My Solutions Architect Professional Experience

Hey Cloud Gurus!

I’ve been studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional (SAP) exam for over 6 months after earning 8 other AWS certifications. I took over 30 full length practice tests across acloud.guru, Whizlabs, and the official AWS practice test. My average on those tests was lower than I would’ve liked around 73%. However, my Solutions Architect Associate (SAA) certification was scheduled to expire in January 2021 so I reluctantly booked my exam anyway. I studied for over an hour every night leading up to my exam, yet could not raise my average. I kept tripping over the same types of services that I never use like Active Directory (AD) and Internet of Things (IoT).

I was starting to think that I would only pass the exam if the questions dealt to me where on topics that I was more comfortable with, something like a crap shoot. Still I didn’t give up and studied tirelessly. I watched Scott Pletcher’s concepts, exam tips, and pro tips literally 10x the nights before my exam including in the parking lot of the exam center.

So the exam day came, I made sure to get plenty of sleep and woke up 4 hours early so I could get some light studying in before heading off. I completed the exam with 50 minutes to spare scoring 940 of 1000. Honestly, I was shocked the real exam seemed so much easier than the practice tests I’ve been struggling with. Although, the exam stayed more in my comfort zone there were a couple topics that I wasn’t prepared for.

Additionally, I heard horror stories of novel-like questions on the exam and yes I got some superfluous questions, but the majority were not that bad. I did see a new format of questions appear quite regularly at least for me in this syntax. Sometimes these questions listed like 8 or 9 criteria items, which you had to choose the best answer out of very different options. Don’t misunderstand… this exam is still incredibly difficult; I just found it different than others have described.

Concept

• Criteria 1

• Criteria 2

• …

• Criteria N

Now the juicy part! These are the topics I saw on the exam:

• (Low ~= < 4 Questions)

• (Med ~= < 10 Questions)

• (High ~= > 10 Questions)

API Gateway (Low)

• @connections

• Quotas

• Types REST, HTTP, WebSocket

AppSync GraphQL (Med)

• What it does?

• When to use it?

• I don’t recall this in study material so was caught off guard.

CloudFormation (Low)

• Change Sets

• Drift Detection

• Stack Sets

DataSync (Low)

• What it does?

• When to use?

Deployment Methodologies (DevOps Engineer Professional Territory?) (Low)

• Blue/Green Method

• Canary Method

• CodeDeploy

Streaming Services (Med)

• DynamoDB Streams

• Kinesis Data Streams

• Kinesis Data Analytics

• Kinesis Consumer Library (KCL)

• Kinesis Producer Library (KPL)

Global Solutions (High) <– Important

• Aurora Global Databases

• CloudFront

• DynamoDB Global Tables

• Cross-Region Replication for AMI, EC2, EBS, RDS, S3

• Promoting Read-Replicas to Master

• Route 53 Routing Policies

• Active/Active vs. Active/Passive vs. Pilot Light

Organizations and Service Catalog (Med)

• IAM across different Organizations

• Service Control Policies (SCP)

• Service Catalog for Compliance/Governance

• Service Catalog Permissions with IAM

Migration (High) <– Important

• Application Discovery Service

• Database Migration Service (DMS)

• Direct Connect (DX)

• Service Migration Service (SMS)

• Migration Hub

• S3 Transfer Acceleration

• Snowball

• Storage Gateway

• VPN Connections

• Encrypted Migrations

• Offline Migrations

Compliance with S3 (Med)

• S3 Object Lock

• S3 Versioning

• S3 Compliance

• S3 Glacier Vault Policies

Networking (Med)

• VPC Endpoints

• Private Link for Private SAAS

• Route 53 Resolvers

• NAT Gateway

• Internet Gateway

Systems Manager (High) <– Important

• Run Command

• Patch Manager

• Session Manager

• SSM Agent

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.