How I became an AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate in 21 days.
I had planned to achieve an AWS certificate for the last 2 years, and as usual, I ended up focusing on my day-to-day work. Now finally, I am an AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate achieved in just 21 days. All it took was a global lockdown.
My Background:
I have been working in Crystal Delta as a full-stack software engineer for the past 6 years, and worked mainly on Ruby on Rails, Nodejs, React, Drupal, AWS, and a few more.
I haven’t tried for any certification before. However, I like to test my own skills and as per my mentor’s recommendation, I set myself the task of certifications. First I tried the Secure Code Warrior challenge and I achieved it in a week. Second I completed AWS Certified Cloud Practioner Certificate.
My Preparation Strategy:
As everyone does, I searched lots of blogs and forums it actually confused me a lot. And Finally, I read My Preparation Strategy for AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam which was suggested by my colleague. It solved my all confusion and helped me to prepare my own strategy.
- A Cloud Guru online video course
- Whizlabs online video course
- Whizlabs practice tests
- Jon Bonso’s Practice Tests
- Exam Readiness Digital course by AWS
My preparation for the exam was intensive.
Each day I watched and took notes for 2–3 sections of the course. Overall, I spent between 3 to 4hours on weekdays and 7–9hours on weekends. It took me 21days to get AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate.
A Cloud Guru Course was my primary learning. I did all hands-on mentioned in the course on my free-tier AWS console. Get my hands dirty makes me learn and understand the services quicker. Summary lectures at end of each section are my important tool for revision.
Whizlab Video Course is my second course for preparation. Even, after a cloud guru course, I do still not get a clear understanding of a few services especially on VPC’s. This whizlab course the author was teaching from basics and also with lots of block diagrams it helps me understand the concepts.
Whizlabs Practise Tests after being done with the video lectures, I started taking the whizlabs practice tests. After each test, I reviewed the answers and took notes for the questions I had difficulties with. Now, Whizlabs has a lot of questions, so I learned many details about the various AWS services from reviewing them. These practise tests are quite easy for me when compared to real exam questions.
AWS re:Invent Videos were super helpful in clearing my understanding, also the format was much more interesting than udemy courses. I watched VPC and Cloudformation re:Invent videos.
AWS Exam Readiness course helped to understand the exam structure and question types, Identify how questions relate to AWS architectural concepts, Interpret the concepts being tested by an exam question and Navigate the logistics of the examination process.
Jon Bonso’s Practice test is one of the best practice test available in the market. Initially, I scored an average of 45–55% on all tests and I reviewed all questions with the detailed explanations given in the review section. And I retake the same test until I got 70+ on all tests. I feel these practice exams are tough than the actual one.
The Exam
AWS Practice Exam: After all the above preparation I did the AWS practice test for validating my exam readiness and I got 75% on that, and it gives me a 100% confidence.
The Real Exam seemed medium difficulty to me — neither too easy nor too hard. You will get plenty of time to answer, also, you will get +30mins if you are non-native English speaker ( need to apply the exam recommendation before you schedule your exam ).
There are two types of questions on the examination:
- Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors).
- Multiple responses: Has two correct responses out of five response options.
For well-known questions, I select the answer and move to next the question without wasting time.
For not sure questions I used the elimination strategy for the options for the questions. I can easily strike out two answers that are completely wrong and I will choose any one answer that I feel is most correct. The main thing is I flagged the question that I am not sure about before moving to the next one.
Once answered all the questions, I review the flagged questions in the review section and un-flagged if am okay with the answers and kept the flag if I am still not sure. Finally, I reviewed again with flagged questions. Once, I had 10mins remaining I clicked the submit button and after a short survey, the summary screen displayed the Pass/Fail result.
That was one of the proudest moments in my life when I saw the final screen with the result as Pass.
Get an Extra 30 Minutes on your Exam
Available to non-native English speakers when taking an exam in English. To understand how to apply this accommodation with step by step process, please visit this How to Get an Extra 30 Minutes on your AWS Exam blog.
References / Key Links
Exam blueprint — https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate
AWS Sample questions — https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sa-assoc/AWS-Certified-Solutions-Architect-Associate_Sample-Questions.pdf
Certification Preparation — https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certification-prep/
