Cleared AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02)

Big thanks to the ACG team for the course, especially the updated one.


Make sure you are following the below latest AWS Course as there is an old one as well.


https://learn.acloud.guru/course/certified-solutions-architect-associate/dashboard

My Exam Tips are:


1. Preparation


• As AWS has a wide collection of questions for the exam hence candidates experiences will differ hence explore more.

• Practise all the demos and hands-on lab given in the course, that’ll help you to get familiarise with service offerings and limitations.

• Go through the relevant Discussion section and try to answer the questions.

• Make your high-level personal notes (ideally not more than 10 pages) which include the information like the key feature of the service, computational/storage etc limits, Which family the service belongs to etc which you can refer to an hour or two before the exam.

• Read the AWS Whitepaper, S3 FAQ and Exam Guide.

• Understand thoroughly AWS Multi-zone and Multi-Region concepts and how they apply to the respective service.

• If you have got the time to prepare a “mind map” of the services.

• You can refer additional practice test provided by other vendors (hope this course will add more in future).

• Think how much time do you need for preparation and Book your exam accordingly as that’ll inspire you to study well (you are allowed 2 free rescheduled).

• Make a checklist

2. What to expect in Exam

  The course nicely outlines the expectations and covers the majority of the topics.

• The exam questions will contain real-time scenarios (the majority of mine were based on 3 tier architecture) so read carefully as they’ll stress a certain scenario that will lead to the correct answers.

• At the same time, they add lots of wordings just to confuse/distract the candidate.

• Out of 65 questions, 5-10 will be straightforward if you know the service quite well.

• The questions mainly focus on Cost, Disaster Recovery, Performance, Scalability, identifying the right service etc kind of attributes.

• Some questions were around identifying the right combination of services to perform a task.
Example: Collecting a high volume of real-time information from the source, Operating on it, storing the result and then generating a report.

• There can be more than one solution to the problem statement but you need to identify the most appropriate one.

• Some of the key topics that appeared in my exam are:


  EC2 Instances (Auto Scaling Groups, Placement Groups, Cost, DR, Performance) & when you’ll prefer serverless over-provisioned.


  Scenario-based questions on ServerLess offerings (RDS, DynamoDB, Lambda, ECS etc in conjunction with SQS, SNS)

  
S3 LifeCycle, Replication, Durability, Deletion Protection


  Security Services


  Scenarios like less Operational Overhead for implementing the solution etc.


  VPC & Networking
 (Peering, Endpoints, Route53 & routing types)

  Cloud Front & ELB’s 

  Data Migration and Hybrid Solutions around the data.


  Big data-related questions
etc etc

3. Proctored Exam

• Read all the instructions carefully at least a couple of days before the exam.

• Make sure you run the “System Test” at the time of scheduling and few hours before the exam (as they keep on releasing the new version).

• Keep the desk and surroundings clutter-free as they will ask you to show the room around.

• Check-in 30 mins prior to the exam scheduled time.

• NO breaks allowed.

• Once you submit the answers and complete the feedback form and then you’ll receive a Grade as "Pass" or "Fail".
  Probably later in the day or the next day, you’ll receive a digital badge confirming you have cleared the exam.
  You may expect a detailed score from AWS in 5 business days.

Not sure if I covered everything I wanted to convey, let me know if anyone needs more information.



All the best for your exam & the continue the learning journey.