Renewing my AWS Solutions Architect Professional Cert

I’ve recently renewed my AWS Solutions Architect Professional Exam and I wanted to share my experiences in the hope that it might help you pass too!

My Renewed Badge!

I am a strong believer that ongoing personal and professional development is key to my success and growth. One way that I like to keep learning is by getting certified in key areas of my role as a Senior Consultant. We’re heavy AWS users at Dae.mn, so renewing my AWS Solutions Architect Professional certificate was a must-do. It’s a good challenge and I find that refreshing my memory on some of the best practices covered in the exam really helps me have more confidence and do a better job for the clients I work with daily.

At Dae.mn, we’ve recognised the importance of certification for both our business and people, so much so that we’ve recently launched official certification paths and offer incentives for our people to attain them. It’s created a really positive buzz in our teams and everyone is enjoying the challenge. It’s certainly given me a nudge in the right direction to get some done.

The first one on my list was to renew my AWS Solutions Architect Professional certificate. Here’s my guide to passing it, I hope it helps!

My Recommended Study Guide and Tools

In order to prepare effectively for the exam I would recommend using three types of tools:

• An exam guide online course: I’d recommend Stephane Maarek’s course on Udemy or the official course from ACloudGuru are recommended.
• AWS documentation: reading the official docs for the key subject areas I cover below is very useful.
• Mock exam questions: I use WhizLabs to practice answering exam questions which is useful up to a point, more on that later.

Key Technologies and Topics

I’ve split this up into two sections, core and advised. The core section covers the main topics that are more likely to crop-up often throughout the exam, and the advised section covers more of the technologies that appeared a handful of times in my exam, but might not necessarily appear in yours.

Core

Networks:

• IP CIDR Blocks & Subnet Design; make sure you understand why a VPC with an IP range of 20.0.0.0/24, a private subnet of 20.0.0.0/25, and a public subnet of 20.0.0.64/26 is technically wrong.
• The features of, and differences between, core network connectivity services such as Transit Gateway & Transit Accounts, Direct Connect vs Site-to-Site VPN; when to use each? What are the pros and cons?

Data Stores and Caching:

• The difference between the different data stores in AWS and when to use them: S3 vs RDS vs DynamoDB vs OpenSearch (Elasticsearch)
• S3: features, security options and pricing models. How does cross-account access work? How can you control object security? What’s the difference between standard and infrequent-access pricing models?
• CloudFront: heavily covered in the exam, so really spend time learning about the features and how to integrate into other services, for example, how do you securely serve S3 objects with CloudFront?
• RDS: what’s the difference between Multi-AZ and Read Replicas? How do failovers and promotions work for migrations? When would you use RDS over DynamoDB?
• DynamoDB: what type of data is suitable for DynamoDB? How do you properly index data in DynamoDB?

Compute and Load Balancing:

• EC2 Instance Costs: you don’t need to know per-hour costs, but, what are the differences between the pricing models for Reserved Instances, On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances, and when is it appropriate to use each?
• Load Balancers: what’s the difference between an NLB and an ALB? When would you use each type?
• Route53: how can DNS be used for deployments?
• WAF: what is the WAF, what does it do? What are WebACLs and what do they attach to?

Centralised Control:

• AWS Organisations and Policies: how can this be used to control a large environment? What can a policy control and what can’t it control?
• Cost Control Across Organisations: make sure you understand the difference between AWS generated tags and user-defined tags and how they’re used to assign costs.
• IAM and STS: how to control access in a secure way.

Data Movement:

• SQS: what’s a FIFO queue? What’s a Dead Letter Queue?
• Kinesis: what is Kinesis, what does it do? What do Kinesis FireHose, Kinesis DataStreams and Kinesis Data Analytics do?

Advised

• ECS: what is ECS and when can it be used? What are some of the core features?
• EC2 Placement Groups: why do we use them? What are the limitations?
• In my exam, I had lots questions on IoT although others in Dae.mn didn’t experience this as much. Reading through some of the IoT services is recommended.
• AWS Glue and Athena: what are the use cases for these tools and what query language can you use?
• Redshift: what is Redshift and what are some of the core features? How is data loaded into Redshift?

Learning Goals

Using the above notes and tools, I would recommend aiming to consistently get 60% in the mock exams on WhizLabs before booking an exam slot. I booked mine a couple of weeks in advance to give me some time to focus on getting to an average of 80% on the mock questions.

My revision went a little something like this:

1. Answer some questions
2. Check which I’ve got wrong
3. Research the wrong answers in more detail and understand what the correct choice was and why.

This iterative approach allows you to practice different versions of similar questions and better understand the format and style of the exam. WhizLabs is good for helping this process because you can review your answers and for wrong answers, it provides a little snippet of why it was the wrong choice as well as links to articles about answers that are correct.

One thing to note, some of the questions on Whizlabs are not well written and can cause confusion. Be warned!

Exam Time

After booking the exam, all the details will be sent to you via email. You can reschedule it if needed as long as you do it at least 24 hours before your exam time. You’ll forfeit your exam fee if it’s cancelled within 24 hours!

In the email is a link to the software you need to run on your machine for the exam. Your mic and camera need to be on and it needs to run a system test. Run this well in advance of your exam day. On the day of the exam, you’ll need to be in a quiet room without any distractions for the duration of the exam. An online proctor will check your work space and ensure there are no secret notes anywhere!

Exam Technique

The exam is 75 questions over 190 mins and all questions are multiple choice. Some of the questions are long, with quite a few needing multiple answers, so take your time and read them twice if needs be.

For most questions, I’d recommend trying to rule out two obviously incorrect answers first before selecting the right one from the narrowed list of two. For example, a question covering high-availability for RDS might have two answers with single node deployments. These can be ignored almost immediately and you can focus on the Multi-AZ RDS answers.

You can flag any questions you’re not sure of so that you can re-read and check your answers later once you’ve been through every question for the first time. I’d highly recommend you do this as you go.

My Exam and Results

I didn’t feel great about the first third of the exam but I was consistent with my exam technique and that definitely helped. I didn’t get my results immediately, which was unusual and was unsettling. I finished the exam close to 15:00 on a Friday and it wasn’t until 10:20 on the Saturday morning when I got an email saying I’d unlocked a new badge!

I’ve taken the most enjoyment from my career through helping people, whether that’s knowing an answer or sharing someone that will add further value. I hope that anyone reading this finds something in it that will add some marks to their exam and improves their mindset going in. Hopefully for you, like at Dae.mn, not passing is not an issue, just dust yourself off to go again.

Good Luck!

Ian Ta is a Senior Consultant at Dae.mn