My Journey to AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate

Recently, I cracked the exam AWS Certified Solutions Associate with a score of 867/1000. I know the score isn’t great in itself but works for me. I was very glad.

Coming to the preparation, I took about 1.5 months to reach the point. It was a mixed sum up of AWS documentations and some Udemy Courses.
Course 1: AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate 2019
This course is really worth to pass the exam. 12 Hours content on this course helped me very very much to be familiar with the basics. The practical labs were very helpful in understanding various AWS services and how do they work. I highly recommend this course. Just PRACTICE the labs, plug in the lectures at least TWICE!
Now the very question that might come to your mind is — Is this course enough?
NO ! This course isn’t really enough to pass. Don’t worry. The second course will cover the remaining concepts and prepare you for the final exam.
Course 2: AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams
This consists of 6 practice exams, which themselves are really amazing.
Once you are done with Course 1, try to solve the exams/practice papers. Don’t worry if you fail. I failed in 3 of them, while passed in 3 of them.
Just after you complete every exam, skim through the solution of each answer. No matter if your answer was even correct. Learn why the correct option was correct and why the incorrect ones are incorrect. Skim through all the question papers and their explanations. Please go through all the Cheat Sheets provided by Jon Bonso.
ATTEMPT AGAIN. The course instructor himself instructs that, Don’t sit for the exam, if you score around 90% in the exams.
When I attempted the exam again, I scored approx 90% on all of them and confidence in me was restored. Alas!
Now every person in the AWS industry will refer you to study the service FAQs and Whitepapers. But I never really went through the latter as both the Udemy Courses worked well for me.
FAQs of the services that I went through — EC2, S3, RDS. It gets quite a lot to skim through these docs, but trust me the Cheat Sheets by Jon Bonso work much better and are abstract as well.
Last but not least, a very famous blog series in the AWS community helped me — http://jayendrapatil.com/ . I skimmed through some of the AWS services using these blogs, which were crystal clear and easy to understand.
Just a day before sitting in the exam, I attempted Exam Readiness by AWS just to check if I was prepared. I scored 22/25 for the questions. These questions are quite easy as compared to the actual exam but I suggest you to go through them.
Steps that might help you in preparations :
- Set goals and time tables and follow them on a regular basis as I did. I daily managed 2–3 hours per day on weekdays and 3–5 hours on weekends.
- Read about all the services in detail. You will be getting scenario-based questions. To select the matching ones, you’ll have to know about all the services in brief. Don't just go in a deep detail for each of them. Too much digging is also not required for the exam. You just need to know which services are superior/inferior over the other and why.
- Don’t push yourself to remember AWS service limits. AWS never questions on that.
Helpful Links:
- https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/
- https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-amazon-practice-exams/
- https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/
- http://jayendrapatil.com/
- https://aws.amazon.com/faqs/
- https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/
- https://www.aws.training/Details/Curriculum?id=20685
Hit claps, if this article helped. Thanks and ALL THE VERY VERY BEST. Let me know when you clear it. Ping me on dikshitkathuria1803@gmail.com for any queries.
