I wanted to share my feedback about the acloud.guru training for the AWS Security Specialty exam. I studied for some 2-3 months, averaging some 2-3 hours per day. I went through the course material twice and studied all FAQs and white papers you recommended in the course.
I took the exam last week. I passed with the score of 834. However, I felt unprepared during the exam – there were many topics, questions, and scenarios I have not encountered before. A good 15% of answers were just guesses. Here is an example of what I wish the acloud.guru course better prepared me for:
1. time management. Basically, I just barely completed all questions. I had no time to review the questions or go over questions I flagged. Most time-consuming were "select three" types of questions and ones that had five options of four-sentence answers rearranged in a different order. I remember the acloud.guru practice test to be much more leisurely paced.
2. GuardDuty. There were many more questions/topics than the course (and FAQ) prepared me for. There were at least three troubleshooting-type questions related to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/guardduty/latest/ug/guardduty_accounts.html. This was all news to me during the test.
I wish I remember more questions that came as a surprise. I guess AWS keeps updating the questions; I wish acloud.guru updated their curriculum based on these.
1 Answers
I second above feedback. I cleared exam yesterday with 891 score . Prepared for 8 weeks and during the exam felt like i was only 50% prepared.
1. Time Management is the key , they are presenting diagrams and lengthy policies , ingesting all that information and going through the response options is time consuming .
2. Many questions on GuardDuty . Need to pay attentions to GuardDuty APIs as well as Security Hub.
3. Look for scenarios , where you need to use CloudFront and/or ALB for threat protection
4. Mechanisms to encrypt within VPC ( Ec2-Ec2 ) – Default vs Coded
5. ADFS and AD connectors. – Differences and when you use these
6. Good Understanding of MultiAccount and MultiRegion usages of security features like policies/CMKs/Roles
I used AcloudGuru , FAQa, YouTube videos and tutorialsdojo ( CheetSheets and Practice Exams. —> BEST SOURCE .)
I use to think AcloudGuru will take you upto 60% ( as it did for Architect Associate ) , but for Security Speciality it takes you around "40% " . Most of the labs are basic and they are already there either in AWS documentation or YouTube. AcloudGuru needs to improve on quality here.
I just failed my exam, after getting 90%+ on Turorial Dojo and Acloud Guru’s exams and study. This whole thing is very wrong compared to the questions on the test.