Tips and Resources to achieve AWS SA Professional

Build a strong reading and time management skills to crack the exam with confidence

AWS Certification are quite famous in the cloud community and still, there is a value of AWS professional-level certification in the market, anyone can crack the exam easily but how you are going to prepare and utilize it in your day-to-day job will be the key important part of AWS certification journey.

I took my first AWS exam in Dec 2016 and to date, I have appeared for multiple exams which include a few “Betas”. Here is the history of my AWS certification. I have intentionally blurred the registration number. It’s not that I am always able to crack the exam but the journey of learning provides me enough confidence to serve my customers better and upskill myself regularly.

You can notice that I have appeared for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam 4 times since 2017 and I failed it in first two times, I was fresher and I took the professional exam as an academic exam but I was wrong, post that it took me 2+ years to learn and build confidence to appear again in 2020 and I was able to complete the exam with confidence, here is the video I shared in 2020, I’ll record the latest video in few weeks as the content has changed for the exam and there are many surprising topics I noticed this time.

I don’t want to discourage you as well degrade the value of the exam but I did not have time to go through any of the courses for the preparation, I recently joined a new organization and from day 1 I have been working with customer to understand their business and IT problem and trying my best to build the custom solutions using AWS platform. I got support from my customers in the last 8 years of my career which helped me to take such risks to schedule exams.

Here are the topics which I notice in the exam and it may happen you will see slightly different. The exam contains 75 questions in 180 minutes but I am sure AWS has a big question bank for AWS SA Pro, so chances are high there may be differences in the topics when you sit for the exam.

Topics that need to be prepared

1. Know the AWS VPC in and out, Public and Private subnets, and NAT Gateway vs. Private link. Don’t get confused with endpoint interface and endpoint gateway. S3 and DynamoDB support endpoint gateway but other services are with endpoint interface.

2. Learn about AWS IOT Service and its different features (IOT Core, IOT Rule, etc.)

3. Service Catalogue is very surprising for me as it’s not covered in most of the courses I have ever reviewed, I got the chance to work on it with my customers in the past hence I was able to find the right approach in the options but I highly recommend to learn from documentation and try it in your AWS console.

4. Gateway Load balancer is another interesting topic and understand the use case of it. Understand the workings of GWLB as GWLB endpoints need to inject and route tables need to modify etc.

5. Build the lab for network load balancer and application load balancer, know the difference and use cases along with how both can be combined to build the solution.

6. Another topic that I was not expecting too much is DynamoDB, knowing the security, accessibility, and how lambda, API gateway, and DynamoDB will work together in a secure scalable fashion.

7. Learn SQSvs.s Kinesis Data Stream/Data Firehose, very important, easy to score more in the exam

8. Direct Connect Gateway vs. Transit Gateway and how both can be combined to get maximum efficiency.

9. S3 is always my favorite topic and know the different classes and their use cases. RTO and RPO play a major role in selecting the class.

10. RDS MySQL, RDS PostgreSQL, and RDS Aurora MySQL/PostgreSQL - this will confuse you but understand the working pattern of it and the features, especially in case of disaster which will support which feature. RDS Proxy is something that will help to score a few points.

11. Don’t forget your favourite of everything i.e. EC2. Know the AutoScaling (types also), Health check, monitoring using CloudWatch, and burstable class (not graviton).

12. EBS volume types are important

13. ECS and ECS in fargate mode is something you must know else it will be tough to pick the right option.

14. Good to know about Eventbridge, SNS, Cloudwatch logs, Athena vs. Redshift Spectrum, and Dynamodb DAX vs. Elastic cache Redis.

15. Cloudfront and Lambda@edge are important to know for some questions.

16. The most important topic I’m putting here is last because it’s my favorite topic and day-to-day work and I was not expecting that it would be heavily tested in the exam. It will be easy if you work on it or chances are high you will lose points there, Guess which topic…………………………………… It’s AWS Migration. Know by heart the 6/7 R’s of cloud migration and what tools will be supported to execute it.

Tips and Hints

I got more than half of the exam as a single-choice question and the rest were multiple selections but not more than 3 options to choose from.

1. Read the question carefully and know the ask which is usually at the end, read it carefully and understand that not every solution will be the most cost-effective. Read and try to match from the option is most reliable, most secure, most easy or quick way, etc.

2. Two options will be wrong if you know the above concepts clearly so do the comparison between the two options and use technical logic if it matches the ask.

3. A few questions are very easy and while reading you will know the answer, Try to cover those questions in less than a minute to save time.

4. If possible do it in the exam centre rather than from home, In the centre, you will get a pen and paper which will help you to draw the diagram.

5. If you are not sure about the options then mark it for review but select someone or multiple best guesses (in case of more than 1 option to choose), I got few clarity and hints from the other questions and answers in the exam and while doing a review I was able to change my opinion on the doubtful question.

6. Don’t click on the next question until you select the option, I skipped 1 question like that and while doing the final review I noticed no option was selected so quickly I read the question and selected my choice.

Resources

The rule of thumb here is don’t follow too many courses as exams will cover many items that will require the real customer experience not just the hands-on labs etc.

I purchased a course by Adrian Cantrill in 2020 but till date never been able to finish but I can say that it is one of the best courses out there (not an affiliate link or promotion), but the way he explained the concepts and design his course will be helpful to prepare.

That’s my progress on the course but don’t know when I will finish it.

Also spend time learning the fundamentals of IT, Networking, Storage, and cybersecurity it will help you in the long term to grow in your career. Here is a few hours long free quality content.

Finally few YouTube videos I highly recommend watch

1. AWS re: Invent 2022 - Scaling on AWS for your first 10 million users

2. AWS re: Invent 2022 - Dive deep into AWS networking infrastructure

3. AWS re: Invent 2022 - Advanced VPC design and new Amazon VPC capabilities - The first 10 mins are key important and gem.

Lastly, all the best and prepare properly, Do not set a too long target and too short, try to do a self-analysis and then schedule the exam.

Do subscribe to my blog and I post mostly about my cloud computing learning and tweaks.

Cheers!!!!