I scheduled my AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional: what now?
Firstly, congratulation on making it this far! Just being willing to take the AWS Solution Architect Professional (SAP-C01) exam and being ready to study for it already puts you ahead of most others, so you should be really proud.
In this article, I want to share with you the entire journey towards achieving my latest AWS certification and provide you with the tips & tricks of nailing it on your first go. If you, just like me, are looking for a structured orientation right before your exam, keep reading.
About the Certification
Known as one of the most sought-after IT certifications to acquire, SAP-C01 certainly lives up to its reputation! As a person who just went through the experience, I can confirm that the exam is — indeed — as tough as everyone describes it to be: it is challenging and demanding from the start all the way till the final verdict on the computer screen. But trust me, it is not impossible and is definitely worth it! All you need is the right mindset, solid preparation, and considerable time management.
Scheduling your exam
First rule: schedule your exam well in advance and create a study plan accordingly. By making yourself uncomfortable, you are more likely to start the preparation in time. In that way, you force yourself to study every day according to the plan.
The AWS Certification exams can be scheduled based on your location and tests centres in the area via study providers PSI Exams or Person Vue Exams. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these test centres now also offer the exams online. That's the option I went for.
My personal scheduling experience was quite painful: on the day of the scheduled online exam (PSI Exams provider), I was informed by an email that my exam would be cancelled. After multiple international calls to the support centre, I received the email from PSI Exam provider, explaining that the exam cancellation happened due to an unexpected “site maintenance” on their end. Just imagine reading that three hours before your actual exam! As a consequence, I had to reschedule my long-anticipated exam to the other first available date.
Personal tip: based on my experience, opt for the Person Vue provider to avoid PSI’s unexpected “scheduling surprises”.
It was indeed a tough start. However, my initial mindset remained steady: I wanted to get that certification and I was prepared to continue working hard for it.
How does the exam look like?
Before going into the exam, make sure you know all the basic practical details:
For example:
- Exam duration — 180 mins
- Total number of questions — 75
- Type of questions: multiple-choice and multiple-answer
- Minimum passing score — 75%
Important note: if you are not a native English speaker, you are entitled to request an “Exam accommodation” which would give you 30 minutes of additional examination time.
As you see, the exam involves going through 75 read-heavy questions as well as the lengthy answers. Given the total exam time, it leaves you with approximately 2–3 minutes per question. Hence, the focus and efficient time use are key here. I would also strongly recommend adopting the following methods, which I used in choosing the right answers:
- Mental Draft — as having paper and pen is not permitted during the online exam, you must have a mental draft of the solution in your head. As each question involves a real use case, combining a minimum of 3 or 4 AWS service, you can try visualising the architecture.
- Key-words Mapping — be analytical while reading the question scenarios, and try to spot typical solutions for redundancy, fault-tolerance, high-availability. Additionally look for these keywords and word combinations: most secure, most cost-effective, least effort, disaster recovery, best performance, serverless, RTO & RPO etc.
- Answer Elimination — in many use cases, you will be doubting between answers, which might fit the use case. Try to work backwards: first, eliminate the least likely answer, then narrow down your choice to even more to try and pinpoint the correct one.
- Answer Comparison — after excluding some answers by using the elimination method, you will naturally end up with very similar answers to choose between. Go back to the question and read again to understand which answer fits the scenario most appropriately.
In general, my advice would be: protect yourself from the unexpected, and nothing unexpected would happen in return.
The preparation
Before you get into any practice tests, make sure you have acquired a solid theoretical base. For example, you should have to be fully comfortable with such things as core migration to the AWS Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Solution, AWS Well-Architected, etc. To tackle these, here is the selection of the materials I have been using:
This online course normally comes with additional costs but you can get it with a good discount on Udemy. Even if you do not watch the entire course, you can always have a sense of which service or domain you are not so comfortable with and explore in-depth in the lectures. While practice tests can be helpful to have a reliable source where you can base your answers and close gaps.
Lectures: 50h-60h
2 Practice Tests: 77 questions in 170 minutes’ duration
4 Practice Tests: 75 multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions, to be completed within 180 minutes, and with a passing score of 75%
6 Practice Tests: 80 multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions in 170 minutes, and with a passing score of 75%
4 Section Test: AWS Organizations, Migration to AWS Cloud, Security and Identity and AWS Lambda & Serverless. Each with 10 questions within 30 minutes.
- A playground AWS Account
It is always helpful to have a visual and functional image of launching or exploring your AWS resources (e.g. mandatory or optional parameters needed for the resource configurations) and getting comfortable with the console. AWS offers several Free-tier services, which you can make use of.
In my opinion, the above-listed set of materials is a sufficient base to be successful in your exam. And practising various tests will boost your study and prepare you for the day X. Both Whizlabs and Udemy have great material, good questions and solid justifications with links redirecting you to the respective AWS documentation with some additional tips on the ways you can interpret the questions.
The EXTRA preparation
Practising daily will help you understand the concepts more seamlessly. However, try not to get too attached to the questions & answers: they will definitely prepare you for the actual exam, but they do not entirely represent the real AWS SA — Pro exam. Instead, take a considerable time in your study to take advantage of the justifications and go deep into the concepts. Not only will this help you in covering the majority of the exam topics, but will also enhance your well-needed time management.
Once you go through all those Practice tests and identify your weak spots/topics/resources — tailor your extra-study materials in a way that would target those weak spots. Now, polish them until you make sure you are comfortable with the topics! To do so, I was following some, but not limited to, of the examples below:
- Whitepapers/Documentation
VPC: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/endpoint-services-overview.html
CloudFront: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/Introduction.html
STS & APIs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/STS/latest/APIReference/API_AssumeRole.html
Elastic Beanstalk: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/Welcome.html
- FAQs
S3: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/?nc1=h_ls
ELB: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/faqs/
API Gateway: https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/faqs/
Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/
- Re:Invent Youtube Videos
AWS Organizations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxo67UeeN1A
Storage Gateway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwIHHEpHltU
KMS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxWvbNvj2lg
Amazon Kinesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAkcRD6OxPw
- Cheat Sheets
Option 1: https://jayendrapatil.com/aws-certification-exam-cheat-sheet/#AWS_Services
Option 2: https://tutorialsdojo.com/links-to-all-aws-cheat-sheets/
- Less conventional services
AWS DataSync, AWS Transit Gateway (not only VPC peering, AWS Direct Connect, site-to-Site VPN), Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Aurora.
All these resources came in very handy days before the actual exam. As I went through my notes and practice tests and — still — was running into some unfamiliar notions, I was able to quickly explore it by using the above-mentioned sources. This approach was beneficial to get even a surfaced understanding of more rare or unknown-to-me use cases.
I hope my journey, listed materials, and shared techniques will help you feel more prepared to ace your Professional level certification.
Manage your time, be confident, and stay focused! Good luck!
Feel free to share your feedback and experiences in comments. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.
