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My path to AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional

Ivam Luz
Grey Frogs
Published in
10 min readMar 18, 2017

Back in July 2016, a colleague approached me with the challenge for taking the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional certification.

Based on my successful experience with the associate level certifications, I decided to focus my studies on reading the official guides of the services that are part of the platform. Given that, until 9/9/2016, date I tried the first practice exam (by the time, U$ 60,00), I spent my time reading the following resources:

Guides (all freely available for Kindle)

White Papers

White Papers that I haven’t read, but looked important after the first practice exam try

Besides all these guides and white papers, I’ve also read a series of articles that I found through the internet:

Having gone through all this content, I was feeling really confident and decided to take my first practice exam on 9/9/2016.

That was a shame. The practice exam proven to be extremely difficult, with lots of both long questions and long answers, requiring a lot of attention to minimal details. In this first attempt, I marked a lot of questions for reviewing and ran out of time to review most of them. In the end, I reached only 45% (I guess the minimum score to get approved is 70%). The score distribution through the topics was the following:

  • Domain 1 — High Availability and Business Continuity: 50%
  • Domain 2 — Costing: 0%
  • Domain 3 — Deployment Management: 50%
  • Domain 4 — Network Design: 50%
  • Domain 5 — Data Storage: 66%
  • Domain 6 — Security : 50%
  • Domain 7 — Scalability & Elasticity: 33%
  • Domain 8 — Cloud Migration and Hybrid Architecture: 25%
First failure in the practice exam

I got really disappointed with such a bad result and felt really frustrated! After studying almost every day for more than 2 months, I went on vacation and decided to take some time away from the studies in order to rest.

Getting back to work around 20 days later, after receiving some recommendations, I decided to give the Cloud Academy (by the time, U$ 59,00, monthly) a try. For around 15 days, I watched all the videos related to this certification path and also answered all the quizzes (the last one, the more complete, a couple of times) available. There was a rumor saying that the practice exams offered by Cloud Academy presented different questions each time you passed through them, but my impression was that this was true only for the smaller ones. For the final, more complete one, my impression was that the questions were always the same, having only the order of the questions/answers changed on each try. My opinion about the Cloud Academy content is that the video materials are pretty good (mainly those that give tips about identifying what topics are being evaluated in the questions and those related to disaster recovery), but the questions presented in the quizzes are much easier than those presented in the official practice exam offered by Kryterion.

In 18/10/2016, after watching all the Cloud Academy videos and reading the FAQ of a couple of AWS services, l decided to give the practice exam another try. This time I was even more confident, but the frustration was worse than the first time. Once again, I got the same 45% as the first try, even though the questions were the same (I think only the order of the questions and of the answers change):

  • Domain 1 — High Availability and Business Continuity: 50%
  • Domain 2 — Costing: 50%
  • Domain 3 — Deployment Management: 25%
  • Domain 4 — Network Design: 50%
  • Domain 5 — Data Storage: 66%
  • Domain 6 — Security : 37%
  • Domain 7 — Scalability & Elasticity: 33%
  • Domain 8 — Cloud Migration and Hybrid Architecture: 50%
Second failure in the practice exam

By the time, my feeling was that, differently from the associate level exams, the lack of practical experience (I’m a developer currently working with Android and with no practical experience of AWS services) in the day-to-day work is something that has a considerable negative impact. You are, most of the time, confrontated with long and complex questions, where more than one answer looks correct, but need to identify which answers fit better for the specific context that’s being evaluated (lower cost, which answer provides the best availability with the lower impact etc.).

Considering these experiences, I decided to take the following approach in order to take the practice exam for the third time:

  1. Read again all the white papers that I had read previously;
  2. Read the white papers that I hadn’t read, but listed as important above;
  3. Participate in a workshop that was going to be offered by AWS to some of its partners in their office in São Paulo;
  4. Read the landing pages and FAQs of all the services, in order to remember the main concepts that I learned by reading the guides listed above;

Continuing with my journey, until mid December, I was able to take the following actions:

As mentioned before, the workshop at AWS happened on 7/12/2016, from 10am to 5pm. Along this day, the instructor covered a lot of topics related to the various domains of the exam. I believe the most valuable assets we got along this day were the tips provided by the instructor, such as:

  • How to identify what are the technologies involved in a given question;
  • Identify what aspect is being evaluated (cost optimization, security, disaster recovery etc.);
  • Among the answers, if you identify something that doesn’t make sense, don’t waste your time reading the rest of it. Due to the fact that the answers are also long, this can save you precious time at the end of the exam!

Besides these precious tips, for non-English speakers, it’s possible to ask for additional 30 minutes for the exam (in case you are taking the English version, of course). In order to get that, you should open a case in the Contact Us page of the Certification. When opening the case, you should provide the name of the certification and a message similar to the one below:

Hello, I am a non-native English speaker. I am requesting to have the option for an additional 30 minutes time added to my exam. Please set my account up so I can have 30 minutes extended time. I want to take EXAM NAME (example Solution Architect Professional). Thank You

Important: you should open this case before registering for the exam, otherwise the option won’t be available for you to choose on the Kryterion web site.

Having attended the workshop, I tried the practice exam for the third time in 17/12/2017 and, one more time, got a punch in the face. This time, my score was 55%. Mixed feelings here because, despite having improved my score in 24%, I was still far from the 70% I believed was needed in order to get approved in the practice exam. This time, my results were the following:

  • Domain 1 — High Availability and Business Continuity: 83%
  • Domain 2 — Costing: 50%
  • Domain 3 — Deployment Management: 75%
  • Domain 4 — Network Design: 100%
  • Domain 5 — Data Storage: 33%
  • Domain 6 — Security : 50%
  • Domain 7 — Scalability & Elasticity: 33%
  • Domain 8 — Cloud Migration and Hybrid Architecture: 25%
Third failure in the practice exam.

After that, I searched on Google and found some forums (mainly A Cloud Guru) that discussed some of the questions from the practice exam. It proved to be a valuable source of information, since there were many really good folks explaining their point of view for some of the practice exam questions.

In 21/12/2016 (I was in a rush, since I believed the deadline for me to take the certification was the end of 2016, due to some business requirements), I gave the practice exam my fourth try. This time, it was a success. I was able to raise my score to 77%:

  • Domain 1 — High Availability and Business Continuity: 83%
  • Domain 2 — Costing: 100%
  • Domain 3 — Deployment Management: 100%
  • Domain 4 — Network Design: 100%
  • Domain 5 — Data Storage: 83%
  • Domain 6 — Security : 62%
  • Domain 7 — Scalability & Elasticity: 66%
  • Domain 8 — Cloud Migration and Hybrid Architecture: 50%
Finally passed the practice exam

I was decided to take the real exam still in December, but, for some reason that I’m not aware of, I wasn’t able to schedule the exam until February 2017. I ended up setting the studies aside (which could have harmed me) and only got back to them around February 20. I was starting to freak out, cause my associate certifications (Developer and Architect) were about to expire in February 27, 2017. In order to keep them, I would have to either:

  • Take the associate exams again; or
  • Pass in the professional exam, which I was focusing on.

I was able to schedule my exam by 24/2/2017 (it was Carnival in Brazil from 25/2 to 28/2, so no way to get a few more days for studying), but, unfortunately, I didn’t know about the requirement to open the support case to get the additional 30 minutes before scheduling the exam, so I couldn’t take advantage of it :(

In this last mile, I was able to study for around more 22 hours (during the nights, after all I had work to do from 8am to 5pm :p). The studies in this phase were focused on re-reading all the white-papers previously mentioned and also a series of good posts (the first here) from Blue Clouds.

On Friday, 24/2/2017, I arrived at the test center around 8:45am. My exam started at 9am. It called my attention the number of questions related to Direct Connect, Kinesis and VPN. Regarding the time, it felt really short. I ended up not having time to review at least 3 of the questions that I had marked for reviewing at the end of the exam.

Almost 3 hours and 77 questions later, that was the result:

Congratulations! You have successfully completed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional exam and you are now AWS Certified. You can now use the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional credential to gain recognition and visibility for your proven experience with AWS services.

…

Overall Score: 75%

Topic Level Scoring:

1.0 High Availability and Business Continuity: 63%

2.0 Costing: 100%

3.0 Deployment Management: 100%

4.0 Network Design: 85%

5.0 Data Storage: 72%

6.0 Security: 50%

7.0 Scalability & Elasticity: 72%

8.0 Cloud Migration & Hybrid Architecture: 100%

And finally the dance of :)

I should confess the mix of happiness, relief and feeling of mission accomplished was very intense when I saw the result. Considering all the time spent to tackle this challenge along the last months, it was, indeed, very rewarding! :D

Hope some people can get advantage from my experience and that it helps others in their way to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional certification.

Updated on March 21 2017

One important note I forgot to add to this text: as other people say, the actual exam feels easier than the practice one, so keep on it in case you don’t do that well at the practice exam.

Thanks for reading! If you found this helpful or interesting please ❤ below.

Cloud Computing
AWS
Certifications
Mastery

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Ivam Luz
Grey Frogs

Written by Ivam Luz

363 Followers
Editor for

A generalist software developer based in Brazil — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivam-luz-26698617/

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