How to succeed in your AWS Certification Exam

Some tips and tools to help you in the journey to become a Certified AWS Solutions Architect

I started studying Computing and Information Technology in 2012, covering the basics about algorithms, data-structs, and foundations in Java and C#. When I ended my career in 2015, I had knowledge in object-oriented languages, frameworks, PMI, and web services, so I was able to start working for a very interesting Peruvian startup. My first contact with AWS was integrating our platform with S3, for object storing. At that time, I didn't know anything about cloud computing and I was shocked about how easy is for a person with zero platform knowledge to perform operations and let the hard work to the provider. In my country, you’ll never learn that topics in a graduation classroom.

So, in the next years, I learned more about how those services work, and someday I decided to challenge my knowledge and get certified in AWS. Here I will share with you the strategy I used to succeed in my exam.

As a first step, you must choose which type of exam is the most suitable for you. The Amazon certification path includes in its first level (Associate):

• Solutions Architect: Oriented to developers and infrastructure managers, covering scalability strategies, resilience, and billing.
• Developer: Obviously more developer-oriented, with a focus on storage services and scalability.
• Sys Operations: Oriented to network and system administrators, a little more complex than the previous two (in my opinion).

If you want more detailed information, you can visit this link. Of course, there are more specialization exams, but I think this preparation framework works well for any certification test.

Taking some AWS preparation course

Yes, it seems obvious, but there are so many institutes charging exorbitant prices that it seems a bit unfair to leave this point without comparison for reference. I was lucky enough to attend the official AWS course offered by a partner institute at a price that I consider is very high paid by my employer. It was 3 days of 8 hours each in which, and believe me, it was not enough time to cover all exam topics. As expected, the last day the instructor tried to run with the remaining topics in order to comply with the curriculum and well, I just suffered an information overflow and didn’t learn anything else. While it helps you get a good understanding of some AWS Cloud concepts, you won’t even be ready to pass the practice exam.

After a couple of months, I found out about an online course on Udemy, the price was not expensive at all and they offered more than 10 hours of content. I bought it, and although I already had a certain basis from the previous course, this course solved in a more didactic way the doubts that could arise during the explanation of the class and included guided laboratories where you put into practice everything you learned. The bad? Difficulty level. I passed each simulation test with 90–100% correct answers and the questions were not challenging at all, but compared to the price (almost $1400 less than the first course) it was fair enough.

I must emphasize that even by completing these two courses, you will NOT be ready to pass the actual exam.

Buy a book

Buy, do not download it illegally. Sybex offers very didactic texts in which you can find all the preparation you need to pass exams such as OCA, OCP, and of course, AWS! The topics covered by the exam are very well explained, and their practice tests are of an intermediate level. The cons, the less interesting — but very important — chapters in the exam, like security and VPC for example, can be a little boring to read and even more difficult to understand. After all, a book cannot answer questions.

Taking only the book as a preparation basis, you will have a good chance of passing the exam with a minimum score. Don’t risk it.

Practice on a simulator

Perhaps the most important step. And no, please don’t buy the practice exam from AWS, it is not even 30% of the difficulty level than the real one. My recommendation is going for the practice tests of specialized pages, for example, Whizlabs. This type of simulator has questions with a relatively high difficulty, similar to what you will see in the exam, the best thing is that the explanations for each question are very detailed and supported by the AWS documentation.

Taking this type of preparation exam is very possible that you will pass the real exam with a good score.

My thoughts after passing the exam

Don’t be intimidated by the difficulty or level of the AWS exam (or any other), with conscientious preparation, in so about 60 hours of study and real practice, I am sure that you will obtain more than satisfactory results. Personally, I consider that the combination of these 3 elements of preparation (course, book, tests) is infallible, one complements the other. The most important point here is that you should practice, do not limit yourself only to learning theory since although it can be useful for the exam, a real architect has hands-on experience with the tool itself. Even more, AWS offers a free tier for a year, make the most of it and if there is some service uncovered, the prices are quite oriented to the welfare of the customer’s pocket.

The only element I would remove from my preparation path is the course given by AWS, I consider you can get the same result with any other course for less money, but I recommend you to read the opinions first before buying. If you need some help with the topics, don’t hesitate to comment and share your doubts with the community.