Hello fellow cloud gurus,
After about a month’s study on acloud.guru, I took the AWS Security Specialty exam today and passed! Don’t know my score yet, but I guess I did OK. Just wanted to share a little bit about my experience with the exam.
I used every single second of the 170 minutes! It was a very exhausting 3 hours. Some questions were very long. They were either a fairly complex situation, or a IAM policy or KMS key policy you have to read through. Just by reading the question and all the answers would probably take 2 minutes. But we only have an average of 2.6 minutes per question. I managed to complete all questions and left myself about 20 minutes to review the flagged questions. So time management is key to pass this exam.
Regarding the difficulty of the exam, I found it is not as hard as I thought prior to the exam. Majority of the questions were very reasonable. They weren’t there to trick us. Even though I didn’t know the answers for some of the questions, just by reading through the answers and applying some common sense, I was able to exclude the wrong answers and pinpoint the correct answer(s). So my suggestion is definitely not getting discouraged by not knowing the answers. Carefully read through all provided answers, use your knowledge and common sense, you can get some of the questions right.
Regarding preparation for the exam, I went through the main ACG security course twice, read all the whitepapers recommended in the course, took and simulation test and attempted the AWS practice test. I also watched the "Practical event driven security" course by Alex Higgins (Highly recommend this one!) Besides, I watched a lot of AWS reInvent workshop videos around security (VPC, IAM, KMS, security services, etc.). I found they were all very helpful giving me a different perspective on AWS security features and services (they are more customer facing presentations rather than training courses).
All right, that’s about it. Next one for me is the AWS Big Data Specialty certification!
Cheers and best of luck!
Stephen
1 Answers
Congrats, nice work passing your certification exam for the Security Specialty! It’s a truly challenging exam, and sounds like you made sure you were extremely well prepared prior to jumping into the course. The tactics you’ve mentioned for dealing with uncertain answers is a great one, and hopefully, other students will benefit from the tips you’ve provided.
Best of luck with the next step on your cloud journey!
Thank you Stephen. It is my pleasure!