What is the best order to take the classes and certifications for the AWS Associate Exams? Judging by the first section of the Developers session it may be Solutions Architect then Developer.
4 Answers
This question comes up frequently and the I don’t think there’s any real right answer. Developer will give you a deeper dive into…well….the developer stuff. Architect will be a more broad experience. Eager to hear others weigh in as well.
The easiest way to help you out is to try the A Cloud Guru mock exams, and go for the highest scores for you.
I took the path of Associate Architect -> SysOps -> Developer. This partly reflects my working experience is more SysAdmin than coding. I do know full time developers take the Developer exam as their first. (many of them still take the Architect as the first because it gives you a broad foundation).
I find the Pro mock exams are well harder – and keep postponing to book my real exam. Tons to learn!
Mattias discusses this in some depth in the Exam Preparation Guide which you might find helpful.
Personally I think Solution Architect Associate is a great place to start as it tends to be broader in content than the Developer and SysOps and will give you a better base to build knowledge from.
Having just completed all 3 of the associates, my suggestion would be to go Architect -> SysOps -> Developer. If you already have some background as a developer, then my suggestion would be Developer -> Architect -> SysOps.
Architect is the best introduction because its very broad without being overly deep in any area. SysOps then takes knowledge from Architect and deepens it some, with some new topics as well. Since Architect and SysOps overlap quite a bit and SysOps is a little harder, regardless of which one you do first I’d do SysOps after Architect as soon after architect as you can to retain the knowledge base.