My tips for passing the AWS Certified: SAP on AWS - Specialty certification

Last year, I published an article to share my view of how to achieve the 12 AWS certifications efficiently. At that time, I was planning to take the AWS Certified: SAP on AWS exam on the last day of March 2023, and that means a good 6 months of preparation.

By mid-February, I had a hunch that I was ready for the exam, so I decided to bring forward the exam date by a month. I am glad that I passed this exam on 22 February 2023 and shall share my experience on this certification here.

Scope of the Exam

From the official exam guide, we can see that a majority of the questions is on how to design and migrate the SAP workloads to AWS. The least weightage is on how to operate and maintain these workloads.

What does this mean to you? It means in order for you to clear this exam confidently, besides the core SAP knowledge, you must be very similar with the following key areas:

1. Networking
2. Compute
3. Storage
4. Security

Besides working experiences over the years on AWS, it still certainly helped me a lot that I have passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, Advanced Networking - Specialty and Security - Specialty certifications before I took this SAP on AWS - Specialty exam.

Many questions tested my knowledge and understanding of these non-SAP areas - Networking, Compute, Storage and Security. I do have some limited SAP knowledge on SAP Hana, but I would be honest to admit that these SAP experiences are not as extensive as those from my other AWS and GCP implementation projects.

Essentials areas for strong understanding

You need to be very familiar with things such as how best to design and implement networking to support all kinds of SAP workloads for the Hybrid Cloud, in terms of cost-effectiveness, the least amount of downtime and other important factors.

You need to know in-depth of each different network topology using Transit Gateway, Site to Site VPN, Direct Connect etc., and why one is used over the other and how it affects the security design and implementation.

You must also know the differences of Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous migration for SAP workloads, the set of tools required for each type and why one tool is chosen over the other, even for the same type of migration.

All these are very important as each question is scenario-based and there could be more than one valid answer among the 4 to 5 given options. You need to fully understand the context of the question for you to choose the right answer.

If you know the 4 key areas well (Networking, Compute, Storage & Security), then the correct answer should appear naturally right in front of you. Otherwise, you may have a hard time in deciding which one, as all the given options can look very similar, or all seem to be a plausible answer.

How about SAP topics

Yes, you still need to be familiar with SAP Hana, SAP NetWeaver, SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Fiori, though not to the extent of extensive knowledge required for Networking and Security. An intermediate level (Level 200) of understanding on these SAP topics should be sufficient. Instead, you need more of the Level 300 (Advanced) or perhaps up to Level 400 (Expert) knowledge for Networking, Compute, Storage and Security.

You should also read the SAP Note 1656099 and SAP Note 1656250 before you sit for the exam. You will find them very useful for answering some of the questions.

Resources for my preparation

I mainly used the white papers recommended by AWS (reproduced here for your easy reference):

1. SAP Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework
2. High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options
3. SAP on AWS Technical Documentation

I found the following resources to be very useful when I was searching for documentations and user guides to improve my #SAP knowledge. I read each of them at least twice.

1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/launchwizard/latest/userguide/launch-wizard-sap-structure.html
2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sap/latest/sap-hana/aws-backint-agent-troubleshooting.html#aws-backint-agent-troubleshooting-backup-recovery
3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/troubleshooting-launch.html#troubleshooting-launch-limit
4. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sap/latest/general/overview-sap-planning.html#figure-4
5. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sap/latest/general/overview-sap-on-aws.html
6. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/launchwizard/latest/userguide/launch-wizard-sap-structure.html
7. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sap-lens/best-practice-16-5.html

I am forever grateful to Christopher Hong for recommending the below resources to me a few days before my actual exam. I only have the time to complete the #Udemy course, but the other resource (practice exam) looks very promising as well.

1. https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-sap-on-aws-specialty/ - This is a very direct and straightforward course from Udemy. I like the way Riyaz Sayyad conducted the lesson - very concise and informative. It certainly helped me a lot in improving my SAP knowledge over a short period of time.
2. https://www.whizlabs.com/sap-on-aws-certification-exam-training/ - I only have the time to do the free test of 15 questions from Whizlabs (There are 2 full tests of 65 questions each at very reasonable price). When I first attempted the free test, I found the questions to be pretty decent, with clear explanation on why the other options are wrong. After my exam, I would attest that these questions are quite similar in terms of the length and level of difficulty as compared to the actual exam.

How does SAP on AWS - Specialty stack up against the other Specialty exams

I would say while it is not an easy exam like Solutions Architect - Associate, it is definitely not as difficult as the Advanced Networking and Security Specialty exams. I would rank each Specialty certification as follows:

AWS Specialty Certifications (in descending order of difficulty)

1. Advanced Networking (most difficult)
2. Security
3. SAP on AWS
4. Database and Machine Learning (both are comparable)
5. Data Analytics

Do note that individual career and experience vary. What I deemed as challenging, for instance, networking and security, could be considered very easy by others, and vice versa.

In my previous article, I suggested an order of taking each AWS certification, and I think the order still remains unchanged. You can swop the order of Solutions Architect - Professional with SAP on AWS - Specialty though, as it should not matter much. Not at all.

Finally for the golden jacket
Finally, I am in the position of getting the AWS golden jacket! That is after answering 800 questions, over a total of 32 hours.

This pretty sums up my AWS Certified SAP on AWS certification journey. I hope this article is useful for your journey as well.

Good luck and be #AWSome!

About the Author

Chan Chee Siong is an AWS Community Builder with many years of IT professional experience. He can be connected at http://www.linkedin.com/in/chancheesiong.