AWS certification preparation: Some useful resources and tactics
2 Feb 2024 • ~1000 words • ~5 minute read
I've been putting quite a bit of time into preparing for the AWS solutions architect associate certification recently and I thought I'd quickly summarise my thoughts about the emphasis of the certification, some of the resources I've been using, and how I'm trying to retain the useful information.
Certification emphasis
AWS publish an overview of how the exam breaks down here. Having worked through a lot of content recently, I'd say there are three services you need to know in detail, a goodly number of services you need to know at a high level, and a few areas you just need to know exist and when to use them. I would organise these as follows:
| know in detail | know at high-level | know exist |
|---|---|---|
| VPC | Lambda | machine learning services |
| EC2 | ECS/EKS | big data services |
| S3 | SQS | Elastic Beanstalk |
| IAM 1 | SNS | AppRunner |
| Kinesis | ||
| Route 53 | ||
| KMS | ||
| RDS | ||
| DynamoDB | ||
| CloudWatch | ||
| CloudTrail | ||
| API Gateway | ||
| EventBridge |
My day job has exposed me to the bulk of these, though I've had very little experience with VPCs and surprisingly little hands-on experience with just EC2 too.
Thinking in more broadly conceptual terms, it might look as follows:
| know in detail | know at high-level | know exist |
|---|---|---|
| networking | serverless | machine learning |
| compute | containers | big data |
| storage | decoupling | managed deployment |
| security | databases | |
| streaming | ||
| monitoring/audit | ||
| event-driven |
Common threads throughout are scaling, redundancy, optimisation, security and, of course, cost. Knowing how to answer questions on these five facets in relation to most of the above is pretty key to success.
With this in mind, I feel this is a very well matched certification for me - there's a lot of consolidation of things I've worked with on and off, but lots of the real in-depth stuff is less familiar. Either way, I'm enjoying it.
Resources
Stephane Maarek's Udemy course
You don't have to look far for this one. If there's one video course that everybody seems to recommend, it's Stephane Maarek's on Udemy.
It's 27 hours long. At the time of writing this, I'm 70% through (about 19 hours). Most of the remaining sections are specific to exam techniques and solutions architecture more generally, but there's a whopping 2 hour 30 minute chapter on VPCs which I'm both dreading and looking forward to.
Adrian Cantrill
Again, this guy is massive in the AWS certification training space. I've been watching a lot of his YouTube videos and really like the way he teaches, so decided to buy his course too (more on this below). There was an excellent bundle deal for both the associate and professional level solutions architect courses.
I only bought this this week and don't intend on watching the whole thing through (it's a lot of hours and obviously doubles up a lot on the above). But I will say that I regret getting this one second, as I think the way he's structured the course and how in-depth he goes caters more to me than Stephane's.
Honorary mentions
A number of YouTube channels are pretty good on AWS content, even if they're not explicitly for exam preparation:
I definitely recommend subscribing to these if you want to learn more about AWS (and a good number of other things!).
Methods
As I've already said, there's a lot of content to watch. Going over sections repeatedly isn't really an option, and nor is taking detailed notes - which is what I would do if I were working through a Pluralsight course or something.
Anki
Enter Anki to the rescue! Anki is an algorithmic digital flashcard program.
The solutions architect exam seems to be about knowing
- range of services available
- best uses cases for service
- limits and costs
- well established patterns
Considering how massive AWS is, going through flashcards regularly (daily if possible, but admittedly I've not kept it that regular) and just reminding myself of those limits, best use cases, patterns is fantastic.
So instead of taking notes, I put together short specific flashcards that capture the essence of the info while I watch along. It's much quicker, and I actually feel it is helping me remember.
I'm creating my own deck of AWS flashcards, but of course there are loads that people have done for themselves and shared publicly - so it's possible to balance revision between the targeted stuff that I decided to put in a flashcard and just whatever happens to be in the decks I downloaded.
Get hands on
I'm lucky that I work a lot with AWS so have a lot of hands on experience, but even so I am taking the time to build out some of the things I've learned as nothing quite internalises something better than just getting stuck in…!
Next steps
I think I'm going to see the course by Stephane Maarek through to the end. Then I want to do some mock exams - this was one of the other reasons I bought Cantrill's course too: I wanted to ensure I try mocks from a few different sources. I want to go through targeted parts of Cantrill's course too. (VPC and EC2 at the very least.)
I want to keep the momentum up, so am thinking I'll try sitting the exam in March. We'll see.
Footnotes
There is a focus on IAM as a service in its own right, but of course knowledge of specifics relating to services (S3, SNS, SQS, Lambda especially) is required too.