Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam

I was able to prepare for the Solutions Architect - Associate exam within one month. Immediately prior to that I had earned the Cloud Practitioner certification which I prepared for within 10 days. I was new to AWS so the CCP material was a necessary introduction to the material so I recommend factoring that in to your study plan if you’re also new. You can read about how I studied for the CCP exam in a different post. I spent a minimum of 30 minutes every day studying this material but averaged over an hour each day. I essentially had no prior experience with the AWS platform other than following a deployment tutorial once or twice.

I hope this post is encouraging for others because AWS was intimidating and daunting for me. The certifications turn out to be a perfect vehicle for building confidence in using the platform. Even though AWS recommends having prior experience it’s totally not necessary! In fact, the platform is still intimidating, but now I have the (cautious) confidence to deploy with it anyway. :)

Background of the Challenge and My AWS Experience

A little after the new year I read about FreeCodeCamp’s AWSCertified challenge. I certainly had never considered getting AWS certified before reading that post. The most experience I had with AWS was with a strict adherence to a Django deployment tutorial. I found AWS to be overwhelming and intimidating when approaching it through a guided tutorial. It wasn’t the educator’s fault, there is simply a lot of ground to cover at a conceptual level when introducing cloud services.

Because AWS felt like too many moving parts, I’ve deployed my projects on Heroku or Linode up to this point. I decided to hop onto the #AWSCertified challenge because I saw some motivating results from people on Twitter and I wanted to be competent with AWS. Exampro.co released a couple of free videos (4 hours for the CCP material, 10.5 hours for the SAA materials). I thought that if the content could truly be covered in that amount of time, then I could find the time to learn it. Spoiler alert: it took a lot more studying than just those videos, but they were an excellent launch point especially considering they’re a free resource. Once I got into the material, I started to believe that it would be worth it to go through with certification because it would teach me enough to be able to deploy my own projects on AWS.

My Study Material for the Solutions Architect - Associate Exam

When getting started with the AWS material, I started with video since it was free. After the videos I used two books to fill in the gaps. I’ve read that a lot of developers don’t like to learn through books. Personally, they’re my preferred method of learning something new, assuming you can get an e-book that’s up-to-date. I remember details from reading better than through videos.

Unfortunately, after taking the exam, I can’t say that any one of these resources is sufficient on its own. For someone totally new to AWS like myself, I recommend a combination of materials - at least one video course and the practice exam book. The books are good as e-books, no reason to purchase the physical copy. The practice tests will really help you understand your weak points. I did all six practice tests before taking the exam. I did not worry about my scoring on them, I just used them as guidance to direct my deeper studies towards the end.

1. Exampro.co. I purchased the SAA package through Exampro.co. I love to support content creators who also release information for free. All of my programming learning started with free materials and it’s important to me to support the flow of information. The package you can purchase on his site is the same video content as on YouTube. The package includes additional flashcards and a practice test. I preferred making my own flashcards because a lot of his flashcards were a little too simplistic. Simple flashcards also have less value for the SAA exam than the CCP exam because the questions are more like synthesis-type questions anyway. I used a different resource for my practice exams (below) so I can’t speak to the practice exam quality on Exampro.co. To be perfectly honest, I found the videos to be lacking in enough detail, and the videos, if used entirely on their own, are not sufficient to pass the exam in my opinion. This is great content to give you an idea of the landscape, however, so I would really recommend going through the entire video course as a launch point if you are fresh to AWS like I was.
2. LinkedIn Learning - Prepare for the Solutions Architect exam learning pathway. I discovered that LinkedIn has over 18 hours of video content on this exam as well from a course by Tom Carpenter. They also have a free 30-day trial, enough time for me to get through the material then cancel my subscription. The teacher in this course is excellent. He speaks clearly and at a good speed and hits on more detail than Exampro with better explanations. If you can only go through one video course, I’d pick this one. Not technically free but if you can work through it in 30 days, you can cancel your subscription in time to not get charged. I did >80% of both video courses and they were worth the time.
3. After working through most of the two video courses above, I decided to read this study guide. I used the same company’s material for the CCP exam and really liked it for that exam as well. I wholly recommend this book for filling in yet more gaps not covered by the video courses above.
4. I strongly recommend the massive set of practice exams provided by this book. There are 6 exams in the book, each with 65 unique questions, for less than the cost of one AWS practice exam. I found the practice tests to be slightly harder than the real exam. The practice tests were discouragingly difficult in that sense, but they WILL make you aware of your weak spots. The book is excellent because it tells you why the correct answer is correct and also why the incorrect answers are not correct.
5. Finally the AWS documentation had the answers that couldn't be answered by a quick Google search. I tended to go from the practice tests to the AWS docs a lot.

Other Tips

Part of the guidelines for FreeCodeCamp’s challenge was to post your progress on Twitter about studying. This had a weirdly motivating effect for me even though I had no followers. Getting the #AWSCertified hashtag in your posts will get you supportive likes and comments from strangers and it’s actually pretty nice. As someone who posts nothing on any social network until this came up, I was a little surprised by the effect this had on me. I’m not sure what my next challenge will be but I like the developer and learner connections Twitter enables.

The LinkedIn course doesn’t mention a whole lot about pricing of AWS features. Before launching stuff in your test environment, be sure to have a look at pricing. I ended up with a couple dollars in charges launching some things I hadn’t investigated 🙂 The best learning comes from practice though.

Overall, don’t expect to be perfectly prepared for the SAA exam. You can’t possibly memorize everything there is to know!

Finally, the best thing I did for myself was SCHEDULE AN EXAM AT THE START. I benefited greatly from having the exam scheduled from the very beginning. You can postpone it twice if you really needed to. Give yourself 1.5 - 3 months of time if you’re just starting. You can do it!

P.S.

If you need to download a video from LinkedIn to view offline later, you can paste this code into the Javascript console in developer tools (not sure if LinkedIn wants you to do this - certainly don’t distribute the video you download). Run it and the video will open in a new tab, which you can then right-click and save.

var videoLink = document.querySelector(".vjs-tech").getAttribute('src');
window.open(videoLink,'_blank');

If you use the Exampro.co website, you’ll notice that pausing the video brings up some annoying overlays from YouTube. You can hide those elements all the time by doing the following:

1. Get uBlock origin (the best ad-blocker)
2. Go to the uBlock origin dashboard
3. Paste the following into ‘My Filters’

www.youtube.com##.ytp-scroll-min.ytp-pause-overlay
www.youtube.com##.annotation.annotation-type-custom.iv-promo.iv-promo-video

UBlock will simply remove the overlays from your page and you’ll be able to read the embedded video while it’s paused.