AWS SA - Associate
· #aws · #certification
To help with my new job, I’ll be taking a few AWS certifications. First on that list is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification exam which I passed yesterday.
As a reminder, this is my personal blog and whatever you read here are my personal views and not those of any past, current or future employer!
The AWS SA Associate exam tests foundational knowledge AWS services and the ability to use them to solve requirements with secure & robust solutions. The exam’s duration is 130 minutes & it consists of 65 multiple choice questions with either one or two right answers.
Preparation
These are the resources that I used to prepare for the exam:
- Stephane Maarek’s Udemy Course: This course is great. It covered all the stuff needed for the exam. But this course can be overwhelming if you don’t have some prior experience building software systems. If that’s the case, you should find another foundational course before coming to this.
- Exam Readiness: AWS SA Certified - Associate: This free course is a nice short resource to get oriented to the exam. The key value of this course is that it explains clearly what factors to consider when an exam question asks for scalability vs resiliency vs HA vs fault tolerance.
- Whizlabs practice tests: These were just alright. While the level of the actual exam is probably 20-30% harder than the questions here, the good thing about the test collection is that they cover a wide variety of questions. For each question that I’d get wrong in practice, I would read the linked documentation, any related documentation as well as the FAQ pages.
- On the day before the exam, I reviewed all the slides from Stephane’s course as a final refresher. This is essential since the amount of material covered in the exam is quite vast and reviewing everything a day before helps considerably with information recall.
The exam
I took the exam at a PSI center instead of at home. The exam interface is quite straight forward and allows you to navigate between questions as well as flag questions for review later. The count down clock is always visible on the top right and gives a five minute warning as well. I had sufficient time to complete all the questions and then review about 30-odd questions again, before running out of time.
I was informed of the result (pass!) as soon as the exam ended. The screen also informed me that I’ll receive an email within five business days with the score. However, when I logged on to the AWS training website later in the night, the score certificate was already available.
One weird trick
If you are Singaporean, you can use your SkillsFuture credits towards Stephane’s Udemy courses. I did just that for this course and plan to buy his other courses as well for the next certification exam that I attempt.
Good luck if you are planning to take the exam as well!