Prepping for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) exam

Published in

Kickdrum

7 min readAug 17, 2017

Why certify?

At Kickdrum, we always encourage our employees to level up their skills on the latest cloud platforms, especially those that offer a rich ecosystem of storage, compute, automation and infrastructure-as-a-service. According to Gartner, Amazon’s cloud (AWS) is 10 times bigger than its next 14 competitors, combined! That means we need to hone our expertise in AWS if we want to continue support big enterprise customers.

Getting AWS certified is the best way to get familiar with the AWS ecosystem, to demonstrate and test your knowledge, and to inspire confidence in your customers.

What are the benefits?

Having AWS certified members helps Kickdrum deepen our AWS knowledge, differentiate our business, and better serve our customers. But, there are also several personal benefits to getting AWS certified:

You can validate your technical skills and knowledge with an industry-recognized credential from the gold standard of cloud providers
You get experience working with the hottest and most bleeding edge technologies available in the market today.
You can showcase your achievement and take on even tougher levels of certification.
You get a wonderful new tool in your architecture toolbox that makes you even more valuable to your customers.

Where do I start?

There’s a ton of material available to help you prep — so much that it can be confusing. I wanted to share my preparation notes for the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)” exam. These are the resources that helped me pass the exam.

Please note that if you are new to AWS and need a high-level overview of AWS services and how AWS solutions address customer business requirements, you can take AWS Accreditation courses (a series of e-learning modules) before preparing for the certification.

Certification Roadmap

AWS provides Associate and Professional level certifications for Architects, Developers and DevOps roles. They’ve been adding specialty certifications for depth in specific areas like networking and big data.

Note that you are required to have an associate certificate before you can sit for the professional or specialty exams.

How long does it take to prepare?

When I was new to AWS, I started by taking the AWS accreditation course titled “AWS TCO and Cloud Economics”. It is intended to enable learners to use the AWS TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator and consists of 8 self-paced e-learning modules (estimated 3 hours total). It took me one week to get accredited following the curriculum after work each day.

As I began to prepare for the Architect exam, I set aside an hour a day to complete the readings and hands-on exercises.

After about 2 months of studying and practical exercises, I sat for the exam and cleared with 83% (50 out of 60 correct answers).

Note that passing scores are set by using statistical analysis and are subject to change. AWS does not publish exam passing scores because exam questions and passing scores are subject to change without notice. However, anything above a 70% should probably keep you safe (at least 42 correct answers).

What does the exam look like?

60 questions and 80 minutes to complete
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
Registration fee is USD $150
No prerequisites
Refer to the Exam Blueprint for full details
The exam takes place in one of AWS on-site testing centers
Preview some sample questions and test yourself!

Based on my experience, the time limit is absolutely sufficient for someone who is prepared. Besides questions related to details of any single service, most of the questions were scenario based where some set of services were used to solve a business case.

The exam is divided into 4 sections:

List of domains measured by this examination and the extent to which they are represented

The first section (1.0) contains questions about building modern cloud-based systems using AWS and is essential as it carries a high weight in the scoring. Questions in this section use real-world examples to introduce you to the problem that has to be solved.

(2.0) Implementation/Deployment and (4.0) Troubleshooting are the easiest sections as they mainly test basic facts or problems that you’re likely already familiar with after a few months of using AWS.

I found the (3.0) Data Security questions to be the most problematic and it’s worth noting that you need to have a good understanding of security processes described in the Security Practices whitepaper.

How do I start training?

Create your free AWS account

Sign up and create an AWS account at https://console.aws.amazon.com (This account comes up with free tier for 12 months with limited resources. However, you should be able to use it for hands on experience while studying for the exam)

Create your training account

Create your training account or sign in using existing AWS login at https://www.aws.training/

Watch short introductory videos

If you are new to AWS and looking to gain foundational knowledge about key AWS services, explore these free AWS introductory videos.

Watch these AWS re:Invent (2015) videos

Follows these tutorials

Read these whitepapers

Read these FAQs

Take these practice exams

Practice Exam I (Free) — NOTE: this is covered by the course below
Practice Exam II — Part 1 (Free, a few questions are outdated)
Practice Exam II — Part 2 (Free, a few questions are outdated)
Practice Exam III (Mix of Free and Paid. In fact they claim money back guarantee if you don’t pass the exam provided you buy their bundle of 3 practice exams — Total of 180 questions and score 80% in each)

What’s the best course to take?

As I mentioned earlier, most of the questions are scenario-based, which means that hands-on experience is the most important for passing the exam. In most cases, AWS users don’t use every AWS service on a day-to-day basis, but that’s why it’s worth taking online labs or courses that will guide you through services that you haven’t seen. Personally, I highly recommend the course that I took and the one that looks the most recommended by others:

https://acloud.guru/learn/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate

NOTE: You can buy this course from Udemy (https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/) with a huge discount and then link with A Cloud Guru account. There is an advantage to take this course from A Cloud Guru after linking as it provides the discussion forum for each section which helps you clarify the doubts general course takers have. I bought it for $10 from Udemy by finding the discount coupon online.

TIP: You can get up to 95% discount on many AWS courses from here (AWS certification course coupons)

This course alone doesn’t guarantee you to clear the exam; however, it provides a comprehensive guide to the topics that are tested on the exam.

NOTE — Be sure to look at this “Exam Feedback” blog provided by one of the students of the “A Cloud Guru” course to learn about a few topics that don’t get covered in the online course.

What do I review right before the exam?

Study this cheat sheet

Study the excellent cheat sheet provided by http://jayendrapatil.com/

Follow these exam tips

Don’t expect straightforward questions in this exam. Each and every question requires you to think before answering. Even simple questions are made very tricky with similar but incorrect options.
Only tag questions you aren’t sure of with “Mark for Review” for later followup. I made the mistake of marking quite a few even though I was confident in the answers. I could have spent this valuable review time on ones that really needed followup.
If you get an “Internal Server Error” or “Technical Issue occurred” screen while clicking the “Next” button, inform the protractor invigilator at the testing center immediately and he/she can solve it for you. I got this screen twice and the invigilator pressed refresh, then logged in again to get back to the next question. You may lose time if you start troubleshooting yourself.
Use the “process of elimination” approach when you are in doubt.
Remember this is an AWS certification exam, so answers that suggest you use non-AWS solutions should be viewed very skeptically.

How do I schedule the exam?

Go to https://www.aws.training/certification, click “Schedule an Exam”, and follow link after link to make your way into the Webassessor system.

Go for it!

I hope this article will help you in preparing for your “AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)” exam. Note that Amazon does change the certification topics based on the new services it releases, so it pays to stay up to date on their latest offerings.

Your AWS Certification will help you validate your technical expertise, enhance your confidence and credibility, and contribute to your organization’s ability to create AWS solutions.

Kickdrum is an Amazon Web Services Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partner. We have deployed thousands of cloud servers, services, and serverless solutions for consulting clients for everything from PoC and Dev/QA workloads to mission critical, high-availability production environments. We help customers of all sizes design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads and applications on AWS.

To learn more about Kickdrum’s AWS expertise, please visit: https://www.kickdrum.com/aws

Good Luck!!