No How I passed 3 AWS Certifications in 26 days and saved $24.000 in one day.
Don’t get me wrong I am not your friendly neighbourhood boss who does not have any idea on the technology. I do work, breathe and teach technology. I debate on and learn about it on a daily basis. Considering that my job as a leader is to have a greater vision of how the systems that I manage work, couple, decouple and find the parts where it can be rebuilt with new technologies, I also take time to explain this to others where they also have the same visions as me. This achieves both alignment and the motivation of the team for greater projects.
So I can hear you asking “why are you explaining these to you while the title is on AWS certification” Well these and the certification is really highly attached to each other. As most of you will empathize with me on your journey to becoming a Director, CTO, and Executive the time you spare for details of the technology that your teams use becomes less and less. It is not because you do not want to, but because you have tens of more responsibilities like forecasting, budgeting, hiring, motivating unblocking bureaucracy and communicating, which ends up occupying all your time.
Then you end up with a selection. Either you stay with your team and become a bottleneck or you let your team decide the best and you then understand what was done and why.
I have always chosen the latter. Giving your team the freedom they need and teaching your team members on responsibility and asking them to take part in decision making is a great way of creating the next generation managers, leaders, and people who are not only doing what they are told but actually think for the best of the team and the company. While you are doing this as a manager, director or an exec level you distance yourself from daily decisions which end up making you lose the deep understanding of the technology you are using.
Alright now back to the exam. Although having a general view of what the teams I manage and work with is essential it is also very important to go back to engineering days and refresh your deep knowledge on the new technologies. If you are working %100 with AWS you will know that the upgrades to existing services as well as new technologies are being pushed every day. While in 2000 you could have the latest technology by just reading a couple of articles every month now you have to keep learning every day. Not only that you need to keep going back and refreshing your base knowledge every year or so because there is a big possibility that the technologies you think were dependable are either expired, rebuilt or replaced by other technologies. So yes you need to keep learning no matter what.
Thinking all those I spent my entire Christmas holiday studying for AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam. I did know about the technologies but I couldn’t answer you if you asked me what would happen if you asked me “Which service can identify the user that made the API call when an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance is terminated?”. So I started studying on the foundations of AWS. When it was built, what were the first service they offered (That’s SQS by the way!) and all the other general information that would help me get a general idea on AWS.
I write if you want to succeed you should too. I have these big notebooks where I take note of every little detail I learn during studying under its respective technologies. This way when I go back I always have a chance to capture and remember the notes with just a quick look.
I studied the basics and read whatever FAQ I could get my hands on but most importantly the following:
AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide
AWS Cloud practitioner Sample Questions
Overview of Amazon Web Services
Armed with these I went ahead and scheduled my exam through AWS Certification Page. Since I live outside of Barcelona I had to drive around 1 hour so I schedule the time around 13.00h. Just a quick look at my notes and there I was taking the exam. The exam was not hard but was not as easy as a pie either. You had to have a deeper understanding of S3, EC2, ELB, Auto Scaling, VPC, Subnets, ECS, AWS Transcoder, RDS billing.
I finished the exam around 1 hour and pushed the “End Test” button. The next was a couple of questions about the exam center and Bom! I have seen the following sentence:
“Congratulations. You successfully passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam”
I was now an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF). Great now I could go and celebrate it with a bottle of Rioja wine but I didn’t. While I was going back home I remembered how much I loved learning technology and especially AWS. How this would help me understand my team better and probably help architect newer solutions by not only reading through AWS blogs but really understanding what lies behind.
So there I was in my desk studying for AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (SAA). Now, this was though. Cloud practitioner certificate does give you a sneak peek of what technologies are being used but merely asks you for details. Solutions Architect exam is where you need to really not only understand the technologies and the best practices but also need to be able to use them in real life.
AWS does it with scenario based questions. Get ready to answer questions like:
A web application allows customers to upload orders to an S3 bucket. The resulting Amazon S3 events trigger a Lambda function that inserts a message to an SQS queue. A single EC2 instance reads messages from the queue, processes them, and stores them in an DynamoDB table partitioned by unique order ID. Next month traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 10 and a Solutions Architect is reviewing the architecture for possible scaling problems.
Which component is MOST likely to need re-architecting to be able to scale to accommodate the new traffic?
So I have started studying on 27 Dec. I had to leave behind the family meals, Turrón, and Cava which is very typical here in Spain and continue studying.
As usual, your first stop is official guides. Here are the resources I have used :
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (Released February 2018) SAA-C01 Exam Guide
AWS Solutions Architect — Associate (SAA-C01) Sample Exam Questions
You will be tested on the following domains:
Now for the exam tips. You NEED to breathe, eat and drink AWS Whitepapers and FAQ for Lambda, S3, CloudFront, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, DynamoDB, RDS and especially Well-Architected Framework.
If you will remember from this year’s re: Invent Werner Vogels is really putting a lot in Well Architected Framework which helps AWS Customers to create Secure and Reliable architectures and cloud projects. I am sure we will be seeing more news an exam questions on this
You will also see A LOT of questions on Serverless architectures and networking. Make sure you know VPC, Fault Tolerance across regions through EBS snapshots and Cross-Region-Replication, NAT Instances, NAT Gateway, Internet Gateway, Subnets, CIDR, Routing, Security Groups, Virtual Private Gateway. Remember to study especially what is the proper way of creating networks and where you can use VPC, Subnets, Nat Gateways, Internet Gateways and how you can debug them.
Read the FAQ of every technology mentioned in the Official Exam Guide.
One night before I got really sick, passing all night nearly awake and getting up 05.00am to be in Barcelona at 09.15 made me think of just letting it go and taking the exam another day yet I have thought again what would I be if I had left when came across difficulties and problems. I never did give up and I was not going to give up this time either.
Then there I was on 3 January on the way to Barcelona, with a double dose of ibuprofen to take the exam.
Now the exam was nothing like the Cloud Practitioner Exam. As I was expecting the questions were scenario based and really were to find out not only theoretically but hands-on you knew the architecture inside-out. I sweated and then there was that “End Test” button.
I clicked and waited. The next message was:
“Congratulations! You successfully passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam ”
Well, I was happy not only because I passed the exam but because I did not give up. Somehow passing exams under hard conditions makes you value them more than the others.
Then I was on the way to home again. 1.5hour drive and I found myself in the bed for another 10 hours.
Then I sat down just to see what was the certification path that AWS recommended. I just wanted to have a sneak peek and I was so tired of studying so many days I didn’t even think of doing another exam. AWS recommends the following:
Then this bug appeared again. I know I always wanted to help my developers but was I doing it? Was I really helping them to use the technology in the way they were supposed to use it? Was it my job to do it? Was it something that I would lovingly do?
Well, the answer was YES so I had no chance but to start studying again. This time was for AWS Certified Developer Associate Now believe me when I say two things:
- The exam tips, exam dumps and blogs on the exam you can forget about. AWS upped the level in 2019 and the exam questions you respond in the actual exam has nothing to do with the exam questions you can find on the internet at the moment.
- IT IS DIFFICULT
Now Solutions Architect was a difficult exam, yet you could read the experiences of the people and learn from the tips they mention in their blogs. That’s not the case for Developer Associate exam. The exam is new and I was one of the first group of people taking it. I believe it will take a relatively short period for the courses and exam dumps to update but till then make sure you study and study hard.
In the exam, I was asked 65 die-hard questions only 2 of which I had seen in one of the online exams I had tried. The rest 63 are questions that are focused on one thing: Finding out really if you know the details.
As in the associate Exam, you are faced with scenario type questions. But this time instead of being asked “Your client is migrating to cloud how can you help” you are being asked “You are developing xx application how can you develop in more secure and how can you debug the problems” which adds a great part of difficulty if you are not a hands-on developer like me.
The best thing you can do again is to really learn the concepts on AWS white papers, AWS FAQ and REALLY UNDERSTAND how you can develop cost-effective solutions in the most secure way.
- DO study until the last night you have
- Make sure you put yourself into situations where you really wonder what would be the MOST SECURE, MOST COST EFFECTIVE way to develop. You will encounter multiple answers where all answers are usable but ONLY ONE is the MOST EFFECTIVE, MOST SECURE, BETTER solution compared to others.
- DO learn how to calculate DynamoDB Capacity Reservations. You will get a question to calculate it and you don’t want to miss it.
Seeing that I was having problems understanding capacity calculations. I have found a way to visualize it better. Round it, divide by 4, x it with times you will need access and divide by 2. I remember it as:
0/4xtimes/2
Well then I was on the way again, driving to Barcelona at 5.30am. I have sat down and used all of the exams time. I re-passed all the flagged questions that I didn’t know the exact answer for. And yes flag the questions you are not sure on and just skip them as soon as you can. You will have time to come back and think about them
I pushed the “End Test” button and there it was:
“Congratulations. You successfully passed the AWS Cloud Developer Associate Exam”
There I had done it. 26 days of over 14 hours of daily study (except during the week when I was working, which would drop to about 4 hours) and ending up with 3 AWS certifications which will help me through the decisions I take with my team, to the forecasts that I will make for the company and of course for the architectures that I would design to help my peers.
I have scanned all my notes and added them to a repository. You can download them here:
And no I didn’t forget. How on the earth did I save $24.000 ?
Well, this is where the power of the good certifications come into play. AWS Certifications are made in a way where you can put them into action while you are studying or just after completing them. There is no “ONLY THEORY” here. You are dealing with real-life scenarios where you have to find real-life solutions.
While I was studying I had learned about the usage of Cold Disks, Throughput Optimized Disks vs General Purpose. Then searching through our infrastructure knowing that we could use Throughput Optimized and Cold HDD I have seen a big database volume where we would save the Historical data. This data was not being used by any IOPS intensive applications. I have explained it to the team we did change the disk volumes to Cold and Throughput Optimized HDDs. We ended up paying $732 with the usage of Throughput Optimized and Cold HDDs instead of $2,779 with General Purpose SSD disks. The result was:
$2047 a month x 12 = $24564 / year
So do go back and refresh your knowledge. It does not matter where you are in your organization you can help your company make more clever, safer, more cost-effective solutions. Don’t forget the higher you go up in your organization the higher impact you can make refreshing your knowledge and explaining your knowledge to your people.
Need help deciding? Join our Technical Account Managers community in Discord. Feel free to contact me via Twitter or LinkedIn.
Update: 28.11.2020: I have joined up AWS as a Technical Account Manager and then promoted to the Head Of Enterprise Support Spain& Iberia where I manage a golden TAM team. If you are curious about how I did it you can read it here:
Update: 28.03.2019
Since the write-up, I also passed the AWS Sysops Associate exam. Now I am 4x4 AWS Certified.
