I was able to recertify myself as AWS Solution Architect Professional. It’s not so important, but I was surprised by my score of 916. Especially that, during an exam, I was not so sure that I’ll make it. I found it a way much harder than three years ago. I flagged half of the questions to review. Even thou, I was not able to go through all of them in the end. I think that I scored a few points during a review, as I had 40 minutes left, due to the fact that I benefit from 30 minutes of accommodation for non-native English speakers.
The exam is difficult and quite exhausting, as it requires staying focused one by one on every single scenario question for the whole three hours(three and a half in my case).
I’m not sure if this is only my experience, but the first teen scenario questions seemed to be much longer than others and required more carefulness in reading, then the next ones started to be a little bit shorter.
Topics:
migrations
dr scenarios – e.g. EFS multi-region ( aws data sync), and storage classes and lifecycles, databases dynamodb global tables, aurora, rds, redshift
direct connect, transit gateway and shared VPC, DNS route53 resolver, private link, s3 gateway private endpoint
AWS organizations, security, and compliance aspects
few CI/CD – code pipeline, code build, deployment strategies
s3 access points quite a new topic
CloudFront, API gateway, sqs decoupling, kinesis
I found this forum post very useful:
Thanks for that Lars Nohle.
Resources:
I used the ACG pro course (thanks Scott Pletcher for this course), which I found very useful, reading each managed service Faqs. I tried to go through whitepapers, but I didn’t manage to read all of them.
And practice tests, a cloud guru (found it much harder than a real exam), Udemy Jon Bonso, and Stephane Maarek. Those tests only help you to measure the timing and make you more comfortable with staying focused for three hours. Provided explanations and reference to materials are the most valuable benefit of those practice tests.