From English Teacher to AWS Architect

Hello!
My name is Alex Day. My path to AWS might seem a little unconventional. After studying Cyber Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio, to the surprise of my family, I found myself teaching English in Japan. Last year, I decided to make a career shift and set my sights on becoming a Cloud Security Architect.

For those of you that just want to see what I used to pass the exam, scroll down until you see STOP in bold!!

Three months of dedicated studying later, I was celebrating passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam! Looking back, a big part of my success came from the hands-on experience I gained with Adrian Cantrill's AWS courses. These courses, along with the valuable AWS documentation, provided the perfect one-two punch for my learning journey.

Cantrill's labs played an instrumental part in learning and passing the exam (https://github.com/acantril/learn-cantrill-io-labs). They not only allowed me to get my hands dirty building cool projects in the AWS environment, but also gave me something to show on my github to prove my abilities to future recruiters. This practical experience solidified my understanding of the theoretical concepts I was reading about in the AWS documentation.

For those that are already further along in your AWS studies, I suggest trying to tackle his Advanced Demo - Web App - Single Server to Elastic Evolution! It takes a single Wordpress server and turns it into a fully elastic, scalable and resistant architecture.

STOP!!

Here's my full list of things I did to pass the exam:

• Adrian Cantrill's AWS courses AND labs
  https://learn.cantrill.io

• Tutorials Dojo practice exams
  https://tutorialsdojo.com

• Quizlet - To remember specific facts about services https://quizlet.com

• Notebook after notebook

While some may disagree that using a notebook while studying tech takes too long, but....
The pen is a slower instrument than the keyboard, but its very slowness can be a virtue. It forces us to think and organize our thoughts before we commit them to paper.

Maybe you are like me, and can only remember things that you committed to paper.
With that, I wish you luck on your studies and AWS building! I am off to study Terraform and automate the building of a Minecraft server.

See you next time,
Alex.