Passing all AWS Associate certifications is not that hard!
From my sophomore year in my engineering degree, I was fascinated by cloud and the underlying technologies that are built to create its architecture and services, I was hooked from the first encounter and I knew back then that my future lies with Cloud and especially AWS.
I started my journey from scratch with the help of friends and lots of enthusiasm. I made a resolution and kind of promise to myself to finish all the 12 AWS certifications and through this post I will try to cover my one year experience from preparations to the hardships I found to how I overcome them.
Preparation Materials
During exam preparations, I tried top known e-learning platforms like A Cloud Guru, Linux Academy, Udemy, Whizlabs, and Pluralsight. Finally I finished focusing on Ryan Kroonenburg’s courses in A Cloud Guru and Jon Bonso’s simulation tests on Udemy.
Certified Cloud Practioner — CLF-C01
This is made for non technical personnel in sales, support and managerial roles. But if you have already an associate, professional or specialty certification, it will be very easy for you to pass this one. Certified Cloud Practioner aims to validate overall understanding in cloud concepts, cloud technologies, security/compliance and Billing/Pricing.
Certified Developer Associate — DVA-C01
This is made for developers who want to develop, manage applications in the cloud This certification needs to take hands-on labs in AWS Lambda for serverless development, Cloudwatch, X-Ray for monitoring and debugging, and CodeBuild/CodeDeploy for CI/CD pipelines.
Certified Solution Architect Associate — SAA-C01
This is made for solution architects who wants to design resilient, performant, cost-effective and secure architectures in AWS. This certification can help you understand how to interact different services one to another, how to choose the best of them, et cetera… . You can pass the exam by dive deep on the core services: EC2, EBS, ELB, VPC, S3, SQS, RDS, ElastiCache and Cloudformation.
Certified Sysops Administrator — SOA-C01
This one is the toughest among Associate certifications. It helps you manage resources, deploying cloud infrastructures and operate scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems. The main technologies covered by the certification is System Manager, Config, ELB, Route53, VPCs, IAM, EBS…
Difficulty Scale
CLF-C01< SAA-C01< DVA-C01< SOA-C01
Tips before sitting for the exam
- Read FAQs about core services of each certification
- Make your hands dirty in the AWS console
- Repeat simulation tests that you have done
- Use Mindmapping to organise and connect what you have learned in the course
Tips in the exam
- Flag question when you have a doubt
- Classify questions by domain when needed
- Use elimination strategy
- Take your time when reviewing flagged questions
- Use ESL option when you are non-native English speaker
