AWS Cloud Practitioner | Everything I Used to Pass (and What I’d Skip)🚀

#aws #cloud #certification

I recently claimed my AWS Cloud Practitioner certification and I'd like to share some tips and resources from my experience that might be helpful if you're targeting the same.

1. Avoid over-estimating/under-estimating the Difficulty Level

Let me clarify that the exam has a bound syllabus, which means 99.99% questions will be from the official topics list and you don't have to keep looking for more resources.
Secondly being a foundational level exam, very few(5-6) questions will require logic and reasoning to get through.

Lastly, this doesn't mean that we can under-estimate the question set. If you skip any topic, there will be high chances that you'll have to pass up on a question, since most of them will be fact based.

2. Watch-out for "KEYWORDS!!"

The best way to remember the services and differentiate between them is recalling the keywords. I'll give you an example:

In AWS, both "Cost Explorer" and "Trust Advisor" help optimize cloud spending and resource utilization. But if we bundle them with keywords like 'Cost explorer offers cost forecasting' whereas 'Trust advisor focuses on recommending best practices to manage resources in AWS environment'

Here we can recall and differentiate these services when question is asked regarding cost/usage etc.

Cost-explorer ----> Fore-casting
Trust Advisor ----> Recommendation

3. Limited Resources

Don't overwhelm yourself with plethora of resources available over the internet. Trust me, you don't need a lot to clear this exam.

All you need is 1 good video course and 5-6 full length practice sets.

I used the below 3 for my preparation and they prove to be sufficient.

Course: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Practice Set: 6 Practice Sets
Mind map to keep track of topics: Mind map

4. Practice Topic-wise (ChatGPT - The saviour)

Now here's a game changer, keep note that this isn't much reliable, but surely helps in gaining grasp over individual topics.

You can generate topic-wise questions of simple and complex problems to practice as you complete a section.

This will ensure that you've additional edge alongside the questions that're given at the end of each section in udemy/any preferred course.

5. NO PANIC MODE

Don't get discouraged and panic if you score low in practice sets. The sole purpose of practice sets is not only getting experience of real-time examination.

The best way to use it is, solving a practice set and then using it as a question dump before moving to the next set. Don't focus on the score in 1st iteration/attempt.
After thoroughly going through the sets 1 by 1 with correct answer, the second attempt is your real test.

Repeat this process till you get to a desired (~80%) score.
This exam will basically test you for the knowledge width, not in-depth understanding, so covering a large volume of questions will be helpful.

Edit: BONUS (Optional)

If you're attempting the exam as a non-native speaker of the preferred language, you can claim 'accommodation' for an additional 30 minutes over the default exam duration.