How I passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional 2021 Exam - SAP-...

Introduction

I recently passed my AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certification on the first try. I wanted to share my experience of preparing for the exam as well as the actual exam day tips and tricks I learnt from the veterans. I'll also talk about what to expect and ways to navigate the challenges. Getting an AWS certification is important for your cloud ecosystem career. Any role including DevOps, Engineer, Data, Architect would immensely benefit from this certification.

The certificate

Credly Page

Background

I've been a full stack developer for over 15 years. Worked in small and large organizations across domains. I started my journey on cloud with AWS, working on the very basic offerings such as EC2, VPC, ELB, R53, S3, etc around 8 years ago. My primary focus has always been on AWS with about 20% time spent on other cloud vendors like Google Cloud Platform (GCP). I've built large scale, distributed, real-time systems in various domains and seen them through scale and chaos.

I have also passed my AWS DevOps certification a couple of years ago. Currently I am an AWS Community Builder, which is an awesome platform for AWS enthusiasts and you should definitely signup to learn from the experts at AWS Community Builders. With Jason Dunn steering the effort it has become even more engaging and vibrant.

What does the exam test you on?

The AWS SA Pro is one of the toughest and sought after certifications in the cloud ecosystem. The primary reason is, the certification not only tests your knowledge but most importantly your experience. AWS tries very hard to ensure that candidates DO NOT clear this certification by sheer hard work or grit unless they can demonstrate experience and the ability to evaluate situations.

Does that I mean I cannot pass without experience?
Of course you can, but according to me, cramming for a professional certification and passing it might just be a waste of time. You're better off studying the associate certification and then get real world experience before moving ahead.

Understanding the exams

It is important to understand the mechanics of the exam. They will help you be aware of what AWS expects out of each question. AWS goes into painstaking details to make the exam unambigous. Their focus is to test your knowledge and experience at every step. My notes on the research:

Questions

• There are no trick questions
• Several questions are distractors. Distractors are answers which may be wrong but seem perfectly plausible
• Very rarely will previous questions/answers aid your next ones
• You get about 2.5 minutes per question and they are long. Learn to read them quickly (more on this later)
• Many answers are right, you have to pick the most appropriate one given the requirement
• At the Professional level, the questions require you to Analyze and Evaluate. This means you need to understand the scenario and pick one based on several factors
• Questions will only test you on one area at a time even with multiple systems
• Questions will not test you on UI, numbers, math, etc. You do however need to know the limits of services to select the right answer. For e.g. API Gateway has a timeout of 29 secs and will impact long running choices.
• Scores are scaled. Each question does not have the same weight. This will impact your total score.
• There is no penalty for wrong answers

My Preparation

I spent over two weeks of rigorous study prior to the exam. I continously work on projects that require me to interact with AWS (most common services), this helped a lot. Some of the questions are recall level, which means they test your ability to remember services and their characteristics, and continously working with AWS will help you answer them.

Give yourself at least 1 month to prepare even if you are an AWS expert

Focus

Like any certification exam, passing the SA Pro, requires a bit of everything:

• Knowledge - You absolutely must be well versed with AWS
• Experience - You must know how to solve problems using a combination of AWS services and have solved at least a few in the past
• Scope - Understand what the certification will test you on before you start studying. Go to at least more than one source to get latest information
• Skill - The questions are long, designed to confuse and needs time to evaluate. Picking the right approach is key to solving all questions
• Time Management - Devise an approach to reading the questions and skimming through them (more on this later)

There are many courses and prep tools out there for the professional exam. I did a cursory search on the internet and asked experts around for the recommended ones.

The only two I ended up using was:

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Practice Exams 2021 by Tutorials Dojo

These exams are the holy grail of practice. They are continously updated and John B (a fellow AWS CB) is looped into the AWS ecosystem. The team keeps the questions updated and very relevant to the exam. If there is one service you pay for to pass the exam, this is it.

John and his team are great and will help you every step of the way.

How to use Tutorials Dojo"

• Do these exams last but do them all
• Go thru your study material and leave them for last
• Prepare yourself for 3 hours and take one exam at a time in its entirety
• Do this as close to the exam date as your schedule allows

Click here to visit Tutorials Dojo

• Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional 2021 by Stephane Maarek (Udemy)

Stephane Maarek is one of the best fast paced trainers out there for AWS certifications. If you have significant experience with AWS, then his courses will walk you through the exam oriented aspects of the services.

How to use Stephane's course

• This is a slides only course. No UI or demos
• Follow up with self guided practical sessions to understand the nuances
• Review the slides before the exams
• This is a long course, playback at 1.25x or 1.5x to save time

Click here to visit Stephane Maarek's course on Udemy

Study notes

• Go through all the services whether you have used them or not
• Write down characteristics and limitations of every service (e.g. EBS is about 3IOPS/GB, Lambda has a max of 15 mins, Lambda vCPU increases with RAM)
• Map services to keywords. e.g. NLB = expensive, fast, millions of connections, SQS = decouple services
• Take notes, lots and lots of notes. I filled an entire book with simple one liner notes. It helps to recall later
• There are many services with similar names and functions. Clearly write their attributes to distinguish e.g. Storage gateway options

How to read the questions

Almost all questions are scenario based and require you to read them quickly. I devised a strategy that worked for me. After the first 120 minutes, I had gone through the entire set of questions, skipped 5 (not even read), and had marked about 12 of them for review. This gave me a full hour to review the ones I wasn't sure of. The strategy is as follows:

• You get about 2.5 minutes per question. Do not time while reading the question
• If the question is long and has each answer that involves multiple services - Skip it
• Get through all the small ones first

• With each question:

  • Read the scenario and requirement two times. Pick up keywords and pivot your answer around them
  • Eliminate the wrong ones immediately. Wrong ones have clear issues e.g. Archive data to ephemeral storage
  • Questions can have single word differences, read each word carefully e.g. instance data vs user data
  • Once an answer is chosen, read it and map each requirement to the scenario and requirement

Exam day - Game time!

I woke up early on exam day, after a small run, I took the final timed exam from Tutorials Dojo.

Notes:

• Have a good breakfast. You'll be in for 3 hours, you need the energy
• Have a small walk/run
• Try and reach at least 20 minutes before
• There is no set exam time/batch. Once you arrive, they log you in and off you go
• You cannot carry anything in the exam center (no watches, wallets, keys, etc)
• There is a bathroom break but the exam timer does not pause or stop. Best to take care of things before the exam starts
• Exam centers generally have smaller monitors and uncomfortable chairs/keyboards. Be mentally prepared to not be physically comfortable
• Ask for a pen/paper to write notes. You can only mark the question for review, not the choices. I avoided using the comments feature of the exam. Instead I wrote down the choices I am confused between on paper
• Remain calm. The first few questions and minutes can be overwhelming. Once you start answering your pace picks up (TD exams will also help)
• There is no penalty for wrong answers, so make sure you attempt all of them
• If you finish early, review only the most ambigous questions. I tried reviewing most of them and wasted a lot of time
• Mark questions for review liberally. If you practice you can get through the questions quickly

And that's it, if you've practiced and read enough this should be a breeze. You'll see a PASS grade immediately.

Best of luck!