Passsed AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional 28/04/2020

EXAM

From previous practice exams I wasn’t too concerned about time but I finished with just 3 minutes left on this one.

My first 10-15 questions i was way behind schedule i started with some very long and (what i found difficult questions) but this does seem to balance out so i would say not to worry but when questions come up you are sure on don’t second guess yourself get them answered and claw some time back!!!

A tip i found useful was to spend the extra minute or two on a question to get the answer i was happy with. Thinking behind that was If you spend 3 minutes on a question and don’t answer properly but flag it because you have rushed it and plan to revisit you are going to spend at least that same amount of time when you revisit it due to the length and complexity of the questions and won’t actually have more knowledge than the first time around. In this example it is a total of 6 minutes on a single question. Were as if you spend the extra 1 minute 30 seconds – 2 minutes at the time while it is fresh in your mind instead of re-reading it could save you some time. May not work for everyone but make sense for me.

A few areas I recall coming up on the exam.

• Lots of Serverless Lambda & API Gateway being the main two,

• Plenty of DynamoDB but mostly based in amongst questions on Architecting Serverless architectures

• Handful of SQS, sitting SQS infront of DynamoDB is something to remember.

• Kinesis all over the place but not in depth just as part of answers

• WAF and CloudFront was a couple answers..

• OAI accessing s3

• Enhancing user speeding up content and I’m sure I used lambda@edge for an authentication answer

• Lots of standard architecture questions to simple 3 tiers arch.

• All the LB’s

• RDS (Mostly Aurora) but plenty of Multi AZ vs Read-Replica

• Few S3 vs EFS

• Few systems manger

• Lots of questions are based around cost even spot vs on-demand & reserve come up a few times not just for EC2.

• Recall a couple on apps running on more 1 large instance instance and I answer ASG around cost

• Couple placement groups which was quite surprising but easy marks really as questions not in depth.

• Lots of connecting VPCs to each other and on-prem (mostly cost based)

• Lots of WAF, what it can sit in front of probably a good few marks on its own

• Quite a few questions on ECS. . Fargate was a potential answer a few times think I only picked it once over ECS/EC2 I think.

• Quite a lot of AWS orgs questions

• Couple of config and cloudtrail

• Loads of CW in the answers

• Few on CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline and Codedeploy

• Lots of CloudFormation everything from Templates/Stacks to DR with CloudFormation and service catalog.

• Cognito a few times.

• Loads of IAM, cross account, using roles instance profiles.. even an IOT one that I answered with IAM cause it was writing to DB

Things I was surprised by

• ElasticSearch a lot more than I expected (4/5) questions even if only part of the answer

• Very surprised I answer 2/3 questions with NAT

• Had an IPV6 question pointed straight to egress-only IGW (quick answers like that get you some time back)

• Redshift a couple of times not as much as I expected same for ETL tools like GLUE

Study Material

Tracked the bulk of what I had done to study.

Courses:

LinuxAcademy CSA Pro (Went over certain topics multiple times)

ACloudGuru CSA Pro (Went over certain topics multiple times)

ACloudGuru Exam Prep Course

ACloudGuru Mastering Well Architected Course – https://learn.acloud.guru/course/aws-well-architected-framework/dashboard

AWS Well-Architected Training – https://www.aws.training/Details/Curriculum?id=12049

AWS Official Exam Readiness – https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=34737

2 hour Free AWS Learning Library Course – (EC2) Systems Manager – https://www.aws.training/learningobject/curriculum?id=13830

2 hour Free AWS Learning Library Course – Amazon API Gateway for Serverless Applications – https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=27199

3 hour Free AWS Learning Library Course – Architecting Serverless Solutions https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=42594

Practice Exams

ACloudGuru

Udemy

AWS Official Practice Test

On-Going Reviews

https://acloud.guru/forums/aws-csa-pro-2019/recent?p=1 – Recent Articles on ACG

https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/

https://tutorialsdojo.com/comparison-of-aws-services-for-udemy-students/

https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sa-pro/AWS_Certified_Solutions_Architect_Professional-Exam_Guide_EN_1.2.pdf

Useful Articles / Exam Tips

https://medium.com/@ntwobike/want-to-pass-the-aws-solution-architect-professional-exam-5f3245a095

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/preparing-aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-henry-liu/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/preparing-aws-certified-solutions-architect-2019-sap-c01-agarwal

http://jayendrapatil.com

https://d0.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs/AWS_certified_solutions_architect_professional_examsample.pdf

https://acloud.guru/forums/aws-csa-pro-2019/discussion/-M4e2VbdX0X20uTzCliC/passed_the_aws_solutions_archi

Whitepapers

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/Intro_to_AWS_Security.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-security-whitepaper.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-securing-data-at-rest-with-encryption.pdf

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-amazon-vpc-connectivity-options.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/AWS_Security_Best_Practices.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Blue_Green_Deployments.pdf

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-web-hosting-best-practices.pdf?refid=em_

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_CAF_Security_Perspective.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/microservices-on-aws.pdf

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-security-whitepaper.pdf

https://jayendrapatil.com/aws-disaster-recovery-whitepaper/

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/DevOps/practicing-continuous-integration-continuous-delivery-on-AWS.pdf

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/overview-of-deployment-options-on-aws.pdf

http://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/managing-multi-tiered-web-applications-with-opsworks.pdf

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Migration/aws-migration-whitepaper.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Migration/migrating-applications-to-aws.pdf

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Networking/integrating-aws-with-multiprotocol-label-switching.pdf

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/cost-optimization-reservation-models.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

http://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-migrate-resources-to-new-region.pdf?refid=70138000001adyu

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/cost-optimization-automating-elasticity.pdf

Well Architected Pillars:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Operational-Excellence-Pillar.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Security-Pillar.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Reliability-Pillar.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Performance-Efficiency-Pillar.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Cost-Optimization-Pillar.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card