Amazon Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)

As of today, I’m officially an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate. Certification numbers are issued sequentially, so I can infer that I’m the 16,891st person worldwide to earn this title. Since certifications must be renewed every two years, though, many of those who certified earlier might have probably let theirs lapse.

I have opened a personal AWS account in the second half of 2014, around the time I was assigned to the project I wrote about in my previous post. I have barely used it, and still only use it for cloud backups. Without a professional reason to dig in, this path won’t take anyone very far.

The turning point came when I started doing DevOps work for a customer of my employer at the time. They had a fully configured AWS environment and gave me unrestricted access to that. Amazon recommends a year of hands-on experience before attempting the certification, and that is no arbitrary requirement: there’s a whole system to master before you can use it well.

My certification journey began about a month ago, when I read this Reddit post. The timezone difference meant I couldn’t claim the free month of study that was on offer, but the idea had already taken some roots. Here’s what followed:

• Confusion at first. For the first few days I didn’t know where to look or what to read. I didn’t want to pay for expensive courses and labs when I already had access to AWS environments where I could try everything myself or watch how it was done. I also wasn’t sure which certification to pursue (Architect, Developer or SysOps), especially since they overlap so much.
• Course recordings. Through an “alternate channel” (don’t ask), I obtained recordings of courses from two years earlier, first for SysOps, then for Architecture. I decided to do the Architecture track first, get certified, and then move on to SysOps.
• CloudAcademy. After finishing the recordings (about 14 hours), I signed up for CloudAcademy and used its free 7-day trial to the fullest. I worked through all the quizzes and the 157-question sample exam several times. Whenever I scored poorly on a topic, I opened the matching lab and followed along (for example, creating tables and indexes and working with DynamoDB). My goal was to score above 90% consistently on every quiz and on the final exam of that learning path.
• Blogs, forums and apps. Once the trial ended, I searched blogs and forum posts for more material. Some recommended Android quiz apps, so I installed four. I returned the two paid ones within the two-hour refund window, but only after answering most, if not all, of their questions. By then I was already scoring above 90% consistently.
• Whitepapers. I then read Amazon whitepapers on key services (EBS, VPC, Route 53). They cover details, such as EBS RAID configurations and special Route 53 record types, that aren’t found elsewhere, and the exam may include a few questions on them.
• Practice exam. Feeling confident, I took the $20 practice exam and scored 90%. I then booked the real exam in the first available slot at the testing center.
• The real thing. A little stressed, I sat the exam and passed with an overall score of 83%.

I can’t share any exam questions, and I don’t remember many anyway. Some people take exams specifically to memorize questions or record them with devices, then sell the “dumps” to buyers. That’s a viable business, I suppose, but I suspect Amazon has hundreds of possible questions and gives each test taker a random 60 out of way too many.

A few observations:

• You may get at least one question from the sample questions on Amazon’s certification page, though those are on the easier side.
• You may also get one or more questions from the practice exam.
• Up to 33% of the questions fall into the “true or false: water is wet?” category, though they can still be hard if you’re not fully familiar with the topic.
• Another 33% are somewhat trickier, along the lines of “what feels more wet, water or oil?”
• The rest are frankly tough. They cover service internals or architecture decisions, such as which service to use for a given scenario. Often all or all but one option could legitimately work, but you must pick the one Amazon recommends.
• About half the questions are multiple-answer, with no partial credit.

The practice exam can be taken at home on your own computer. The real exam must be taken at a dedicated testing center. In my country there is only one such center for the entire country.

Total cost: $20 for the practice exam + $150 for the certification exam.

The future is still unwritten, but I’m considering the SysOps certification and one of the Professional-level certifications.

Until then, thanks for reading!