How I passed AWS Solutions Architect - Associate Exam in 2023
A simple 3 step plan to ace the exam
👉 Study Plan
- Udemy course
- 6 Udemy practice exams
- AWS Skill Builder practice exam
- Solutions Architect Udemy Course: Link
Initially I was going through each section of the course in great detail but pretty soon realized I’ll never get around to finishing it. Especially if you’re working full-time, it’s hard to keep track of the things you learned two weeks ago. Instead, I started being more intentional about the key concepts and moved onto the next sections quickly.
For some foundational sections though, there’s just no way around spending a lot of time until it finally clicks. One of them for me was VPC where it took a LONG time to piece together concepts like Direct Connect from on-premise to VPC, or how resources from a VPC would connect to s3 either through an Interface Endpoint via a PrivateLink or directly through GatewayEndpoint. 🤯
However, once you get through VPC, Encryption, Advanced IAM concepts, it becomes much easier to grasp other sections like Decoupling Applications, AutoScaling or differences between EFS and EBS.
2. Udemy Practice Exams: Link
Dedicate at least 1–2 weeks before your exam date to just focus on the practice exams. Taking this exam is a skill. The very first one I took, I scored around 30% because the scope of questions was pretty overwhelming. Once you’ve gone through a few, you start seeing patterns. However, it never really gets easy and you have to stick with it. On the second try I got 60% and it only went up from there.
Key thing for me was not getting discouraged when I still wouldn’t get scores above 80% even though I was on my third or fourth practice exam. I found each one honed in on a specific range of topics and provided a great way to identify concepts you’ll be asked on the actual exam. Make sure to go through the answers especially for the questions you get wrong, even though it takes a while to read and understand those lengthy explanations. It will pay off.
3. AWS Skill Builder Practice Exam: Link
I signed up for the $29/month subscription thinking that I’d take some Kinesis and Redshift labs. But actually the most useful part was the practice exam you can find in the courses catalog. I took it after I finished all the 6 Udemy exams and looking back would probably take it after the 3rd because it provides a better feel of what you can expect on the exam day and how deep they’ll drill down so you can identify key concepts to review.
Once I finished and passed this one, I decided it was time for the real thing.
Final Thoughts
Closer to the exam I realized there would always be questions I haven’t seen before but because of practice would be able to eliminate at least half the wrong options. As expected the actual exam did have some tricky questions whether to use
- Direct Connect, VPN or Snowball Edge to transfer data from on-premise
- How you would setup WAF with ALB
- Using Route53 with NLB
also make sure you’re very clear when to use
- Kinesis Data Streams vs SQS
- DataSync vs Storage Gateway
- ALB vs NLB
- CloudFront vs Global Accelerator
- EBS vs EFS vs FSx for Windows or Lustre
- IAM vs bucket policy vs ACLs
- Services like Amazon Textract, Polly
and many more, these are just some of the one that come to mind.
Things I’d do differently
Perhaps some additional practice exams from websites like Whizlabs wouldn’t hurt (link) and reviewing Cheat Sheets from DigitalCloud (link).
Is it worth it?
Of course. Who doesn’t like a nice url they can use to brag. A 50% discount they give you for your next exam is not bad either. 😏
Thanks for reading and good luck on the exam, you got this! 💪
Curious what resources others used, please leave those in the comments.
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References
- Udemy Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-saa-c03/
- Udemy 6 Practice exams: https://www.udemy.com/course/practice-exams-aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/
- AWS Skill Builder (Practice exam): https://aws.amazon.com/training/digital/
- Whizlabs Practice Exam: https://www.whizlabs.com/aws-solutions-architect-associate/
- DigitalCloud Cheat Sheets: https://digitalcloud.training/category/aws-cheat-sheets/aws-solutions-architect-associate/