A little bit of backstory
I'm a software engineer/student who's been working in the industry for a couple of years now and I've been purely on the software side of things. Before 2021, I have no idea what cloud is. I've used S3 for one of my backend services to store photos but I have no idea how the whole cloud or AWS thingy works. These were all buzzwords for me.
Spoiler alert: It's just someone else's computer.
There are plenty of cloud vendors out there, from small startups to big providers from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alibaba, and each platform has their own version of certification that determines the credibility of an engineer using that particular platform and foundational knowledge of the cloud.
But why is the industry standard of cloud certifications sort of lean towards AWS and why I personally took one of AWS' associate level certification?
Amongst all cloud providers like Azure, GCP and AWS, Amazon was one of the earliest players in the cloud computing field, and they're still dominating the current cloud market at a whopping 32% this year.
Personal Motives
Personally, I strongly believes in real world problem solving skills are better than traditional education of degrees and certifications, but what makes me go ahead and break my own beliefs? Because AWS certifications are aimed towards solving real world problems rather than just knowing theories of how each services work.
It does not ask you things that you can normally go and look up in the documentation (well, not entirely true, keep reading, I'll get into it in a bit). It asks you how you will handle scenario x with y requirements when you have to focus on z. Let's say a customer comes up to you and ask how you are going to build a frontend application that involves GraphQL and React, you provide a solution of how that application should look like with simple and resilient architecture at a minimum cost.
Different certifications
AWS offers certifications at 4 levels, Practitioner level, Associate level, Professional level and Speciality level. Some of the exams focus on building solutions for customer specific problems, some on DevOps like how we would leverage AWS to build a better performant applications and some on specific fields such as Databases, SAP and Machine Learning. I took the Certified Cloud Practitioner exam and Solutions Architect associate exam. I am not going to dive into all these exams but here is a link if you want to know more.
What is the Solutions Architect Exam
The Solutions Architect exam has two levels, associate level (the easier one that I took) and the professional level. I personally took this exam to get a deeper understanding of how AWS services work in conjunction with one another and how I can provide better solutions for the customers. This exam focuses on more technical side of cloud services offered by AWS and a bit harder than the practitioner exam.
To be completely honest, it took me 6 months to prepare for this exam rather than 4 months (sorry, wasn't a clickbait xD) because I spent the first 2 months procrastinating. But do keep in mind that it took me 4 months to pass this exam because I am a full-time student and working part-time as a Software Engineer who has no idea how AWS works and trying to maintain a good GPA to keep my asian parents happy. This timeline can vary to different people on how much time they can commit to studying, past experiences and level of expertise using Amazon Web Services.
How to prepare for the exam
There are 3 things to keep in mind when you are preparing for any sort of certification exams (or any exams in general).
- Domain Knowledge of the field
- Hands-on (practical) labs and
- Practice Exams
Usually I would recommend using online learning platforms like Udemy, youtube and google, but whizlabs.com offers a great platform for people who are taking certification exams. Of course there are other platforms like O'Reilly and Udemy, but back then whizlabs were having a sale so I just got that.
I used whizlabs.com to study for the domain specific knowledge. They have great video lectures on how different services work, explain really well and touch on almost all domain knowledge that the exam can ask for. It even explains on how you would use it in the real world application and how you can pair it with some other services to create a better product with great performance.
Having just the domain knowledge is not definitely enough to pass the exam, that's for sure. That's when you need to get your hands dirty. There are plenty of free platforms that you can use to practice different architectures like hosting a website on S3 and serving it though CloudFront or building a serverless API that the public can access, with AWS workshop or using AWS' free tier plan. I used whizlabs' demo environment to practice my understanding of how different architectures work since it is also included in my purchase.
Finally I cannot stress this enough but practice exams. Do your practice exams! By do your practice exams, don't just go through questions and click "Reveal Answer" and reading the explanation. I would really recommend to take the practice exam under strict exam condition, like not leaving up to take a leak or use your phone every 30 minutes or so (yes, I know. been there, done that). And after each exam questions, always review what and how it went wrong and revise that particular topic back. There are practice exams that you can purchase from Udemy. I personally recommend practice exams by Tutorial dojo.
Tips and Tricks
Now that you've prepared for the exam with sleepless nights and pulled every hair out of your head trying to understand what different services are, now is the time to take the exam. Here are some tips and tricks (I am not going to give you generic tips like eat well before exam, drink water and blah blah.)
You probably will not understand all the technologies that are used in a question like RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka, but when you see something that you have no idea what that is, my advice is to take an educated guess. There is definitely no way that you can use RDS with a key-value database, nor a way to use a structured data in a Dynamo Database.
Some of the Multiple choice questions are really really ambiguous but they always have one single word that shifts the possibility of the right answer towards one option. What I would recommend is to look for keywords like graph, relational, disaster recovery, etc.
You will see questions that has phrases like "most cost efficient way" or "most secure". These questions test your scope of focus and priority. You wouldn't choose EFS over EBS if your main focus is cost, like you wouldn't choose Security Groups over NACL for network level security. Look for what the questions' focuses are.
One another personal trick is to keep yourself entertained during the entire 2 hours. I know that the exam can be stressful and all that but for someone who has really really short attention spam, sometimes it's hard for me to focus on one thing for a long time. Normally what I do is, after every 10-15 questions answered, I always close my eyes and let my mind go wild for 5-10 seconds, and then focus back. This not only helps me with my attention deficiency but also helps with my eyes.
Now that you're all prepared for the exam, you can chill and ace the exam. Good luck folks! May the Jeff be with you!
Reflections
Looking back, I probably could've done the exam much faster than 4 months if I had spent more time on the labs and then have some blocked out time during the day to study. But I'm happy that I passed the exam as well as the Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. Now I'm studying for the professional level Solutions Architect exam and once I passed, I will create more blogs like this. In the meantime, since this is my first ever blog post, feel free to let me know if there are any mistakes or more tips!
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