The journey to AWS Solution Architect — Associate
Before I joined carsales and was still a uni student, I did not have many chances to be exposed to AWS and get my hands dirty. One of the many benefits of joining carsales is that you have a lot of opportunities to be involved in AWS events as carsales works closely with AWS to encourage beginners to get on board with cloud services. Over the past year, we’ve had many game days and immersion days. While they can be overwhelming (I felt completely lost of several hours at the last game day!) they’re a great way to get engaged to learn cloud architecture. Being in the environment and involving in all the events really engaged my interests and pushed me to learn more about AWS, because you don’t want to sit in the event feeling at a loss for several hours!
Why learn AWS
In my role as a developer, working with AWS is essential on a daily basis. While I have been using certain AWS-backend services at work, my knowledge and experience were fairly limited. Learning more about AWS has benefited me in many aspects as a developer.
Most of our products are deployed in AWS with a bunch of the key AWS services like EC2, S3, Cloudwatch, ELB, etc. With the knowledge of AWS, I am now able to think in terms of high availability and security and design cost-effective, reliable cloud-native architectures. Since I’ve honed in on my new found skills, I’m able to engage with aspects of development which previously I might have left to a more senior developer or even a DevOps. A practical example might be when a website is down, I can now troubleshoot on the cloud by looking at the logs and metrics. Also, when the traffic spikes, I can check our existing monitoring on (CloudWatch logs…Xray e.t.c) and configure the autoscaling groups to ensure the high availability of our web services. And I have been having a lot of fun building some serverless websites with microservices on AWS as well.
Learning with Women in Tech
My cloud journey started in April, which involved plenty of hard work, and I found myself dependent on the Women in Tech Group within carsales along the way. In April, carsales’ Ladies In Tech Group formed a special study group — “AWS Study Group”, and the initial objectives are Women in Tech Group learning AWS together and aiming to be certified. And months later in August, I got accreditation as an AWS Architect Associate.
The steps we have took
- Establish the goals — Hi to our future certified
In the first few sessions, we discussed our development focus and decided which certification we were interested in. Considering I was still quite new to cloud computing, I chose to do the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate” as it focuses on the core AWS services like IAM, VPC, S3, and EC2, which can give me a good understanding of how AWS approaches security, networking, data storage, and compute capability. And based on the interests expressed by the ladies within the group, we broke into three study groups including “Elementary”, “Developers” and “Solution Architects”.
2. Weekly group study — The lunchtime study
One hour of studying together every Tuesday became our weekly routine and brought us together. Our “future_aws_architects” study group sat together to learn and review the topics related to certification, including inviting some professional DevOps inside the company to run workshops and explain some common topics like VPC, Subnets, Security Groups; Discussing encountered problems together and sharing good learning resources; We also did troubleshooting together, tried to play with AWS, and to build something when we were unsure about the problems
3. Presentation — Study review
After around one and a half month’s study, based on what we have studied, we had our first presentation. It gave us an opportunity to present the topics we learned from the study group and I felt it was a good way to reinforce what I have learned by showing and explaining it to the group.
4. Panel Discussion — Meet some internal experts
We had the chance to sit and chat with CTO Jason Blackman, Head of Tech & Operations for GPS Jane Ooi, senior DevOps engineer Rikki Hodgman and Yuri Petrov from development in this session. They spoke about the history of carsales migration to the Cloud and the importance of designing high availability, security architecture for a big enterprise like carsales. It has been a very fascinating experience. Knowing the development of Cloud and how it has benefited us really focused my motivation to pursue the certification.
5. Practice Exam Questions — See how far you have got
In the last session, we went through some practice questions discussing unfamiliar topics like Dynamo, API Gateway e.t.c, it highlighted some knowledge points we may have overlooked, and having Shaun from AWS in the room helped a lot in explaining the answers and gave us a deeper insight into the topics. After the session, I felt like having more confidence in doing the exam and having a better understanding of how the questions look like in the real exam.
How this came together for my exam
To be honest, I have thought about getting certified since last year but I was dragging my feet for the lack of motivation and study companions. The study group has been very beneficial and helpful. The exam format is 130 minutes in duration and consists of 65 multiple choice questions which gauge your knowledge and application of various AWS services.
My Learning Resources
- The A Cloud Guru course for AWS Solution Architect — Associate
- It is a very good course to start with, which walks through most of the basic topics and gives you a good idea of how the exam would be like. With its hands-on labs, you are able to practice the material and play around within the AWS Free Tier.
- The link of my study note to the course: https://drive.google.com/open?id=131P2A_19oh-xYe8QTuSpj_OOqD8BGRGK
- It gives you more in-depth and concise information plus quizzes.
- Read the FAQs at least for these important topics, as it contains a good portion of questions from the exam and it is good for quick review.
4. WhizLabs:
- It serves as an excellent resource for practice material, which provides 7 Practice Exams and Section Tests for each examined topic which costs around $15.
- It provides very detailed explanations for each quiz which is super helpful!
5. QwikLabs
- It provides accounts only for certain hands-on labs. You can avoid using your own accounts and cause some unintended fees. ( Happens to me when I created a NAT gateway and forget to delete… T-T)
Conclusion
This is the AWS certification journey I have with our Women In Tech Group. It has been such an amazing and rewarding experience. Studying with the group and having panel sessions and getting certified has further motivated me to learn more about Cloud Service.
And Thanks to
Women In Tech Group, especially Jane Ooi, Anthea Corridon for organizing every session and Leila Creagh for editing assistance and carsales dev team for sharing knowledge.
