AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional
Finally, I completed one of the most difficult exam in AWS — Solution Architect Professional, I should be consider myself lucky as I passed the exam on my first attend.
One of the biggest bonus that I get from this exam is that my AWS Solution Architect Associate level qualification being extend 3 more years.
Here I will write down my learning journey and share my personal experience on how I get my professional exam pass. And at the end of the post, I will share some of the study meterial that assist me during my journey.
The Certificate
The certification is not mean the end of the learning path, but it’s actually just another beginning of my cloud journey.
Previously I may just use AWS service to achieve what I being assigned to do such as setup a EC2 to hosting a website, setup the VPC network, configure the route and so on.
But after I really going through the exam, I realise that there are many way that I can do it better, more scalable, more reliable with the minimum of cost. I should follow the least privilege setting for IAM, restrict the access of S3 bucket, enable cloud trial for auditing purposes and so on.
Back to the learning journey until I get certified by AWS, I actually started to work on AWS cloud around 5–6 years ago when I start to propose my company to migrate to cloud from our co-lo data center as we should off load the hardware maintaining job to someone who are more professional than us, and we as a development house, we should focus on building our tools to generate income. Since then, I start my cloud journey.
After 2 years of handson on AWS, I decided to attending AWS Solution Architect Associate courses to polished my cloud skill. After the class, I immediately decide to get my self certified as AWS Solution Architect Associate level.
Back than, the Associate level certificate only valid for 2 years, again I decided to get my self certified as AWS Solution Architect Professional. When I start to look around for the instructor lead courses, only I found out that Professional level courses is not available in Malaysia, so the only way to study is online self study.
The Study
Thanks for Zeal Vora courses on Udemy, it’s really help me to understand a lot about the service in AWS, because professional level of exam, you need to know almost everything about AWS service, so the 30++ hours of courses it’s really help me a lot to have basic understanding of everything.
But only the course is not enough, you need have a lot of hands on experience on the service you just learn. Only by make your hand dirty than only you can really understand the purpose and usage of that particular service. Thanks to my company that they allow me to do all those hands on as per I need.
In addition, the test exam also another tools help me a lot during the journey. You need treat the test exam is another source of learning path to you, normally those test exam come with the detail explanation of the question. From here, you will learn a lot and get yourself used to the scenario based question that you will do a lot of reading during the exam.
In the professional exam, you will found that the answer option given may be all right, but only 1 or 2 is a best fit to the case. So you need to learn to pick up the key point in the question, such as “minimum of cost”, “RPO hours and RTO hours”, “most stable and consistent network speed”.
You can’t just memories all the service in order to pass the exam, but you really need to understand the use case, which service best fit which scenario.
The exam
The exam is 75 questions and you need to score at least 700 point in order to pass, and the exam duration is 180 minutes, where it’s equal to 2.4 minutes per question. You really don’t have much time to keep on reading the question as the question may be a full page long story, so you have to very careful about your time management during the exam.
I remember during the exam, I stuck with few very long story question and long story answer, than I have to decide flag the question and skip it, because we should not spending too much time as there maybe more simple question after that particular question which we can easily score it.
Above is all my personal experience during my learning and certified journey, it’s may or may not help you but hopefully you will get some brief idea on how’s the whole thing work and what should you expect to face before and during the examination time.
For those who really want to take go for the exam, you may start looking at AWS training and learning path at https://aws.amazon.com/training/path-architecting/.
Study as much as possible the white paper on AWS site, AWS blog, documentation FAQ which some of the question may just pick out from there.
Last by not least, wish you all the best for your learning journey and happy cloud computing.
Study and learning material
https://www.aws.training/ https://www.udemy.com/share/1020D4A0UZeF1WTQ==/ https://www.udemy.com/share/101VTsA0UZeF1WTQ==/ https://www.udemy.com/share/102yrMA0UZeF1WTQ==/ https://www.udemy.com/share/1025wIA0UZeF1WTQ==/
Originally published at https://tech.david-cheong.com on July 21, 2020.