My AWS Certification Experience

4 min readMar 13, 2023

Hi there,

On January 31st, I passed AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional (SAP-C02) exam. Excited to share my certification experience, motivation, and outcome

(See links and costs at the end)

Why?

I never saw significant value in Certificates and Diplomas and always relied on my expertise and learnings. So why would you study something that you’ve been doing for years?

I have been in Software Engineering for over six years and have worked in various roles — Full Stack, Backend, and DevOps; I designed and built many projects, always learned new technologies, and applied best practices. But it turns out — there is always room for growth.

90% of IT leaders that employ AWS Certified staff say productivity improved after their staff earned AWS Certifications, and 89% report faster troubleshooting (source)

Besides confidence and industry evaluation, I noticed significant improvements in the following:

Designing new solutions — be able to make design decisions in minutes (rather than hours)
Continuously improve existing solutions
Contribute to organizational complexity (network, security, multi-account environment, cost optimizations, tools)
Increased productivity and documentation skills
Faster troubleshooting and incident response
Easy communication with AWS Experts and Support
Learned about areas or technologies that I avoided before

Preparation

In December 2022, I came across official sample questions and cracked 75% (the minimum to pass). It was exciting, but there were so many learning gaps: Hybrid Cloud, Migrations, Networking, Storage and Data Transfer, AI/ML, and others.

I was curious, accepted the challenge, and started my preparation!

Lectures (~2 weeks)

First step is to learn the basics.

I subscribed to the Udemy Course and studied for 1–2 hours daily. Lectures give you excellent core knowledge of all AWS Services. However, some advanced use cases or facts (numbers, quotas, etc.) did not “glue” to my brain.

Practice Questions (~4–5 weeks)

Next and last step is practice!

This is the most complex but crucial stage in your preparation. It was overwhelming and burning me out, but there was no other way!

I purchased Practice Sets by Tutorials Dojo and worked thru 11 sets. It was a continuous process where you go back and forth:

answer 75 questions
review and learn from failures
retry

Throughout the process, I learned much from AWS Documentation and AWS Whitepapers, Tutorial Dojo’s cheat sheets, and created my notes and diagrams.

AWS builds its services from customers and industry demands. So, you must have real engineering and architecture experience. AWS recommends at least two years. Also, learning <service_name> purpose, features, and limitations is NOT enough. You must know why other answers are NOT valid.

Some questions have multiple valid answers (solutions), but only one will apply to a specific situation (cost-effective, best RTO/RPO, etc.).

Another important note — there are only three hours, and some people just run out of time. So it would help if you prepared to sit for three hours, read, understand, and answer 75 complex questions (25 per hour).

As I was OK with my score, I scheduled an exam at the test center in Dubai.

Exam Day

It was a sunny Tuesday and felt like any other preparation day. I just walked into the education/test center, signed a paper, and the exam started.

A significant benefit of the test center (vs. “at-home”) — you get bathroom breaks! My eyes were very thankful for that.

The test was challenging and exhausting. So, please take as much preparation time as you need. Max duration was about 3.5 hours (+ 30min for non-native English speakers), but I finished in 2.5 hours.

That’s it! I was happy it was over, despite not receiving the result immediately. Time for celebration lunch!