Introduction
In their own words, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
I had always read about their certification paths, but never got around to dig deeper. Until last week. Decided to have a go at it, to validate my knowledge and experience. After about a week’s preparation I was able to pass the exam and earn my badge. 👏
Let’s discuss the exam format first.
What is the exam like?
The exam duration is roughly 2 hours (130 mins), and you need to answer 60-odd questions. The number of questions can vary as per AWS, with some questions being not used in scoring. Questions are multiple-choice types with a mix of single answer or multiple answers. Multiple answers can appear in 2 scenarios. A problem that is solved in multiple steps or a problem that can be solved in multiple ways.
You are expected to login atleast 30 mins prior to your scheduled time and a proctor will inspect your surrounding before setting up the exam. The 130 min window starts from when you launch the exam.
The result will be shown on the screen as soon as the test ends. You can expect a detailed scorecard in your inbox within the next day, though they mention it can take upto 5 days.
What kind of questions to expect?
As per AWS, the exam objectives are as follows -
- Effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies.
- Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
- Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the life cycle of the project.
How did I prepare?
There is no better preparation than hands-on experience.
Just what AWS says in their exam guide, and it is quite true. Yes, you could slog it out and try to clear this exam, but you will need some form of hands-on training to be successful.
I had good exposure to AWS, thanks to my job profile. As a result, I had a good understanding of the major services, security practices, recommended architectures etc. I started by going through the exam guide and sample questions to understand what kind of knowledge AWS expects the test takers to have.
I then browsed through the FAQ section of services I did not feel absolutely confident about. For example, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Snowball, AWS Storage Gateway etc. The FAQ pages are an excellent resource to develop an understanding of the service, and where does it best fit. For more detailed information, I also looked through the documentation.
Between the FAQ and Documentation - everything gets covered in terms of what can be asked in the exam. If you already have some experience with AWS, chances are these will be like reaffirming your knowledge. If you don’t have practical experience previously, my recommendation would be to try out at least the major services in a free-tier account before attempting the exam.
AWS Whitepapers are a great source to get a holistic understanding of how to approach a problem and design a “well-architected” system. If not all, be sure to go through the Well Architected section to understand what makes a architecture “well-architected” in AWS speak.
I did not buy any courses or prep materials from the usual suspects as I did not feel the need after the above preparation. In total, I must have devoted around 7 days of prep time. 4 hours or more on 3-4 days, and 2 hours or less on others.
Anything else?
- AWS’s re:Invent videos are a great source for a deep dive into any service. A small caveat here is to supplement them with the documentation. Over the years, even though most concepts remain the same, service limits and capabilities keep changing.
- Take the AWS Training Quizes here. There are about 6 to 7 episodes of 20 mins each where the panelists go over 4 or 5 questions.
- AWS Training Portal videos for specific services you want to deep dive into. For example, this is for S3 storage classes.
- Complete the exam readiness course by AWS here. It would give you an idea if you need to prepare better in some areas.
- AWS provides a test exam at a nominal fee, which you can use to test your understanding before the final exam. This can give you a feedback in time, if you need to improve. I did not take it though.
- This is an excellent video (10 hr+) from FreeCodeCamp that covers almost everything and is completely free! It’s a great resource to brush up your understanding. The cource is by Andrew Brown from ExamPro.co.
- Cheatsheets by Andrew Brown here are again excellent to do last minute revisions, and are completely free.
Tips!
I recommend to prepare these topics really well as a majority of the questions will touch upon these in some form.
- S3 - Study about S3, Glacier, lifecycle policies, security, controlling access, bucket policies, replication, storage classes etc. This is one of the most important sections as S3 has a huge variety of applications. Be thorough with your understandng of this service.
- IAM - Study about the different policies (resource/identity) and their use-cases. Be familier with the policy syntax as well, there maybe a few questions which will ask you to choose the most appropriate policy given a requirement.
- VPC - The network layer is incredibly important again. Things like NACL, gateway endpoints, EIP, routes, NAT gateways, flow logs etc are essential to creating robust, secure, fault-tolerant architectures.
- Compute - EC2, ECS, Lambda or EKS. This is again a big one. You need to have good understanding about the instance types, capacity reserations, placement groups, auto-scaling policies, Load balancers (& their applications) etc.
- Storage - EBS, EFS, Storage gateways etc. Questions might ask about the most suitable storage type for a requirement, so you must be aware of which product offers what. AWS often puts options in questions that are simply not possible, so it’s just as important to know what a service can’t do.
- Database - RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora, RedShift etc. Be very clear about the functions, uses and capabilities of replicas. How are they configured, what kind of auto-scaling each of these offer etc. It may get tricky with RDS MySQL and Aurora at times, but if you have a thorough grasp of Aurora you will be able to select the answers by eliminating wrong choices.
- Security - CloudTrail, KMS, IAM, Parameter Store, Secrets Manager etc. Explore the different options available to secure the workloads in cloud. It may not necessarily be about 1 service in particular, but rather a combination of services.
- Monitoring and automation - Cloudwatch, Cloudformation, Systems Manager etc. Although it’s a small sub-section, you would still get questions about monitoring, alerting etc. So prepare well for these areas including what AWS offers out-of-the-box, and what you need to configure specifically.
Conclusion
To sum up, if you have been working with AWS for a year or 2, I recommend supplementing your practical knowledge with some of the resources I described above. It should not take you more than a week’s study to be prepared.
If you are just starting out, I would suggest to get some hands-on experience first with the basic services like VPC, EC2, S3, IAM etc. before attempting the exam. I cannot stress this enough, practical experience is absolutely essential to acing this exam.
Hope you find this post helpful.
Good Luck for your exam! 👍