My path to AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C01) 2019

Mandeep Singh
Nov 2 · 3 min read

After passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C01) Exam last year around October 2018, I decided to go for Professional one. I was able to crack the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C01) Exam in May 2019 and here are my thoughts on the exam and preparation guide.

Experience and background

I work full time on AWS designing and developing solutions for the Enterprise businesses. I had around 3 plus years of industry experience working on AWS before sitting for Associate exam and I didn’t prepare much at that time. With just 2–3 weeks of study and some Practice exams I was able to clear the Associate exam easily.

But after having gone through the Professional exam blueprint and a failure attempt on the official sample questions, I knew this time I needed some extra preparation so I started gearing up on that.

Preparation timeline

I prepared for around 3 months before sitting for the professional exam. My study plan included 6–10 hours of study every week alongside my full time job.

Online Courses

I decided to buy an online course which could help me in my preparation. There are a lot of courses out there by Linux Academy, Cloud Guru, Udemy etc but one of them sparked a little more interest than others, because of its content coverage. I decided to go for Udemy course by DolfinEd. It offers a practice Exam so you can get to know your weaker areas. I used to skim through the topics I had a good command on and mainly focussed on the weaker ones.

Hands On training

I would say hands on training is must otherwise you cannot crack the professional exam with just theory knowledge. I used to do a lot of hands on during my off work hours to familiarize myself with the services I had never worked on.

AWS Whitepapers

AWS Whitepapers are great way to expand your knowledge with content authored by AWS. I read almost all of the whitepapers related to:

  • AWS Well Architected Framework
  • Migration to AWS Cloud
  • Serverless Technologies
  • Database and Storage
  • Security
  • Operational Excellence

AWS Reinvent videos

The Reinvent videos are kind of knowledge gems out there, backed by years of experience of the AWS team, Industry experts and the community. I have been following them for more than a year and continued along my preparation phase also.

AWS FAQs

I used to go through AWS FAQs a lot in order to revise the topics side by side.

Practice Exam Sets

One of the important aspects of this exam is the time constraint, you need to solve around 75 questions in around 170–180 minutes. Before 3–4 weeks of my Exam I started doing some practice exam sets in order to prepare myself. I bought practice exam sets from Whizlabs and Udemy JonBonso. I found that the Whizlabs question sets were quite repetitive and not at par the level of professional exam, but the JonBonso ones were quite good and they helped me a lot to improve on my time.

Final thoughts

It’s good to have Certification in hand but a Certification is only as good as what you do with it. It cannot replace industry experience. For me getting this certificate was a self booster in my early phase of the Cloud Architect Journey.

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