Finally, I became AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate on January 8 with an overall score of 87%. In this post, I will go through the exam experience and give final tips for preparation.

This is the third post in my AWS certification series. The first post covered the motivations behind the AWS certification and why I keep a log. The second post covered my study method, an update on my preparation after 1.5 months, and a plan going forward. This third post will cover my final updated study plan and my exam experience.

AWS Beta cert: the phantom menace

After the last post, my preparation had come to a grind. If you remember the little table of the second post, I set my mind to do some exercises but I couldn’t get to them. After procrastinating for some days, I decided to change my strategy. If I couldn’t get to do the exercises, I could, at least, watch somebody doing them for me. So I signed up for acloud.guru, a portal with online courses on cloud-computing topics.

The site offers a paid monthly membership but in December there was a promotion that gave away a free month. Since I was planning to take the exam in early January, that was all I needed.

In the videos, the first thing I noticed was that the AWS Certification is changing. There is no official final word on this, but Amazon has introduced a new beta AWS Solutions Architect certification. It came at half the price but with the important caveat that it might not be valid as an official certification after all. This is because changing the scoring system requires a trial period to adjust the scores, period in which the scores themselves might be invalid. Unfortunately, the poor beta testers might pay and end up with no certification at all. So unfortunate!

This was a bad deal for me but, more importantly, I was afraid the beta became the real certification in January 2018. So, after studying three months from the official study guide, I would have had to update again only to take the exam! This pushed me to study hard during the Christmas break and take the certification as soon as possible in the new year.

Study plan: how I would do it now

After finishing the official study guide, I took a look at the syllabus and found out that some newer AWS services were not covered: for example AWS ECS, AWS Snowball Mobile, little on AWS Lambda, etc. Additionally, I hadn’t read whitepapers and FAQs, for a total amount of pages bigger than the book itself. This was too much for the time I had, so I covered these topics with the videos from acloud.guru. The videos turned out to be great although lacking some depth in topics such as security.

Here is what I would do if I were to prepare again:

First, watch the videos from acloud.guru to have a general idea about everything (~1 month). In parallel, do labs and exercises to solidify concepts, especially on basic topics such as VPC’s. Take notes on topics you are unfamiliar with and review them regularly. Skim the official study guide, going deeper in the areas you feel are not covered in depth in the videos (e.g. security and compliance, KMS, some details on SQS, etc). Take notes for these areas. Optionally, use flashcards for review, such as this Anki deck. (free) You can review cards on the go and keep your memory fresh. Another source of flashcard is the online portal from the book. Complete as many quizzes and mock exams as you can. Use the online resources from the book, the online quizzes on acloud.guru and buy the official mock exams, which I heard are harder than the real exam. When you can’t answer a question, review its topic and nearby topics, so that you’ll be able to answer all similar questions. In parallel with the mock exams, read also the FAQ’s, which contain details not covered either in the official study guide or in the acloud.guru videos. I skimmed the security whitepaper but I found most of the things were covered in the official study guide. If you feel unprepared in this area, have a look at the whitepapers.

Exam experience

The exam experience was smooth. The system lets you schedule exams on a short notice, even for the next day, if there is availability. The booking can be canceled for free up to 48 hours prior the exam and paying a rescheduling fee of $60 up to 24 hours prior. In the last 24 hours, the exam cannot be rescheduled. The official cost was converted in an amount of EUR 135.

The day of the exam, I drove to the test center (Real Comm SRL in Porcia, Italy) and showed my two IDs to the proctor. He led me to a room with a computer with an old LCD monitor and the software for the exam preloaded. After the initial login, and reading some instructions, the interface shows you how many questions you’re going to answer in 80 minutes. If I remember correctly, it was 55 questions in my case but the number varies by the candidate. The interface also allows marking questions for a later review.

At the start of the exam, after answering about 10 questions really quickly, I had a confidence boost. Then my confidence declined as I marked the next 5 questions for review. I started feeling unprepared on some topics such as AWS ECS, AWS Lambda, and AWS API Gateway. This feeling improved over time but I kept guessing many answers. For each question, there are some obviously wrong answers but each question is designed to have at least two reasonable answers. Not being 100% sure about these I felt I bombed them. Luckily, the result is shown at the end of the exam. It was such a relief! The score is not shown, though, and it comes by email half an hour later. I expected it to be around the passing threshold, which is unknown, but I thought to be around 60%. I was very surprised to have scored 86% overall: my best area was system design, my worst was troubleshooting, with implementation/deployment and data security being good but not perfect.