AWS offers Training and Certification programs to help you develop skills to design, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications on the AWS Cloud. Earning certification helps you gain visibility and credibility for your proven experience working with AWS.
Currenlty, AWS offers the below certification exams which are categorized into two-levels – Associate and Professional.
Associate Level Exams:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- AWS Certified Developer – Associate
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
Professional Level Exams:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
NOTE: A Master-level exam for AWS Certified Solutions Architect is on the roadmap
AWS continues to be the leader in Public Cloud Computing Services market and AWS certifications are widely recognized in the industry. In order to learn the nitty-gritties of all AWS services, I had decided to take the AWS certification exams.
Being already a Senior Solutions Architect, I wanted to attempt the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate” exam first and gave myself 3-weeks to prepare for it. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for individuals with experience designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform.
| Certification Name | AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate | |
|---|---|---|
| Prerequisites | None | |
| Recommended Courses | Architecting on AWS | |
| No. of questions | 60 multiple-choice multiple-answer questions | |
| Total exam duration | 80 minutes | |
| Exam Registration Fee | $150 per sitting | |
| Exam Administrator | Kryterion | |
| Practice Exam Fee | $20 |
I have taken the exam on 06/15/2015 and passed with 85%. I honestly felt 3-weeks was not quite enough time to deep dive into all the topics the way I wanted. I found the exam to be very challenging as the exam had mostly all scenario-based questions which tested one’s comprehensive knowledge to configure various AWS services to be able to solve different usecases.
What I liked the most about this exam is that it was not like read & memorize some documentation and answer straight-forward questions. Hands-on experience and exposure to almost all of the AWS services are required to be able to face this exam. That ’s what makes AWS exams challenging and hence desirable to have on one’s resume.
Below are some key things to know and practice until comfortable before sitting for the exam.
- Configuring a custom VPC and troubleshooting along with Security in VPC
- Pay lot of attention to all aspects VPC..very important
- Private vs Public Subnets, Security Groups vs Network ACLs, NAT instances, Internet Gateway, Storage Gateway, Virtual Private Gateway, Endpoint for S3, Life-cycle policies and Glacier
- Elastic Load Balancer in combination with Auto-scaling
- Different storage options, S3 vs EBS vs Ephemeral, Securing S3 buckets/objects for different scenarios, Encryption, Performance/Durability/Availability
- Read thoroughly on “Route 53”, I had lot of questions on this
- Different EC2 instance types, EBS Volumes and Snapshots, Some soft limits, Bootstrap scripts, Instance meta data, placement groups, IP Addresses & ENIs, AMIs, Optimizing I/O performance, Security
- Configuration of Cloud Front
- RDS/DynamoDB/RedShift
- Basics of SWF, SQS, SNS, Cloud Watch, CloudFormation
- IAM Users/Groups/Roles, Groups vs Roles, Policies, Service-based Roles, AD Intagration, Security
- Security, Security, Security
- Practice, Practie, Practice
Below are few points that will help towards preparation for the exam.
AWS Free Tier
The AWS Free Tier is designed to enable you to get hands-on experience with AWS at no charge for 12 months after you sign up.
After creating your AWS account you can use any of the 21 products and services, listed below, for free within certain usage limits.
Read all the FAQs at http://aws.amazon.com/faqs/
- After reading through all FAQs couple of times, practice by answering all the questions under FAQs without looking at answers and then compare
Read few AWS whitepapers at http://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/ – at least the below
- AWS Security Whitepaper
- AWS Storage Options
- AWS Amazon VPC Connectivity Options
- Managing Your AWS Infrastructure at Scale
Take one of the online ondemand courses on “AWS Certified Solutions Architect” on udemy.com
Watch AWS re-invent deep dive videos on some key topics
Read the exam blueprint and also answer the sample questions provided
Take the AWS Practice Exam (costs $20) if you feel required
Next, I am planning to take the other AWS exams – Developer, SysOps and CSA Professional. I will share my experience as I complete those exams.
All the best to you if you are preparing for the AWS exam. Feel free to leave a comment if any questions or feedback.