How did you prepare for AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Level certification?

If you are planning to prepare for the AWS certification exams, then the path as below:

1. Developer Associate
2. Solutions Architect Associate
3. SysOps Administrator Associate
4. Solutions Architect Professional
5. DevOps Engineer Professional

AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam is the first or second exam that has to be taken by the AWS developers. If you are an AWS developer and would like to start your certification preparation, then AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate or Developer Associate is the place to start.

This is the most basic level of AWS certifications. Many exam takers feel that Developer Associate has to be taken first because that is very simple and easy to pass.

Here is few free questions for AWS solutions architect associate certification exam. This would help you to understand the pattern for the real exam.

Work Experience

If you don't have any idea about the AWS, then you can't pass the AWS exam just preparing the practice questions. One should have a solid work experience to pass the exam. The reason is, most of the questions will be scenario based. Unless you have directly worked on the concept, you will not be able to answer it correctly.

If you have not got any real time work opportunity, you can sign-up for the one year free tier from Amazon.

• Sign Up : Amazon free tier account : Note that Amazon's free tier offers you the service for free first one year. In this period, most of the services offered by them are free with limited usage. This limit is enough for you to practice for the certification exam.

Here bottom line is that, as a first step sign up for the free tier account and start playing with all the services. If you are doing the practical work outs, it will be very easy for you to prepare for the certification exam.

AWS Official Documentation and Blue Print

Before you move on to buying any of the commercial training, official AWS documentations are a must to ready for gaining great amount of knowledge about the certification concepts. Here is the list of items that are worth reading:

• Official Site: Look at the official site for this certification. There is lot of information that has to be read before you start preparing for the certification.
• BluePrint: You have to download this PDF and ready it immediately. This is the exam syllabus that will have to be prepared for the exam. You can download it from here (AWS Solutions Architect Associate BluePrint).
• Practice Questions: If you want to get the glimpse of how the exam questions will look like, you can download the free sample questions from the Amazon certification page itself. Here is the link for sample questions.
• FAQs: There is a FAQs section of the AWS certifications. This will answer all your questions about the AWS certification exams. You have to read once to ge more clarity about the exam.

Whitepapers

The following are the list of whitepapers that are useful for preparing solutions architect exam. Also you will be able to find the list of whitepapers in the exam blueprint.

• Overview of Security Processes
• Storage Options in the Cloud
• Defining Fault Tolerant Applications in the AWS Cloud
• Overview of Amazon Web Services
• Compliance Whitepaper
• Architecting for the AWS Cloud

Data Security questions could be the more challenging and it's worth noting that you need to have a good understanding of security processes described in the whitepaper titled "Overview of Security Processes".

In the above list, most important whitepapers are Overview of Security Processesand Storage Options in the Cloud.

Solutions Architect Associate Exam Information

It seems to be there is no fixed guideline for the number of questions and duration set for the exam. Amazon keeps changing the number of questions, duration and passing score. As of now, the following are the most likely you will get in the exam.

• Number of Questions : 60 Multiple Choice Questions
• Duration : 80 Minutes
• Passing Score : 65%

Note: There are reports that some users got only 55 questions and some got 67% as the passing score. It is noted that Amazon has signed NDA agreement to the exam takers not to disclose any information about the exam.

Recommended Books

There is only one book has been release for the AWS certifications. That is for Solutions Architect Associate exam. If you are interested in reading the book, you can buy the book from online.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam

What are the topics to more focus on preparing for this exam?

I am listing some of the very important topics for this certification exam.

After you read the courses and books for the exam preparation, you have to read the Amazon's official docs for the below topics. These are most important and you may get lot of questions in this topics for the exam.

• EC2
• S3 (Around 10–15% of the questions may be asked from this topic itself. S3 is one of the most important service for the exam. Read This answer from an exam taker : How many questions asked in S3? )
• VPC
• Do no neglect any of the subtopics of these topics (for example, in EC2 read about ELBs, AutoScaling, Placement Groups, Spot Instances)

Read the complete documentation for the below topics:

• EC2 / AMI / ELB / EBS / Instance SSDs / Snapshots / Autoscaling
• Amazon S3/RRS/Infrequent Access/glacier/cloud front/CDN
• IAM
• Cloud Watch
• Route 53

Just read the FAQ's for the below topics:

• RDS/RedShift/Dynamo DB/Elasticache
• SQS
• SNS
• SWF
• Cloud Formation
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Storage Gateway
• Import Export
• Direct Connect
• Lambda
• Kinesis
• Directory Service

Commercial Training Materials

Once you have prepared using the books and official documentation from Amazon, then you can buy a commercial training from any of the popular sites. You have to mainly reply on them for the practice questions to practice.

Purchase a good practice exams on-line and keep practising the exams again and again until you score 95% or above. This will help you memorize the concepts. This is very important for you to save the time in your real exam. You have to just get the answer in your mind when you read the question. Every concepts has to be in your mind. You need to reach to that level of preparation.

Note that as much questions you practice for the exam, you will be able to gain more confidence to pass the exam. So, it is most recommended to buy a commercial exam software to test your knowledge.

Here is the some of the popular AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam solutions available in the market.

There are five main sources for learning AWS certification exams.

1. Whizlabs - They offer Practice Questions and very detailed online course which helps you to learn each and every concepts that is covered in the exam.
2. A Cloud Guru
3. Linux Academy
4. Cloud Academy
5. Udemy
6. http://testprep.cloudthat.com/

You can buy any one or two of the exam software for your preparation. Whizlabs is one of the leading certification provider for the last 16 years. They have recently launched the AWS certification guides.

Exam Tips

• While you are attending the exam, you have to move very fast. Otherwise you will not get enough time to attend all the questions. This is one of the major issue faced by most of the exam takers.
• Once you have attended all the questions, then review the questions that are marked for review. Don't spend more time for the questions which have no clue.

Testimonials

Here is some of the links that is shared by the exam talers about their experience.

• Vamshi Rapolu has passed Solutions Architect exam
• An AWS Journey - Here is one of the good experience written nicely about the useful resources that he has used for passing the exam. He has used A Cloud Guru and Whizlabs (practice questions) for his preparation.

Some Additional Resources for Solutions Architect Preparation

I have found really great resources that would help you to further understand the tips for effectively preparing for solutions architect certification exam.

• How to prepare for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification exam
• How to become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect | X-Team
• Passing the AWS Professional Solutions Architect Exam
• How to prepare for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification exam?
• 8 Tips to Pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam
• AWS Certification Preparation
• A curated list of AWS resources to prepare for the AWS Certifications

Recertification

AWS release number of new features every month. If you pass your AWS certification, after 1 year you may be feeling outdated because there would be several new features added to the technology. To keep it updated, AWS makes it mandatory for every certified candidates to recertify every 2 years.

If you are not doing that, your certification credentials would become invalid.

You can read more about recertification here:

• AWS Recertification

Do you have Questions?

I hope this helps you to prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification exam. If you are looking for any guidance on preparing for the certification exam, please send me a message. I will help you to prepare for the exam.