How Did I Pass AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional in 2 weeks — Comments, Tips, and Suggestions about the Exam

I’ll willingly admit that the title seems like clickbait. It was only a working title when I started this article but even at the time when it was finished, I still haven’t figured out a better title so I kept it as it is.

But, I did pass the AWS certified solutions architect professional exam (hereafter referred to as SAP, and the solutions architect associate as SAA) with minimum preparation in 2 weeks. I wanted to share my experience, what preparation I did, what learning materials I recommend, exam tips, etc, to you, to help you to pass the exam too.

This is going to be a long article; I warned you.

My Background

I have been working with AWS since 5 years ago.

During this period I mainly worked as a DevOps engineer / SRE / Cloud engineer. Different companies call it differently nowadays, but these roles have something in common which is cloud infrastructure.

I had the chance to work with AWS, Azure, as well as GCP. I probably have the most experience in AWS compared to the other two. Because of projects for some large German corporations I had the chance to use Azure quite a bit. GCP I only have limited working experience in two of my smaller consulting projects.

With that said, I don’t want to mislead you into believing that you can achieve the same from where you have absolutely no knowledge about the cloud or even computer science at all.

Please DO NOT book an exam in two weeks and risk wasting $300 of your hard-earned money. Before you book an exam or even before you decide to take the exam, the first question you should ask yourself is:

Should I Take the SAP Exam?

Short answer, Yes. And No.

Yes because:

• Boost your career — it’s not uncommon to see job descriptions and requirements asking for some certification.
• Increase your AWS knowledge — chances are, even if you have already been working with AWS for a few years, you could still benefit from it.
• Increase your overall capabilities as a solutions architect — the most important of which, in my opinion, is, to quickly absorb information and make the right decision in a short time, which is all this exam is about.

On the other hand, you probably don’t NEED to take this exam:

• In my entire career, no interviewers have asked me if I have some certification. They are more interested in your real-life working knowledge and experience. Note that, this might be a biased opinion because after all I only interviewed a very small number of companies and positions.
• The SAP certification requires you to know a lot and some of which you simply are not interested in, or will never need to use. For example, if you worked for startups especially cloud-native startups in your whole career, you probably never needed to touch on on-prem VMs and VM migrations and hybrid solutions — which are quite important in the SAP exam; or you simply don’t like the CI/CD toolchain provided by AWS and you prefer third party solutions (AWS CI/CD toolchain are also a topic in the exam).
• Although the SAP exam tests many of your skills — reading, absorbing information in a short time, architecting, etc; doing the exam is still quite different from real-world solutions architecting. What I mean is, there is no guarantee that if you do well in the exam you will do well in your job role which is solutions architect.

So, only you can decide for yourself.

My suggestion is, if you like challenges, you probably should give it a try. After all, this is the most difficult AWS certification you can do (well some specialty certs could be harder depending on your background but in general this is the hardest one).

The difficulty of the Exam

Since we are on the topic of the difficulty already, I want to talk a little bit more about it.

I do not want to exaggerate the difficulty of the exam and scare you away. You gotta take this matter objectively — you probably couldn’t pass easily with only a short period of preparation time if you did not know the cloud or even computer science at all; but it’s not so hard that even with experience, preparation, and hard work, you still need to try it like five times before you can pass.

I think, generally speaking, the difficulty of the SAP is overrated on the internet.

The verbosity of the Questions

Some people even say that for non-native English speakers, if you can finish all the questions in time, you already should be congratulated no matter you pass or not, because some of the questions are quite verbose.

When I did the solutions architect associate exam, it took me around 90 minutes to finish 65 questions. When I did the practice exams for the SAP (I will share what practice exams I did and give some recommendations later), it took me around 100 minutes to finish 75 questions. In the real SAP exam, it took me about 150 minutes. Yes, I did not use the whole 180 allocated minutes for the SAP exam.

Although 150min in the real exam is 50% longer than what I needed in the practice exams, I have to say that it’s because sometimes the questions are not clearly stated, or they are hard so you gotta think more; it’s not fully because a significant number of questions are significantly longer than the practice exams.

And I do not consider myself a speedy reader at all. I do read faster than some of the non-native English speakers (for example on the IELTS test reading part, I generally need only 30–40min to finish the allocated 60min tasks, but many people do not need the full 60min to finish).

So, please do not be overwhelmed by the length of the questions. Maybe the long questions are a little more in the real exam than in the practice exam, but not much more; and the long questions sometimes are the easy ones because you get more information, and some answers are clearly wrong, as long as you grasp the key point.

With that being said, if you consistently find that you can’t finish the practice exams within 120–150 minutes, you probably should practice more to increase your reading speed.

ESL+30

There is a possibility to request the ESL+30 exam accommodation (when English is only your second language, you can be granted extra 30minutes on the exam).

I personally wouldn’t recommend it, if I think I could only finish the exam in 210 minutes instead of 180 minutes. Because 3 and a half hours is a lot. It’s too intensive. You will be too exhausted to think properly so the extra 30 minutes could not help much.

In my personal example, I started the exam at 6 PM and finishing around 8:30 PM feeling hungry and low sugar blood already. Imagine I finished at 9:30 PM instead. It’s inhumane to do such a long exam without breaks.

The Coverage of the Topics

You might be scared away by some of the practice exams where the questions cover a lot of AWS services you have never used or even heard of.

Don’t be, because, in the real exam, that is not the case.

The difficulty of the professional over the associate exam isn’t because it covers more topics. Two weeks ago before I did the SAP I also did the SAA exam so I think I am qualified to tell you this.

SAP is more difficult compared to SAA in the sense that some questions are longer (SAA also has long questions), more choices to choose from (for example choose 3 from 6, where SAA are almost all choose 1 from 4 or 2 from 4), and some questions are quite deep into details (for example how AD DNS works in the VPC and how to troubleshoot). It’s not because it covers some corner services you never used, and you don’t need to know everything.

Preparations and Learning Materials

I watched a 20-hour SAA online course from acloudguru.com in 1.75x speed, took two SAA practice tests from whizlab.com before I took the SAA exam. In total, I would say it’s 15 hours or so of preparation time for the SAA.

I mention the SAA because I think it also should be counted as the preparation towards SAP.

Then the SAP, I watched a 10-hour SAP online course from acloudguru at 1.75x speed, and another 13-hour course at 1.75x speed on udemy.com, and 4 practice tests on udemy as well (), in total I count it as another 20 hours.

These total 35 hours are split into about 2 weeks.

Honestly, I think I did too much; you probably do not need to watch so many videos (but you do need the related knowledge).

Online Learning Materials Recommendation

I can recommend the SAA course from acloudguru as a start. Honestly, I can’t tell how much the course helped me for the exam, but I can tell you that even as an experienced user of AWS I still learned some new services and details about old services. This is a course if you should give it a try even if you don’t want to take the SAA/SAP exam at all.

On the SAA practice test from whizlab, there are many, but I only took two of them. I think it’s quite different from the real SAA exam questions. But it doesn’t matter, the practice tests are not meant to get you to remember a lot of questions in the hope that you will meet the same questions in the real exam; I would say it’s more of a “getting some feelings” before the real go. I think there are also other websites for the same purpose. You probably should do one or two mocked test so that you know the form of the exam, and see how long do you need to finish.

The SAP course from acloudguru I do not recommend. It’s done by a different teacher from the one who did the SAA course on acloudguru. And this guy stops a lot in the middle of the sentence, making the experience bad.

The SAP course from udemy I think I can partially recommend. The good thing is you can download a PDF so if you think watching videos is too slow for you, you can read the PDF only. Bad thing is, although it seems the teacher knows a lot about AWS services, he has neither an American nor an English accent with a lot of unnecessary stops in the middle of the sentence, which is made even worse if you play it at 1.5 or even 1.75x speed. At some point, I started to think it tortured me and I wished it could finish faster.

The SAP practice test from Udemy, well, I think I can also recommend, based on the same reason above (to get a feeling about the exam), not because it has similar questions to the real exam. Here you can test if you can finish everything on time. As aforementioned, you probably should aim for 120min (at least under 150min) to finish each test with all passes on the 4 practice test.

Should you take any video/lecture-based courses at all? I don’t think so. People learn at different rates, and people already know different things. Watching the video forces you to watch all the contents prepared by the teacher. Reading, on the other hand, can be selective.

Whitepaper / FAQ

It is recommended by multiple online learning websites that you read the whitepaper and the FAQ from all the AWS services.

Did I do it?

No. I only read a few that I wanted to know more about. Plus, how boring would that be?

I’m the kind of guy who learns by getting his hands dirty in the task; not reading a book and watching hours of videos before getting started.

With that said, your experience may differ. You can learn something from the whitepaper and the FAQ for sure. If you are the type of person who likes reading a lot before working on it, this might be the right choice for you.

But anyway, for the majority of the core services, having hands-on experience definitely helps because in that way you remember what it is, how it is more vividly than only trying to remember how things work in theory.

Tips

Real-world Hands-on Experiences are Highly Recommended, although Not a Must

I have friends who never had any working experience with AWS and still pass the SAP with 3 months of hard preparation. So, if you have no experience with AWS at all, you can still pass the SAP, just like many others who did so.

I do not recommend this way though.

I personally believe if you learn something by doing it, that thing becomes yours. You own it. You remember it because you know how to use it.

On the other hand, if you learn something by trying to remember how it works, you may forget, because it was never yours.

Eat something before the exam.

This might seem funny to you but it’s real.

The 3-hour exam is intensive and requires you to focus highly and your brain will use a lot of energy.

Also, you are not allowed to drink or go to the bathroom. So some scheduling will help a lot.

You DO NOT Need to Answer ALL Questions Correctly

I can't stress this enough, but you don’t have to get all questions right.

This isn’t an exam where you must score 100% to pass.

If certain questions you don’t know at all, make an informed guess, use your best judgment, then simply go on to the next question.

It changes nothing even if you waste more time on topics that you don’t know at all.

Even if you get 15 questions wrong out of the 75, you can still pass.

Don’t be afraid to skip a question or two. Well, not skip, but make an informed guess :)

Skip Long Questions First? No

Some people will tell you that, not all questions a very long, so you might skip and mark the long questions and try to make it all to the end, then come back to look at those long questions.

I personally do not recommend this strategy.

What you should do instead is to make sure you can finish everything ahead of time, and this isn’t only about the exam because reading fast and getting information is a key skill in real life too.

Disclaimer

I have watched all the online learning materials mentioned in the article. They are recommended (or not recommended) based on my personal experience. This article isn’t sponsored at all.

Since Dec 2020 I started working for AWS. I wrote this article because of my interest and I want to help more people who are interested in taking this exam; not because I was told to do some advertising about AWS or anything related to Amazon. This article is my personal opinion, does not represent Amazon/AWS’s opinion.