DEV Community: Tommy Leng

3x AWS Certified: Completed

Tommy Leng — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 18:56:35 +0000

The title says it all, I'm finally 3x AWS Associates Certified! When I started this journey, I had zero knowledge of what cloud computing was. Couldn't even wrap my head around what EC2 or a VM was, what EBS did, or how to comprehend S3 and yet I was able to pass all 3 AWS Associates Certifications in 4.5 months.

If you're in doubt that you can actually learn this or have no idea what is going on, that's ABSOLUTELY NORMAL since there are a lot of services to cover but believe me that everything will eventually click. It's like having a bunch of puzzle pieces and slowly connecting everything together.

The Order You Should Take The Certifications

Now you are probably curious how I did it. Well like most people, my first AWS certification was the AWS Solutions Architect (AWS SAA). It is highly recommended to go for this one first since what it covers has a lot of overlapping parts with the other two. You have to understand about 30 or so services so it makes it easier in the long run if/when you attempt to do the other two. You might be wondering what about the AWS Certified Cloud Practioner (AWS CCP)? Well I skipped it since I didn't see any value in it for me but it does provide a good foundation into AWS.

Next, I took the AWS Developer Associate (AWS DVA) since it is known to be the easiest one and personally I felt like that was the case. While it covers less services, you have to possess a deeper understanding of those services. I previously wrote an article about it here.

Finally, I took the AWS SysOps Associate (AWS SOA). This is hands down the hardest one out of the three. While I did think it was a bit challenging, I felt that I might have overstudy for it. But honestly it's better to overstudy than understudy. Also if you have an AWS SAA, AWS DVA, or both then I say you have a good base to work with in order to study and pass the AWS SOA. I would not recommend attempting this as your first AWS certification unless you have prior work experience.

How I Prepared For Each One

In essence, it breaks downs to a sequence of steps:

Find a course (that includes hands on labs)
Take the course (and take it as many times as you need)
Find some practice exams
Take the practice exams (I averaged around 10 practice exams per certification)
Understand throughly why you got the questions wrong or questions you got right but weren't sure about the answer
(Optional) Make your own cheat sheet or study guide or better yet find one that is already made.
Take the practice exams again until you have average 85+.

Now with the template above I will use that as a reference for each of the certification below and show you the exact resources/practice exams I used.

AWS SAA

Stephane Mareek's Ultimate AWS Certified SAA and Neal Davis' AWS Certified SAA. I took both courses since I was new to AWS but either one would do you good.
For practice exams, I used both Jon Bonso's SAA Practice Exams and Neal Davi's SAA Practice Exams.
I used Neal Davis' cheatsheets but Jon Bonso's cheatsheets are really good as well.

AWS DVA

I used Neal's AWS Certified DVA but Stephane's Ultimate AWS Certified DVA is also a very good course as well.
For practical exams, I used both Jon Bonso's DVA Practice Exams and Neal Davis's DVA Practice Exams.
I used Neal Davis' cheatsheets but again Jon Bonso's cheatsheets are an excellent resource.

AWS SOA

I used Stephane Mareek's Ultimate AWS Certified SOA for the course.
For practical exams, I used Whizlabs' AWS SOA Practice Tests and Jon Bonso's SOA Practice Exams. Be aware though that Whizlabs has some frustrating grammatical errors at times but the material they cover for their practice exams are rock solid.
Didn't use any cheatsheet this time and just went over the questions I got wrong. However I did go over the entire course's slides several times.

So Journey Done Right?

Of course I'm done...not because what's the point of certifications without cementing the knowledge by either getting some work experience, doing more hands on, or creating personal projects. So while I do feel proud of this accomplishment, this is just the beginning. There is always going to be another challenge that you should strive for.

Currently for me it's coming up with ideas for personal projects and writing them on my whiteboard, potentially studying for one of the Professional certifications, or maybe learning how to finally cook. Either way enjoy the wins regardless of how small and never stop learning.

How I earned two AWS Associates (Solutions Architect & Developer) in 3 months

Tommy Leng — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 22:54:37 +0000

With the rise of Covid taking over our lives, I decided to make better use of my time and pick up some useful skills.

In the industry, you hear buzz words like cloud computing, serverless, stateless vs stateful, etc. so I thought it was time for me to learn what those words truly meant.

Doing some moderate research led me to one of the biggest cloud services out there: AWS.

The Resources I Used

I'm a big fan of Udemy for its reasonably priced courses and its no hassle refund policy so all the courses I used were from Udemy.

In my opinion, the two best instructors to learn AWS from are Stephane Mareek and Neal Davis. Both of them provide courses for the Solutions Architect Associate (SAA) and Developer Associate (DVA).

Stephane's Courses:
Stephane's Ultimate AWS Certified SAA
Stephane's Ultimate AWS Certified DVA

Neal's Courses:
Neal's AWS Certified SAA
Neal's AWS Certified DVA

Studying of the Solutions Architect

Since I was extremely new to AWS, I wanted to get two different perspectives with it so I decided to take both SAA courses.

Stephane is great for helping you ease into the material. He explains all the necessary information and more while demonstrating it in a very engaging manner. While Neal makes a huge effort in connecting the services together so what you learn from the previous section builds onto the current section. Though a bit dull, he provides a deeper dive into the services.

After going through the courses, I decided to take some practice exams to help prepare me for the real one. The practice tests I used were Jon Bonso's SAA Practice Exams and Neal Davis' SAA Practice Exams. I averaged around 60s to 70s during the first round and went back over the questions I got wrong and understood thoroughly as to why I got them wrong. The second time around I was averaging 85+.

Honestly either Jon or Neal's practice exams are enough to prepare you for the real test. Personally, I thought their practice exams were more difficult than the actual one. However, the more practice exams you take, the more confident you will feel when taking the real one.

Studying for the Developer Associate

This time around I chose to only take Neal's AWS Certified DVA and skip some sections since I still had a fresh understanding from studying for the SAA.

Basically did the same thing, I went through the course once. Afterwards took practice exams from both Jon Bonso and Neal Davis.

DVA Practice Exams:
Jon Bonso's DVA Practice Exams
Neal Davis's DVA Practice Exams

For Neal's, my averages were low 70s and for Jon's, my averages were mid 70s. Again, did the same thing, I went over the questions I got wrong and understood why I got wrong as well as reviewed questions I got right if I was iffy on the answer. Second time around, I averaged 90+ on both instructors' practice exams.

Some Honorable Mention Resources

While I have not taken some of these courses/practice exams. I believe this could help if you perhaps want to get your feet wet, want to save more, or want a more in-depth course experience with AWS.

First, the free courses, on YouTube FreeCodeCamp provides decent course contents on both the SAA and DVA. The SAA video is 10.5 hours long while the DVA video is 12 hours long. Both videos are taught by Andrew Brown who seems to have a good grasp on the topics for the exams and AWS as a whole.

Youtube Videos:
FreeCodeCamp's SAA YouTube Video
FreeCodeCamp's DVA YouTube Video

If you want a better learning environment, personally I would use Linux Academy. It's a subscription based service with a yearly cost of $379 (as of 8/1/2020). While it is a bit pricey, you are able to use Linux Academy's playground to do hands-on labs which I believe is included in your plan. The course content is really good as well.

Another place for practice exams would be Whizlabs, just like both Jon Bonso and Neal Davis, the service provides comprehensive explanations of the answers. Also if you were planning to take more than one exam, Whizlabs has a yearly subscription for $99 (as of 8/1/2020), this may save you more in the long run since it provide both courses and practice exams.

Wrapping Up

Hope, this gives you have a better understanding on some of the choices/resources you can use to help you become AWS certified. For those who were wondering about my scores, I got an 845 for the SAA-01 (only SAA-02 is available now) and I got an 883 for the DVA-01.

What you should focus on for the AWS Developer Exam

Tommy Leng — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 01:30:55 +0000

The breakdown

Currently, the AWS Developer Associate (DVA) is broken into 5 sections: Deployment, Security, Development, Refactoring, and Monitoring and Troubleshooting.

Now that we see how that the exam is split up, I will relay the related services that will likely fall under each category.

Deployment

For the deployment section, focus on CodePipeline, CloudFormation, and Elastic Beanstalk.

CodePipeline could be understood fairly quickly if you have some experience with CI/CD. What falls under CodePipeline is CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy. CodeCommit is like GitHub but it only uses private repos, CodeBuild helps with packaging code, and CodeDeploy gets it ready for deployment.

CloudFormation helps you build out the infrasture via JSON or YAML so essentially Infrastructure as Code much like Terraform. Elastic Beanstalk lets you focus on the code without worrying about the infrastructure. This is because Elastic Beanstalk utilizes CloudFormation to build its infrastructure. Also AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) might be mentioned as well since AWS SAM is an extension of CloudFormation.

Security

For the security section, focus on Amazon Cognito, AWS KMS, AWS IAM, and perhaps Amazon S3.

Amazon Cognito has two main uses which are authenication and authorization. Cognito user pools (authenication) can be used for sign-in purposes and establishing a directory of users and Cognito identity users (authorization) can help to issue temporary credentials or help qualify unidentified users.

AWS KMS revolves around encryption. You have to recognize the difference between AWS Managed Customer Managed Keys (CMKs) and Customer Managed CMKs and how envelope encryption works in AWS.

For AWS IAM, it would be good to learn some AWS best practices, the concept of IAM users, groups, and roles, and which policies should be use in different situations such as AWS Managed Policies, Customer Managed Policies, Identity-based policies, etc.

The biggest takeaway from Amazon S3 for the DVA would be anything related to encrypting objects in S3.

Development with AWS Services

In my opinion, the biggest topics for the development section would be AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB for the services that would most likely be covered.

Each one is too extensive to cover in just one article so I will attempt to highlight some key features for each. For Lambda, comprehend the difference between synchronous and asychronous invocations, which AWS services can map to Lambda natively, how Lambda versioning works, what is a concurrency execution, and where to view logs.

For API Gateway, understand what kind of the backend points can API Gateway integrate with, how methods and resources work, how to use mapping templates, and how API caching works.

For DynamoDB, grasp the concept of partitions and primary keys, how to calculate Read Capacity Units and Write Capacity Units and what they are, the difference between the Scan and Query API, the differences between Local Secondary Index and Global Secondary Index, and how DynamoDB Streams work.

Some other services that would be good to know are RDS, S3, ElastiCache, Kinesis, and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).

Refactoring

The notion of refactoring centralizes on how to improve performance, the idea of improving code or applications, or transitioning from a traditional on-premises architecture to a cloud architecture. So most likely what would be covered are decoupling strategies and breaking down a large application into smaller parts or containers.

AWS decoupling strategies would most likely revolve around Amazon Standard Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS). SQS helps to create a sort of buffer between the application producing the event and the application consuming the event. SNS has a concept of pub and sub relationship where services can subscribe to an SNS topic in order to receive the message.

AWS has a feature called Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) where you can split an EC2 instance into multiple containers. ECS has two different methods which are the EC2 or Fargate Launch Types.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting

For monitoring and troubleshooting, focus on CloudWatch, X-Ray, and CloudTrail.

Some key concepts in CloudWatch would be CloudWatch Alarms, Events, and Logs. Also understanding namespaces, metrics, and dimensions doesn't hurt too.

X-Ray provides insights into how an application is running by doing an internal trace. This helps with analyzing and debugging the application.

CloudTrail is used for auditing purposes since it keeps a records of all API calls made on your account.

Wrap-Up

This is just a brief intro to what may be covered on the DVA exam however most of the services mentioned are crucial before you attempt to take on the DVA. Also even if you plan to take the AWS SAA, DVA, or SysOps having a core understanding of IAM, EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, and VPC is impervative to figuring out AWS. Hope this is gives you some insights into the AWS DVA and good luck earning that next badge!

How I got my AWS Solution Architect Associate in under 40 days

Tommy Leng — Thu, 28 May 2020 17:27:50 +0000

My Background

Previously, I wrote about starting my AWS Journey and coming to the decision to try for the AWS Solution Arcitect Associate (SAA).

Before getting into more detail about how I learned, how I prepared, and my experience. I feel the need to provide some insights about who I am.

First, I've had prior work experience as a Network Technician so I was pre-exposed to some IT terminology such as the OSI model, subnetting, and differences between TCP and UDP. However, my knowledge in networking did not prepare me for how massive AWS is.

Second, being in the IT field, I'm in an environment where people are consistently advancing their knowledge by understanding better practices, learning new topics, or going for certifications. I also have the benefits of leveraging other people's experiences and knowledge too or when you just need to vent honestly.

How I learned

Most of what I learned was from Udemy and doing some hands-on labs from the courses.

The two courses that I took were:
Stephane Mareek's Ultimate AWS Certified SAA
Neal Davis' AWS Certified SAA

Stephane gives a great overview of what the services are. He explains things in a very easy to understand manner. Describes briefly or in detail depending on the subject matter for what you need to know for the test.

For example, a service you might not need to know much about. He provides what it does and what it is in a basic fashion. For people on a budget, one huge benefit is when he does the hands-on labs, he tries to stick with the free tier as much as possible.

Neal Davis, in my opinion is a bit dry, however YOU WILL learn so much about the AWS services in much more granduality. The way is the course is set up is that you will continuously build from the previous course sections. Giving you a better understanding of how AWS services work together.

For his hands on labs, he sometimes went beyond the free tier. I personally thought this was great because Stephane did not cover this since he stuck to his mantra of staying within the free tier. When it went beyond the free tier, I just watched the videos to strengthened my knowledge of the service.

How I prepared

It took me 1.5 to 2 weeks to finish Stephane's course and about a week to finish Neal's since I already had some knowledge from Stephane.

About halfway or little more than halfway Neal's course, I started to take some of Jon Bonso's SAA Practice Exams. Going through both courses, I thought I knew my stuff and taking Jon's practice exams was a real eye opener. My scores were 60, 60, 67, 73, 73, and 78 when I took them the first time.

What I did next was understood why I got it wrong, create a cheatsheet from that, and record myself reading from my cheatsheet. This way I could go over the material when I went for a walk which served as something to focus on while getting in some cardio.

The next time I took the practice exams, my scores were 86+ (didn't do a re-take on the last one though). I've seen previous posts on Reddit that said if you were getting 85+ on all 6 exams just book the exam, so I did. Two days before I decided to just review on some materials I might have overlooked.

My Experience

Personally, the courses and especially the practice exams were enough to prepare me for the real deal. In terms of difficulties, I felt Jon's Bonso and Neal Davis' practice tests were more difficult compared to the real thing.

They purposedly inflatted their questions to make you sort out what the question is really asking of you. The wording of the question does come in handy when you were looking for a keyword that may help you out.

My Advice

To wrap it up, find a decent course on Udemy such as the ones I've previously mentioned. Linux Academy does a great job and I've heard ACloudGuru is a decent source as well.

If you just want to get your feet wet or you are on a budget, on YouTube freeCodeCamp has a free 4 hour video about the AWS Cloud Practitioner and a free 10.5 hour video about the AWS SAA.

Focus on some core concepts like EC2, EBS, S3, ASG, ELBs, VPC, understand the differences between RDS, Aurora, and DynamoDB, and how Security Groups and NACLs work. Also know vertical and horizontal scaling and how to make services highly available or fault-tolerant.

Do a lot of practice exams. Jon Bonso and Neal Davis do a great job with theirs. I've heard good things about Whizlabs too.

Lastly, go over the questions you got wrong and understand why you got them wrong and rather just memorized the answers.

Good luck on your AWS journey and feel free to reach out to me!

Beginning of My AWS Journey

Tommy Leng — Fri, 22 May 2020 10:18:01 +0000

With the current crisis going on, I have decided on taking my first step towards the path of IT certifications.

I initally thought about taking the CCNA but leaned more towards cloud computing/networking instead. During my research (a basic google search), I stumbled upon AWS and its certifications.

After doing a more detail search (on Reddit), the most popular certification people seemed to be going for was the Solutions Architect Associate.

So, the courses I have chosen to hopefully take me from Zero to Hero are:

Stephane Mareek's Ultimate AWS Certified SAA
Neal Davis' AWS Certified SAA

For Practice Exams (from the recommendation of the Reddit gods):

Jon Bonso's SAA Practice Exams

If you've never tried Udemy, they offer a 30-day money back guarantee on a lot of their courses.

Also just an FYI, Jon Bonso has practice exams for the 3 Associates and 2 Professional certifications located on his website Tutorial Dojo or Udemy that have stellar reviews as well.

Thanks for reading and I will update my progress periodically!