After having recently taken the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam, I though it best to add a few lines here to share my experience and takeways.

This is the first certificate I’ve earned, so a bit of a novel experience after 10 or so years of being a ‘Professional Computer Guy’.

Since some of the other staff in my office are preparing for the same exam, I had this advice to offer-

  • The A Cloud Guru course is fantastic, and I highly recommend it. I got the course through Udemy (heavily discounted of course) and it gives a good overview of what you’ll need for the exam, aimed at beginners. That being said…

  • As good as the A Cloud Guru course is, it isn’t enough for the exam. The course instructor, Ryan Kroonenburg reiterates this throughout the course- read the FAQs.

  • The FAQs are not enough to get through the course either- if you’re like me, you’ll learn by doing. Watching someone with years of experience blitz through setting up a VPC is good and all, what’s much better is doing it yourself.

  • When you’re doing the practical stuff, remember the fundamentals- VPCs are just networks, the rules of networks apply. EC2 is just VMs, the usual caveats of VMs apply. Route 53 is just DNS, the rules of DNS still apply. If you don’t know the fundamentals going in, you’re gonna have a bad time.

  • Although this isn’t meant as a study guide…take notes. Then type the notes. Then read the notes. Rinse and repeat.

  • Don’t be afraid to spin up bits and pieces as you go. A good 90% of the services covered in the A Cloud Guru course are free-tier, meaning there is either a free use compute or storage limit per month for that service, or new accounts can trial the service with no cost associated- spin up those services.

  • The aim of the A Cloud Guru course (and the certification) is to get you to the point where you can Architect a Solution using AWS and its services. Keep that in mind- if you are getting this certification to further your career or as a requirement of your current role, you will be expected to roll with the punches in building solutions.

Last but not least, here is a list of AWS services that are covered in the exam. I’m not saying you need to be utterly conversant in all these services, but you definitely need to know which is which and what they do. There are a couple of questions I came across where they have obviously thrown in one or two similarly named services to try to catch you out (for example, SNS and SQS, or CloudTrail and CloudWatch)