A word on passing AWS Solutions Architect - Associate exam

The AWS Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA) exam is a very interesting beast and there is no doubt it is a valuable certification. Last week I managed to pass the exam with 72% which I am quite happy about (wonder where the last 28% went....)

I have worked with two camps of people, some who believe that certification is a fraud made up by vendors to make "more" money, and some who see it as a valuable achievement. I see certification as a nice to have personal goal, but never a replacement to real world experiences.

My advice for SAA exam is pretty simple. Give yourself at least 2/3 months and use the AWS platform as much as possible. Always start with basic tasks such as creating a S3 bucket, and attempt to use features in S3 to "productionise" it. Then think about how the S3 bucket can be compromised, and whether there are any safeguards in the platform that you can use. The AWS documentation is perhaps the best documentation I have ever come across. It is clear, concise and quite easy to understand.

There are number of courses in Udemy and I recommend you follow one of them. The Udemy course covers almost everything you need to know, but remember to understand the concepts. Knowing and understanding are two different things and make sure you follow the documentation to fully understand the concepts. I am not a bright person, and had to spend many hours reading through documentation to understand certain concepts. There are tons of materials on YouTube (AWS Deep Dives) that is extremely useful if you want to understand "how" and "why" certain things work the way they do.

Lastly, if you are taking the exam in the morning, make sure to have a very good breakfast and strong coffee because you will need it. The questions can be very long and you have to concentrate. Read the questions to the end and try hard to understand the question in the first or second go. Passing an exam require practise; what I mean here is not practising on the AWS platform but the good old questions. Find as many questions as you can, and do them many times. Try hard not to remember the answers but the concept. Research the questions; I found this to be very valuable, because it took me to parts of the documentation that I would never have read.

Good luck - you will need it!