PASSED! SAP-C01 26th MAY

Hello Cloud Gurus! Just wanted to share my experience with the SAP-C01 Certification Exam. I took the exam via Online Proctoring with PSI from Argentina. The overall experience with the testing platform was pretty good, no issues whatsoever with the PSI Secure Browser nor my proctor (although he did have to remind me not to touch my beard damn OCD)

As for the exam, I don’t have yet my final score report.

Overall, these are a few knowledge areas I recall being tested on:

• A TON of questions around Multi-account structure, SCP’s, cross-account access, cross-account access for third parties with trust condition (i.e. ExternalId)

• A few questions on multi-account cost control/reporting scenarios (think org-wide Cost Reports and Budgets with alerts and actions)

• A TON of questions around multi-region architectures involving CloudFront, ELB, DynamoDB Global Tables, Aurora Global Tables and Route 53 in the context of multi-region architecture (i.e. multi-value answer and failover record sets)

• A few (I think around 3) questions on identity federation with SAML, LDAP and AD integration

• A TON of questions around scaling in the context of EC2, DynamoDB, EMR and Redshift

• A few questions on Hybrid DNS (i.e. Route 53 Resolvers, how to associate a private hosted zone with multiple VPC’s, DHCP options set, etc)

• A few questions on Direct Connect for HA and multi-region access (think of DX Gateway)

• A few questions on VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB, API Gateway and Lambda

• A few questions that ask you to troubleshoot users not being able to access AWS resources (think of IAM roles and trust policies and conditions)

• A few questions (I think 2) on RDS Proxy scenarios

• A few questions around EFS (know the difference and use cases for General Purpose and Max IO)

• A question around FSx for Lustre and lazy load vs bulk load https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/new-enhancements-for-moving-data-between-amazon-fsx-for-lustre-and-amazon-s3/

• A question around changing deployment type for an FSx for Windows Server filesystem (single-az to multi-az)

• A question around API Gateway throttling and usage plans

• A few questions on AWS KMS (know common use cases for AWS-managed vs Customer-manager and the requirements around key policy for cross-account ops)

While I felt pretty confident throughout the exam, these are the topics that caught me off guard (best-guess):

• EMR Managed vs Custom Scaling

• Redshift Concurrency Scaling

• Amazon WorkLink and SSL VPN

• How to monitor a Service Quota with CloudWatch and trigger a notification (something I should already know btw)

Here is a quick run-down of the resources I studied:

• ACloudGuru (various courses and learning paths, but for the Pro course I did all the challenges in "expert mode")

• ACloudGuru Practice Exam (took it 3 times with scores from 60 to 91%)

• Jon Bonso’s Practice Exams (took each exam 1 time with scores from 80 to 90%)

• AWS Official Practice Exam (I had a coupon from my SA Associate cert so I redeemed it, passed with 85%. This is a 30-question long exam)

• AWS Documentation for various key services

• AWS Whitepapers

• AWS Architecture Center

• AWS Blog Posts

• AWS Forums

• AWS Events YouTube Channel ( These are A MUST Highly recommend you make a habit of regularly watching the videos uploaded here)

• Whizlabs Practice Tests: a word of caution. I did two of their practice tests which were pretty bad it terms of quality, and I had to submit tons of feedback for ambiguous questions and a few outright wrong ones. I would suggest you stay clear of these, they could really harm your preparation

Overall I spent around a week preparing. I work for AWS so most people should probably expect to spend more time preparing for the exam.

Feel free to ask anything you might want to ask.