My Cloud Journey-The Solutions Architect Associate Exam
The cloud industry continues to grow at an accelerated pace and I didn’t want to be left out. I therefore, decided to start my cloud journey with AWS since it has the largest market share in the cloud industry. I look forward to becoming a Cloud security specialist in the next few years.
I started with the cloud practitioner certification a couple of months back, and so far, the journey is going as planned. I went on to pass the AWS Solutions architect associate on the first attempt after three months of preparation. I kept hearing everyone talking about a 72% failure rate, which meant only 28% of those who wrote the Solutions architect exam were able to pass. That’s an incredibly scary statistic.
This statistic wasn’t new to me because I recall seeing something similar while preparing for my CISSP exam a few years ago. At that time, the CISSP exam consisted of 250 questions to be written in 6 hours, which I managed to write and pass on the first attempt. I had to replicate the plan I used to pass the CISSP exam for my Solutions architect associate exam.
Set a Goal
As a security professional, my ultimate goal in the next 5 years is to be a security specialist. To achieve this goal, I plan to land a remote role to accelerate this journey. With this in mind, I did a lot of reading online, watched youtube videos about AWS, and followed influencers who tweet or write about AWS on Linkedin. This put me in the mood to thirst for more.
Learn From Others
To get the best preparation, I did a lot of research online. I watched youtube videos and read blogs about what others did to pass their exams. Interestingly, I also saw videos of people who failed on their first attempt. Big lessons were learnt from these resources. I took the tips that worked for me and implemented them. In the same way, you don’t have to follow everything I have written here word for word since some of my recommendations may not work for you.
Join A Community
If you have the opportunity, join a study community. I was fortunate to be part of a community of learners called Azubi Africa. They had instructors who had passed the solutions architect exams and were in a better position to steer us in the right direction. The community was vibrant as well, as I met people from various parts of my country and other African countries such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Rwanda, etc. It’s fascinating how close we’ve all become through technology. Each member of the community had their own goals and were all convinced that the solutions architect associate certification was the surest way to achieve them.
Read, Watch and Practice
There are several materials online. Youtube, Udemy, and Whizlabs were my source for video tutorials. One important thing about your choice of materials is to ensure they are curated for the course at hand. Using unstructured materials can be so overwhelming and may throw you off your path. AWS white papers and FAQs are incredible sources of information when you need further explanations.
For practising, I had access to the Whizlabs lab environment which was provided by Azubi Africa. It gives you hands-on knowledge about the service you are learning about. It was a great resource, but my problem with it is the time limit for the labs. This is not a problem with Whizlabs, but a general issue with almost all other labs. I do understand the motive behind it so I can’t fault them. There is little time to understand what you are doing, so you end up following instructions till you meet the objective of the lab within the allotted time. Due to this, I used my AWS free tier account which I created while preparing for my cloud practitioner exam to practice more without time constraints. I had enough time to read more about why I am clicking a button or selecting a checkbox.
Mindset
All the solutions architect questions were scenario based, which meant that just reading about the services wasn’t enough. I needed to know how they were used in various use cases.
The CISSP questions were crafted the same way, so I had to recall how I went about that. “To pass a CISSP exam, one has to think like a CISSP”. Some of the multiple choice answers made so much sense, but aren't correct if you look at them from the CISSP’s perspective. I had to employ this same strategy for my solutions architect associate preparation. What do I mean by this?
The solutions architect associate exam is based on the 6 pillars of the Well architected framework. These are Operational Excellence, security, reliability, cost optimization, sustainability, and performance efficiency. Always have these pillars in mind and identify them when reading or watching tutorials.
Schedule Your Exam
Once the battle lines are drawn, you know what is at stake and would therefore prepare for it. I scheduled my exam and decided to work towards it. This brought in more urgency. I noticed the difference in my preparation before and after I scheduled the exam. I woke up at 3 am to practice one set of practice exams before setting off for work. when I returned in the evening, I spent two hours reviewing the test I did. That was my plan, and I was committed to it.
Practice Exam
Practice tests are not meant for you to pass and make you feel good about yourself. They are meant to bring out your weaknesses early so that you don’t have to exhibit these weaknesses on exam day. Reserve that 100% for the final exam. I had this mindset when I wrote my CISSP and didn’t regret it.
After each practice test, I went through all the wrong answers and read about why the wrong answers are wrong and why the right answers are right. After that, I went through the ones I had right. I knew I had guessed some of the questions I had right, hence the need to review them all.
One material that helped me was Jon Bonso’s practice exams on Udemy and tutorial dojo. For this material, there are six sets of questions with well-explained answers. I preferred that to the questions on Whizlabs mainly due to how it was organised.
A quick tip for using the practice test is not to go back to solve the questions you just reviewed. Move on to the next set of questions and return to the reviewed questions some days later. This will help give a clear picture of whether you understood the concepts or you just memorized the answer.
John Bonso’s questions weren’t easy, but the practice test questions on Whizlabs were more difficult. After attempting all 6 sets of tests two times, I scored a minimum of 85 and used the newly acquired knowledge to attempt the Whizlabs practice tests. I must say my confidence went over the roof after I began getting good scores on the Whizlabs tests. 3 days before my exam, I felt ready and therefore took a break from answering questions to skim my handwritten notes.
Time management is important. I usually solved all 65 questions in 90 minutes. You should plan along these lines.
Topics
I would be doing you a great disservice if I told you the topics I met in my exam. This is because I discussed with two other colleagues what they met and it seemed they wrote an entirely different exam.
My tip is that you read about all the services you encounter in your curated tutorial.
Do not take anything for granted. Spend more time on the commonly used services. Identify the use cases of the given question; does the client want a highly available solution, a cost-effective one or both? Does the client want a solution with the least overhead? The criticality of a workload determines the kind of disaster recovery measures to put in place. One interesting tip I found during my preparation was the difference between managed and fully managed services. These are some of the scenarios you will encounter in your practice tests. Look out for keywords, while reading the questions and try to come up with your answer before going through the possible answers.
Also, get your fundamentals right. When I speak of fundamentals, I am talking about networking, subnetting, TCP IP, basic IT security, and the like. Once you grasp these concepts, the rest will be easy for you.
The D Day
I prefer to write my exams in the morning because there is less chance of any incident causing distraction. Time management is essential when you are writing. If you meet a troublesome question, select an answer, flag it, and move on. It is better to guess an answer than leave it blank. When you get to the last question, there will be enough time to review the flagged questions. I got to my final question in 70 minutes and spent the rest of my time reviewing my flagged questions.
The anxious part of this whole exam was the 24-hour wait to get my results. I knew I had put in so much and needed to pass so badly. Thankfully, all my work had paid off.
Conclusion
One of the core values I picked up at Azubi Africa is Progressive Learning Attitude. We can all grow by maintaining a consistent learning attitude through knowledge sharing, open-mindedness & exploration. I hope to keep up my learning attitude and share my knowledge with all in the coming weeks.
All the best to you if you are preparing for your exam.
