Latest quick tips to ace - AWS Solution Architect Professional Certification Exam

“People ignore design that ignores people.”

– Frank Chimero

I have recently re-certified myself on AWS Solution Architect Professional. I got certified first time on this exam in December 2018. Thanks to my current employer who provided a free exam voucher, I tried attempting recently i.e second week of July, 2022 and passed with a score of 873.

It was very different experience compared to when I first wrote this exam in 2018. I vividly recall, I was very nervous at that time (believe it is a pretty normal feeling when you write a professional exam ;-) . This time I was much more relaxed, both before and during the exam, and there were definitely reasons for feeling that way.

I was banking on my experience of designing and implementing cloud architectures for various customers for over 6 years now — in different roles and capacities. Having passed my Devops certification in April this year also worked in my favour. In fact, I benefited in more than one ways by writing the AWS DevOps Professional Certification exam in April this year (may be a blog on this later :-)

• Firstly, it made me aware that I have to be on my toes in terms of time management and like most AWS professional/speciality exams I need to use elimination techniques heavily rather than focusing on choosing the right answer(please don’t underestimate this technique, even in other fields like advanced mathematics and scientific research, disproving a specific hypothesis is a significant major step to an invention).
• Secondly, I was aware that I have to be patient and keep applying myself till the very end of the exam and I would have a high chances of sailing through comfortably (though the only problem was my lingering back pain so it was bit scary to think about sitting for 3 hours straight during the exam).
• Finally, going through a process once, adapts your mind to follow a similar process later with little ease and efficiency, AWS DevOps re-certification proved the same first process for me.

On other side, I was also aware that this is going to be challenging to manage the exam time (you need to attempt 75 questions in 180 minutes now compared to 65 previously). Though 10 questions in the set are not marked but since you can’t figure out those specific 10 so you have to treat each question with equality. So in nutshell, less time per question now. Keep reading..

To make things little easier for those who are attempting this certification for the first time, I have summarised my learnings on this exam in the form of below pointers:

1. Nothing can take your further in your IT professional career than building strong foundation of basics (and it is never late :-) and one of the sure shot ways is to read good books on architecture. One simple but effective book on architecture patterns one can follow is here.
2. As it goes — architecting is all about trade offs, there is no perfect or worst architecture. It is all sealed in the background context why someone designed something that way. Follow the same principle while answering the exam questions but don’t get carried away and end up over architecting, keep reminding yourself, this is an exam with limited time and 300 USD plus are on stakes :-)
3. From an exam perspective, One should master the art of removing superfluous details from questions so that one can focus on the essentials. This can be valuable for other exams as well. Note: there can be more than one part to a question’s objectives so scan for all of them while reading the question — the first time.
4. Another piece of advice I give for all certifications aspirants, book the exam in advance, prepare a schedule and stick to it — as closely as possible. There will be good days and bad days while following the schedule, be mentally prepared to tackle them. Trust me, they can be your make or break points. This is the not the easiest but surely the fastest way to write the exam, probably, clearing as well :-)
5. Always remember the fact — in regards to certification exams — that you cannot be hundred percent prepared for any exam so trust your knowledge and instincts and go for it. I have seen many in my network who postponed AWS certification exams for even upto three years, inspite of being sufficiently prepared (funny thing is that they know this, too :-)
6. AWS did not showed pass/fail result on submitting the exam this time. It was the first time I had this experience in an AWS exam where I don’t know my results after the completing the exam, thankfully, I got the result in approx. 20 hours. I later checked on reddit and few other websites and it looks like this is the case for everyone else as well.
7. I will categorise the exam as moderately difficult now. If someone is good with conceptual understanding of IT infra, architecture patterns, their key components, best practices and especially anti-patterns and are also using AWS as Cloud Platform on the job, it will be relatively easy while preparing for the same. Still prep time varies significantly among candidates, as expected.
8. I did see around 30% of questions belonging to Hybrid architectures and at least 30% of questions related to migration of workloads (rehost/replatform/rearchitecting/others). Do read AWS blog on 6Rs here and how AWS services can be used to achieve those strategies.
9. There were few questions around troubleshooting issues, which boil down to basics and following the best practices. For example: how to read a VPC flow logs entry to troubleshoot a failed connectivity.
10. There were few questions on cost optimisation techniques (can’t imagine an AWS exam without questions on spot instances use cases but please check the objectives in the question first before jumping on to this awesome cost saving technique — for certain scenarios)
11. I did not find anything in the exam worth mentioning relating to latest AWS services, features and announcements, in last one year or so.
12. While preparing for the exam, please help yourself by chasing quality over quantity. For example — you can pick any one prep course on internet, if you really need to, and go through it in entirety. Repeat couple of times. Or follow the AWS certification exam guide (link in resources section below) for domains, subdomains and services to study. In either case, keep some spare time each day/week and spend on your own research and analysis — now this will be beneficial both for the exam as well as how you will use this in real life architecting scenarios. TIP: remain focussed by avoid too much material (read as distraction).
13. Try to develop a habit of reading at least one AWS blog here each day on any of above topics. Even one a week is better than zero. It really helps :-)
14. There are tons of practice questions available on internet, if you want to practice before the exam but my personal advice is that please don’t look for shortcuts, which makes the exam pretty much useless. In my view, you are fine if you possess the required knowledge without the AWS certificates but obviously, not the other way round :-)
15. As expected not many questions on the exam were from my favourite Containers space, and DevOps related code services (CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline etc). These topics were heavily covered in AWS DevOps Engineering Professional certification exam.

I have listed below some key service features and topics worth studying for the exam, you might encounter them in some scenarios:

• Compute & Databases — EC2 — metadata version 2 concepts, userdata, Autoscaling, RDS Multi-AZ, Replicas, Aurora — multiple readers concept, DynamoDB cost optimisation — on-demand versus provisioned , ElasticCache, DAX clusters.
• Networking — VPC routing concepts, CloudFront caching, OAI concept, lambda@edge use cases, Transit gateway use cases — especially hybrid connectivity, DCG use case for multiple regions, DX — private and public VIF, DX encryption, Cloudhub concept — VPN, Snow devices (SnowCone) versus DMS during migrations, one time migration and data replication use cases, DMS and SCT use case, need for Global accelerator and Route53 polices— geolocation and latency policy in particular, weighted routing. A/B testing, Firewall manager — SG specific use case.
• Security and Compliance— GuardDuty use cases especially anomaly detection, WAF geolocation IP block feature sets, way to block multiple random IPs, Inspector — rules packages, Security hub — use case as a single pane of glass for security events aggregation and normalisation, Gateway load balancer and role in HA IDS/IPS architectures, Organizations — SCP use cases for both whitelist and blacklist types, IAM — roles and use cases like cross account and federation, how different policies are evaluated in IAM, Service catalogue — launch constraints, Config use case — remediation, SSM features patch manager, run command etc., differences between secrets manager and parameter store, KMS — envelope encryption and how this is leveraged by DynamoDB encryption.
• Storage — EFS access points, EBS — PIOPS versus Standard. No exam is complete without S3 — please focus on transfer acceleration feature, Storage gateway types and their use cases— especially file gateway.
• Serverless — Lambda — cost optimisation techniques, provisioned concurrency to resolve cold start problem, workflow orchestration using step functions.
• Analytics and others — Kinesis (all favours — understand subtle differences between each), Athena use cases around querying over S3, IaaC using CloudFormation. I did not find anything interesting around AI/ML — obviously other AWS exam caters to that.

Note: This exam will be retired towards end of this year, still this is a valuable valid credential for another 3 years whoever earns it. You can also apply a discount voucher while booking the exam from any other AWS Certifications exam you have achieved previously.

I have put some resources links below, feel free to browse them. Thanks for reading and best wishes for your certification journey.

Share, comment or give it a clap if this helps you in any way, it will definitely motivate me to write another one, on another topic :-)

You can connect with me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clouddevopsarchitect/

Useful Resources

1. Exam Related information, Sample question paper, Exam guide, Free Official Practice Test and more:

https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-professional/

2. Hands On official AWS Workshops:

https://workshops.aws/

3. AWS Reinvent Sessions, White papers and tech talks and more:

https://awsstash.com/

Disclaimer: This blog is based on my personal experience with this certification exam and represent my personal opinions. If you think something is not correct or inline with exam NDA please reach out to me.