the relevant registration procedures, your proctor will reach out to you and when happy, they will start the exam for you.

My exam tips here don’t really pertain to what you need to study, I think I have covered that in the above paragraphs but please contact me if you need any advise. My tips however relate to how you should conduct yourself in the exam.

  1. Firstly, if you are unsure or an answer you should mark it as complete and come back to it at the end.
  2. Don’t kill your time trying to answer difficult questions at the beginning. Flag it and come back to it at the end. In Adrians course he has a whole video around this sort of techique.
  3. Read the questions properly. Don’t miss marks because you only selected one answer when you should have selected two!
  4. And last but not least, eliminate answers which are clearly wrong first. If you have a multiple choice question with four possible answers then you can almost bet money that two of those answers are going to be obviously wrong answers.

At the end take your time to review the questions you haven’t managed to answer. If you don’t know something then pause and at least try to make a logical guess.

When you’re done you will get your results immediately. You won’t however get your score until the following day (although AWS states up to 5 working days).

And that’s it!

I think I’ve already waffled on for long enough so I’ll leave it there. Best of luck to all of you studying for this exam. It’s tough but with the right study and commitment you can nail it. For me personally, it took me a a little less than 8 weeks from start to finish. For some it will be less and for many it will be more. Be consistent and don’t be afraid of failure. You’ll never know unless you try.

Feel free to contact me directly if I can help in anyway but please do understand that I will not be able discuss exam specifics with you.

Good luck!

Alex