AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02) - Preparation & Acquiring the Certification

April 09, 2021

What is AWS SAA certification?

It is one of those cloud based certifications (associate/ intermediate level) which will help you to think like a solutions architect & evolve your decision making skills in different scenarios with different constraints. But I truly believe if you are planning to move on this journey or already started or moving with a quite speed then your future will be much more brighter, challenging & full of opportunities.

Why you need to acquire this?

Now lets try to get into a little more for the reason why:

• you want to become member of cloud computing world & contribute to society
• your career needs this & will be helpful to open new opportunities
• to take networking & virtualisation at the next level using AWS
• learning new things always motivates you & cloud computing excites you more in some way
• AWS certification help you to stand out among your peers

Who should acquire this?

If you are a student, working professional, management person, software architect, team leader, etc anyone who have some learning desire & can benefit from this certification in their current personal/ professional journey.

What are the pre-requisites?

Lets say a few items:

• Cloud computing foundational knowledge (Cloud Practitioner Cert - good to have not must)
• At least 6 months hands-on/ work experience (I believe you have to involve in this journey more practically for better outcomes to handle real life challenges more effectively)
• AWS Free Tier account (many of the key services are free to be used till 1 year within service specific quota limit)
• A running laptop with connected wifi to perform hands-on labs/ practicals for designing solutions
• A lot of motivation, patience & consistent efforts towards your goal (you have to acquire only 72% - approx in the exam)

How I acquired this?

Motivation

There are times when I look back my skills & analyse that there are some skills which require actual appreciation. I have worked upon many projects using many AWS services (like IAM, VPC, EC2, RDS, S3, SNS, SES, ElasticSearch, etc) using best practices. I wanted to dig more into designing & architecting solutions using AWS services with industry standards. I found that AWS SAA & SAP certifications are aligned towards my long term career goals and can help me to upgrade my skills & knowledge in that specific domain.

Journey

Due to Covid-19, we got enough time at home to think about our due goals & plan for them. It started in Sep 2020 when I made my mind to set a goal to achieve AWS SAA certification before end of 2020. I have started by booking exam on a date before Nov 2020. Then I bought some courses/ practice exams and started my preparation using them along with other available options. I have re-scheduled exams 3 times (ideally re-scheduled 2 times... as it is limit & cancelled 1 time more and re-booked again ) as not much confident to attend the exam. Its better to re-schedule until you are confident enough to sit into exam. And finally I have attended the exam on 31st Dec, 2020 & passed the exam with so much thrill and drama during the examination. At the end, I achieved my goal by Dec 2020 & felt happy and much appreciated by myself.

Resources

I went to this AWS site & gathered all the required information related to topics with their specific weightage in exam. Although you will not found any list of topics or services to be covered but you will get an high level idea about what are the key things you need to learn or practice to understand the exam structure & get ready for that. Its completely scenario based questions to assess you analytical & business understanding with available AWS services.

There are below resources which I have used for my preparation:

• Video course by Acloudguru (Ryan Kroonenburg) https://www.udemy.com/share/101Wg6AEUddltXTXo=/
• Course developed by Andrew Brown of ExamPro: https://youtu.be/Ia-UEYYR44s
• Practice Tests by Jon Bonso (Must buy & practice them): https://www.udemy.com/share/102DhfAEUddltXTXo=/
• AWS re-Invent events for last 2-3 years for topic specific deep understandings
• AWS FAQ: Check EC2, S3, VPC, RDS, IAM, etc these key services FAQ. Whenever you get time go there & check questions and prepare your cards or notes for last minute revisions.
• AWS Cert Quiz show (Good to watch if have time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mAZ4kXzu8o&list=PLBFD3bw_QT1YJe34JPM9MtR5tiVIekxBH

Hands-on experience for all topics mainly including (check latest topics/ services introduced in last 6 months - 2 years):

• Security: IAM, STS, GuardDuty, Macie, Shield
• Network & Content Delivery: Route53, VPC, ELB, API Gateway, Transit Gateway, DirectConnect, Private Link, CloudFront, Global Accelerator, VPC Peering, VPN connections (IPSec Site-to-Site, Client), VPN CloudHub, VPC Endpoints
• Compute: EC2, Elastic Beanstalk
• Database: RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora
• Storage: S3, EBS, EFS, Storage Gateway
• Management & Governance: ASG, Cloud watch, CloudTrail, Cloud formation, Organisations, Trusted Advisor
• Application Integration: SQS, SNS
• Analytics: Athena, EMR, Elasticsearch, Kinesis
• Serverless: API Gateway, Lambda
• Migration & Transfer: Snowball, SnowMobile

Other good resources you can select against Ryan's course (I was not aware when I bought Ryan's course but for sure better bet than Ryan's one):

Adrian Cantrill - In-depth knowledge for AWS SAA exam: https://learn.cantrill.io/p/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-saa-c02

Stephane Maarek AWS SAA course: https://www.udemy.com/share/102CPBAEUddltXTXo=/

Experience

It was not an easy & straight forward journey, when I started preparation by watching few topics on which I have already worked upon it looks like I have only used few services but never thought about how well an application can be architected like in terms of high availability, fault tolerance, cost optimisations, setting appropriate metrics, etc.

Then I started from learning about key fundamentals of well architected framework & its key pillars. Then I picked up some pace by understanding pillars & understanding the specific AWS services supporting them.

I have watched bought video course & available free online videos from multiple sources to understand the different scenarios where any set of AWS services altogether can help any business more efficient way.

After watching 1 time completely 2 different set of courses (1 & 2 from above resources), I gave practice tests to assess my skills and I failed very badly (scored 40%). My exam was about to come in 2 weeks so I re-scheduled immediately & take 2 more extra weeks for more hands-on prep. Although it took me few more weeks (re-schedule couple of more times) to attend the exam due to lack of consistency, lack of expertise on some topics, exam strategy was not there, and so on. But I was able to overcome most of the issues/ bottlenecks in the bought time before exam.

After giving so many practice tests & actual exam, I understood couple of things:

• you have to remember or memorise or make some pattern in your mind for key concepts or events or scenarios to connect them to visualise the architecture for answering the questions quickly
• you have find out keywords or specific terms on which questions can turn out to be twists
• you have to quickly read & understand the questions & answer it within 1-1.2 minutes
• you have to save time for later review if not able to connect to question instantly (it worked very well for me, spent last 35 mins to review 20 questions)
• you have to face easy, intermediate & hard questions in any specific order, you have to keep yourself calm & patient and do not worry if a few list of questions are not connecting simultaneously
• you have to make sure that you have a very good internet connectivity & clean and quite place if you are giving online proctored based test
• you may loose test link after starting or even attempting few questions, no need to worry it will save that test with same timestamp & resume it later (you need to follow same step which you do for starting your test)

no matter what will happen in the exam, you will surely learn a lot by the exam itself & it will help you to understand how you handle real time situations in limited time span, just be yourself & give your best.

What will be the next AWS certification to acquire after this?

I prefer to go ahead with AWS SAP one & that will take more time as compare to SAA. As it aligns more with long term career plan. But if you are a developer or operations person and that excites you much more, then you should follow the DevOps path for sure.

Whom I like to thank specifically?

I would like to extend special thank my family (parents, wife & kid) for supporting & motivating me in that journey. I would like to all the trainers, whom training material I have watched or read to understand the topics and pass this particular exam. And thanks to all close friends who gave me valuable advise at right times whenever I needed for preparation & before attending the exam.

Location: Singapore