Getting AWS Certified
One person’s account of completing the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam.
Recently I realised that we are now using AWS to such an extend that we need formally recognised skills in our team to manage it, so I decided to go out and get AWS Certified. We have been using their services for a long time now but lately we have been really pushing the boundaries and putting in bigger and bigger workloads.
The certification ladder as AWS offers two main levels of certification; ‘associate’ and ‘professional’ but also has an introductory cert of ‘cloud practitioner’ and a growing number of specialty certs.
I decided to start with the most simple one just to dip my toes in and see what the process is like. At that point I was not sure I would be going for a full certification, I just wanted to try it out and see how well I actually knew the platform.
Getting AWS Cloud Practitioner Certified
After looking into the certification scheme I signed up for the free Cloud Practitioner training courses on aws.training. The courses on offer were accessible and not too hard or lengthy to get through. After spending a couple of hours watching the videos I signed up for the practise exam on aws.training and tested my self. The exam is on-line and can be taken when you want.
After passing the practise exam I was confident that my knowledge was sufficient to go for the exam so I signed up to sit the exam at one one of the kiosks in central Melbourne. However, I also recognised that my breadth of knowledge of the different services was not quite enough for me to be comfortable sitting the exam yet so I watched the rest of the video courses before sitting the exam.
On the day of the exam I took the train early into the city and went to the kiosk office in the CBD. The facilities were basic but functional. The kiosk was in a room with two kiosk stations and a person taking a different exam at the other kiosk. The kiosk station was a computer with web cams and scanning equipment and a chat window to talk to the observer.
Once I had scanned my id and got permission to start from the observer I clicked to begin. The format of the questions was just as it had been in the practise exam and the question were similar. So far so good.
Once I had answered about 30 questions I expected the exam to come to an end soon as the practise exam but it did not. The questions just kept on coming. I asked the observer how many questions there were but they did not know either. I started getting a bit frustrated with the length of the exam but the difficulty was very much in line with what I expected and the topics did not stray from the training I had got from the free courses on aws.training.
In the end it turned out that the number of questions was 64, just like the memory on my old Commodore 64. This was the only real surprise during the exam. I had expected 25–30 questions but got 64. Other than that the exam reflected the level of knowledge that the cert is targeted at; general working knowledge of the AWS product offering. If you have used AWS for some time the exam will not be particularly challenging but you would be well advised to go through the course before sitting the exam as the AWS ecosystem is very broad now.
Getting AWS Solutions Architect Certified
Armed with lots of confidence from my practitioner exam results I figured I might now go for one of the Associate certs. Since the first one was that easy how hard could the next level be, right? I started looking at the same resources as before and looked at some sample questions. It all look quite attainable so I decided to go for it.
.. the practise exam was a brutal reality check.
Now I got more serious. I looked around for some good material to prepare and found that my friends at Udemy.com had some good looking resources. My team has a team access to Udemy so I signed up for the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams” course.
My first go at taking the practise exam was a brutal reality check. The pass mark for the exam is 70% but I only scored 40%!! I had a lot of learning to do.
Fortunately for me Udemy has a good collection highly rated of AWS courses
The first thing to do was to get some training. However, the instructor led courses offered by Amazon are very expensive. Fortunately for me Udemy has a good collection highly rated of AWS courses and I have free access to Udemy. Even if you have to pay for the courses they are only $15–20 so not much of a hurdle there.
I selected course called “ AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate 2018” made by the same guys who created the practise exam that I took. The course contains 20 hours of training material in 128 lectures. It looked daunting, but I got started.
After covering some of the basics and diving into areas where I knew I was weak I sat another practise exam to see where I was at. My expectation was fairly high to be honest. After studying more than I had for anything for years I was pretty confident.
Even the practise exams are daunting though. You have just over 2 hours to sit the exam and I needed most of that time just to finish. On my second go I scored 60%! A marked improvement but still not enough to pass. Damn! Back to the training.
In the end I attended 107 of the 128 lectures and re-ran about half of them to do revisions on areas where I knew I did not know something. I also read a fair bit on the product pages and AWS documentation when the lecturer would recommend it.
To say that I was confident in all my answers would be a blatant lie
It is all too easy to drift off and not finish a task like this so I set my self a deadline and booked the test about two weeks in advance. This really help me stay focussed and put in the effort required.
The day before the exam I sat my third ans last practise exam. This time, I did not pass either!! I got 69% correct, only 1% away from the pass mark but a red ‘fail’ in the course results for my last exam. I did some last minute reading about VPCs and NATs and then stopped and hoped for the best.
The next day I went to the city and sat the exam. The questions were very similar to the practise questions. This time however I took care to read each question really well to make sure I had the full understanding of the question before choosing my answer. This worked really well, until I realised I was very quickly running out of time. I then started rushing through the questions.
To say that I was confident in all my answers would be a blatant lie. Most of the question where I was confident I knew the answer had two options that could very well be correct. This was intensely frustrating.
When I clicked the ‘finish’ button I had only a few minutes left on the clock and I was fully aware that my chances of passing were far from certain. The exam gods smiled at me that day though and I passed.
Next steps
After passing the Associate exam I briefly considered moving on to the Professional exam. Then I remembered how hard the Associate exam actually was. I think I now have to some of the new things I have learned from the study into practise before I start looking at the Professional exam.
Overall though it was quite fun to do a bit of study again so I think it’s quite likely that I will eventually scale that mountain.
Other members of the team are now working on their certifications too. We will probably be able to apply for a partnership status with AWS soon if we keep this up.
