Preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect — Professional Certification Exam
For Starters
I successfully took the SAP-C02 exam and passed in Nov of 2023. This was my second professional certification and I will show you the study path that I followed.
The AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam is one of two Professional-level certifications that AWS has nowadays. It validates advanced knowledge and skills in architecting complex solutions to complex problems, optimizing security, cost, and performance, and automating manual processes. So be prepared for gigantic and complex questions and answers during the exam.
All of the knowledge acquired will help you to keep your solutions maintainable, secure, scalable, and resilient.
In this exam, I have never worked with some of the AWS Services, so I took a really good time learning and understanding them. My end-to-end study path took around 4 months, from the beginning to the end of the main course, some Hands-On, FAQs, trying out the exam practices, and reviewing the services and features I needed to improve.
My study routine was usually at the end of the day(it depends if I had any late meetings or job activities and if I had then tried to study in the morning to compensate) and about 3/4 hours of study during the week and Weekends/holiday I managed to study about 6–8 hours, it took me a while to finish the course because I like to transcript, take notes, see architectural examples and use cases to get a better understanding of what is being explained.
The level of detail that I put in the documentation depends on my knowledge level of the topic.
Like the example below:
And also added some things from the documentation, like:
Your daily routine really depends only on yourself. If you are a morning person or are more active at night; how your work agenda; gym hours and etc. Only you know what’s the better time or the time you are more comfortable with.
Best Courses and Practices Exams
For the studying I prefer using the https://learn.cantrill.io/ courses, it takes more time because is more Deep Dive into each service but it is worth it. If you like there are the courses from Stephane Maarek at Udemy that are also very good. And not forget the FAQ’s!
And for the Practice exams, I used Tutorial Dojo from John Bonso and Whizlabs.
DO NOT RUSH THE PROCESS! Studying for the certifications takes time, especially if you are entering the world of cloud now so it’s natural to mature the content over time and get experience during work.
AWS Certification Roadmap
- AWS Cloud Practitioner
- AWS Solutions Architect — Associate
The focus of this certification is on the design of cost and performance-optimized solutions, demonstrating a strong understanding of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This certification can enhance the career profile and earnings of certified individuals and increase your credibility and confidence in stakeholder and customer interactions. by AWS certification documentation - AWS Solutions Architect — Professional
The ideal candidate for this exam has two or more years of experience in using AWS services to design and implement cloud solutions, can evaluate cloud application requirements, and make architectural recommendations for deployment of applications on AWS. by AWS blog
Solutions Architect Roadmap
Here are some of the skills needed to be a Solutions Architect
Don’t be afraid of all of this. You will get these skills over time while working, facing challenges, clients/customers, people management and partnerships. You can always trust your fellow partners in crime from work for advice to help you out with technologies and services you don’t have expertise in.
Exam Domains
- Design for organizational complexity
- Design for new solutions
- Continuously improve existing solutions
- Accelerate workload migration and modernization
Study Paths
There are some paths for you to study for the certifications:
- Slow: Watch all the course for the certification, do the demos, understand the service understand how it integrate with other AWS services, read the whitepapers and FAQs, do the practice exams, go back to the course or read the papers again, more practice exams and finally go take the certification exam. This is the path that I recommend, you will learn much from it and be a better IT professional with all this knowledge.
- Fast: Start by doing a practice exam with all domains and by the end it will give you a score and which domain you do not match the expectations. Focus on studying the domain and repeat the process. I only recommend this only if you have a short deadline to take the certification. BE AWARE that this is only to pass the exam, you will NOT learn much from it.
Exam Topics:
Here are some of the AWS Service and its features that were in the exam. Remember that the questions are always about use cases, so you are going to face questions with at least 3 services and more of their features on it.
- Organization
SCP
Enabling services across the account in the organization and centralizing logs/info in a core(Security account, Foundation Account, Audit Account, Log Archive account, and etc) account of the organization
Centralized Billing - AWS Billing and Cost Management
Cost Explorer
Cost Allocation Tags
Anomaly Detection
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
Budgets - Org Identity Provider
LDAP
IDP
SAML
STS
AWS SSO
Directory Service - IAM
Roles
IAM users
Integration with On-premises Enterprise Identity Provider - CloudFormation
Stackset
Nested Stacks
Recreate infra in another region - AWS DMS (Database Migration Service)
Migrate related engines
Supported sources and targets
AWS SCT (Schema Conversion Tool)
Schema Copy
Pricing - AWS MGN (Application Migration Service)
Replication Agent
Agentless snapshot replication
Monitoring with CloudWatch - 7 Rs Migration Strategy
Rehost (“Lift and Shift”)
Relocate (“Hypervisor-Level Lift and Shift”)
Replatform (“Lift and Reshape”)
Refactor (“Re-architect”)
Repurchase (“Drop and Shop”)
Retire
Retain (“Revisit”)
Always a use case about any of these options and the services to do it - AWS Direct Connect
Supports Transit GTW
Transferring large data sets
Real-time data feeds
Regulatory requirements for private connectivity
Failover: Active/Active & Active/Passive
LAG (Link Aggregation Group)
Direct Connect GTW - CloudFront
Cache Behaviour
Integration with WAF
Edge Locations
Lambda@Edge
OAC
Performance and availability
AWS Shield, AWS WAF and R53 for security against DDoS - AWS WAF
Rule
Application Layer Attacks
Regular rules and rate-based rules - AWS EC2
Many scenarios where the environment was migrated from the On-prem, so the questions here were more focused on using ASG, ECS, Fargate and logging - AWS ECS
Normally involving Migration scenarios, ASG questions and use cases
Fargate - AWS Config
Use cases where the core team needs to be notified when there is any configuration change in X service - AWS CloudTrail
API activity
Audit questions - AWS CloudWatch
CloudWatch Logs
CloudWatch Rules
CloudWatch Subscription - Trusted Advisor
Use cases about unused EBS, overall costs, and especially monitor service limits - System Manager
Automation Document
Patch instances
SSM agent
Run command - Secrets Manager
Use case to store Database Credential
Use case for automatic rotation - VPC
VPC Flow logs
NACL
VPC peering
Site-to-Site
Route Table
NAT
DNS
DHCP
VPC Endpoints
GTW Endpoints
VPN Connections - AWS ACM (Certificate Manager)
Integration with CloudFront, ELB, API GTW
Multi-Region Use Cases for DR - API Gateway
SSL
Cache - AWS RAM (Resource Access Manager)
Shared Services VPC
Specify Resource share, resources or accounts
Used With AWS Organization, enable in the master account - Route53
Record types
Health Checks
Routing types
DR related cases
Alias
DNSSEC - AutoScaling
Health Check
ASG + ELB - AWS Inspector
Analyze the behavior of your AWS resources and helps identify potential security issues
Use cases were more about host(EC2) vulnerabilities - AWS Global Accelerator
DR
Improved performance
SOC, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO compliant. - S3
Cross-Account Replication
Storage Classes
Multipart upload
Requester Pays - EFS
FSx for Windows
FS for Lustre - DynamoDB
GSI
LSI
Global Tables
DAX - RDS
RDS Read Replica
RDS Multi-AZ
Supported Engines
DB Instances
Lifecycle
Snapshots
Restore
Copy snapshots across AWS accounts
Transfer charges
Purchasing options - AWS Aurora
Aurora Multi-Master
Aurora Read Replica
Aurora Global Database - ElasticCache
Use case for user session
Improve read performance - AWSLambda
Integration with Services
Deployment
Versions
Concurrency - AWS ELB
ALB with multi-AZ
NLB
SSL - Snow* Family
Use Cases with SnowBall Edge - Others (Only 3 of these were on my exam)
Amazon Connect
Amazon Kendra
Amazon Comprehend
Amazon Lex
Amazon Polly
Amazon Extract
Amazon Translate
Amazon Fraud
Some Useful Links
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional official page
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional Exam Guide
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional Sample Questions
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional Official Practice Question Set
Exam Prep: AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional
Lean Cantrill Courses
Tutorial Dojo
Considerations
The certification exam questions normally involved 3 to 4 services and their integrations and features, there were real-life scenarios, trick questions, and so on. Always try it on the practice exams because they really help to be more prepared for the certifications.
This exam is very extensive, it is a total of 75 questions in 220 minutes(with accommodations) + 5/10 minutes for the surveys, so try to do it in the morning while you are well-rested.
Feel free to comment in case you got anything different from your certification exam.
And finally, Good luck with your next AWS certification, and hope this preview and documentation can come in handy!