Passed my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional

Hey All, I passed my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional yesterday (2nd Dec 2019). It was the most difficult exam that I had ever written. I had rescheduled it 3 times as I felt I was not prepared enough. Here are my thoughts. I had 3 sources where I prepared from : ACloud, LinuxAcademy and DolfinEd(Udemy) along with numerous AWS white papers and videos provided by AmazonWebServices. Also took Jon Bonso tests

Just a heads up,. I was nearly not allowed to write the exam due to a name conflict ( name in ID should match name in you have registered with). Took around 1.5 hours to resolve it. So anyone attempting any AWS exam, please get your name corrected.

I took 2 months to prepare for the exam ( 6-7 hours a day during the last 30 days)

Not sure if I was unlucky, but ALL my questions (and the choices were equally long). It took me more than 2 minutes just to read and comprehend most of them. So for those non English speakers please ensure you request 30 minutes more (has to be done before you schedule your exam)

None of the practice tests matched the real one. The closest one to the real exam difficulty was of ACloud guru. The real one was twice as difficult.

Get complete understanding of all the topics covered here in ACloud. Questions were heavy on CloudFront, Load Balancers, EC2, EBS,S3, EMR, RedShift, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, AWS Config, various security related services. Challenge here is to know what exactly each service does and where to properly use them. Did I forget IAM and organisations?

Read through all white papers provided by Amazon, watch all Amazon Videos in youtube (by https://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices). 

Every topic in ACloudguru was covered in the exam.

I completed my exam with 19 seconds to spare (in comparison to my practice tests with an hour to spare)

Best of luck to anyone who is attempting it.