First of all, this post is not about refining the AWS concepts and also it’s not about testing your skills on AWS or anything related to enhancing your learning in Cloud computing. But this post is all about is how to actually start step by step preparation towards achieving solution architect associate certification. Just to provide a background on my profile, I am a certified AWS solution architect associate and have taken the exam on 29th May 2018. Let’s proceed towards the journey of our preparation. Why should you do this certification? As someone rightly said, “Certifications are not a substitute for actual experience, they are a good place to start”. Hence the certification can only provide you the opportunity to have an interview call. It only adds value when you have done the preparation sincerely by covering all the concepts in depth and also having the certification certainly gets you the wanted attention. Now let’s come to the essence of the article to understand the strategy to pass this certification. First and the most important thing is one should have hands-on experience on architecting the software product as most of the questions on the exams will be scenario based which actually test one’s ability to architect the product using AWS as a provider. If you don’t have any hands-on experience then I would suggest to go for the online courses which should give you some hands-on experience, one of the course I can recommend is which will take you from the very basic to advance level as Ryan has beautifully explained all the concepts by taking care of newbies. AWS Solution Architect Course by a cloud guru Pro Tip: — Do remember that this is not the only thing which you have to do prior to the exam just take this as a reference to clear your basis and try your hands on AWS. The questions in the exam drills you down on the real world concepts like What should be the best strategy to move the legacy system having several TBs of data to the cloud? Hence one should have a broader vision towards designing the robust, resilient, scalable, fault tolerance and last but not the least secure system with AWS. For Enhancing your vision towards designing the resilient system one should have to go through the below white papers and FAQ to have a gist of analyzing the real world problem: - 1. Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2) — FAQ 2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)- FAQ 3. AWS Security Best Practices 4. Architecting for the cloud 5. AWS Well Architecture Framework Security Best practices is must for appearing for the exam and rest you can just have a look so that you can understand the context of designing the product in the cloud. Pro Tip: — At certification level, you are not expected to have a thorough understanding of the white papers but it will surely help in enhancing your vision towards the cloud computing and of course, will provide an edge among others solution architect in the market. At this point, you have mostly completed the stuff required to appear for the certification but these are the below services you have to remember by heart along with its real time applications prior to the certification. 1. Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2) 2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) 3. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) 4. Amazon Route 53 5. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) 6. Amazon Elastic Load Balancer In the next series, we will try to add a summary for aforementioned research papers as well as the important topics in a simplified way from the exam point of view so that it can be easily understood by a beginner. Hope you will find this article useful, don’t forgot to provide your thoughts in the comment section below. Happy Learning!!! and All the Best for the Exam… :)
