Hi and welcome to our very first lecture for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator course, the associate level.

In this lecture, I will provide to you an overview about this course, including the prerequisites and scope. I will also give you an overview about the exam. After all, I believe that you're interested in it. I will talk about free tier and where to go after this course to achieve the knowledge that you need to succeed in this exam. For this course and also for the certification, I would recommend that you have a general IT understanding, and by that, I mean the common general concepts like web server, database server, DNS and so on. Also, systems engineer experience is needed. You need to know how to provide services from a Linux or Windows environment. No need to know both, but it would be nice. This is a very quick and technical course. I will not take too much time explaining the basics of AWS services. Thus, I recommend you to take a look at our certified solutions architects course first. For the exam, you'll have 80 minutes to complete the questions, and that's barely enough. Be sure to keep track of your time. It's multiple choice and multiple answer questions. No case studies or practical labs. The exam will have around 55 questions. This means around a minute and a half for each question. Run, Forrest, run. And finally, the exam fee is $150. There are no second shots available so far. Let's take a look at what AWS says about the exam. Here you can have an overview, but I prefer to show you the exam guide, which has more information. It defines the abilities that the exam validates, and I can tell you the questions are very practical. You feel that you're in a real situation in every question. AWS has done an amazing job creating the questions. If you're comfortable with AWS and have worked with it, you will not have any trouble finding the right answers. Here we can somewhat see the things that I said about the general IT understanding and the systems engineer experience. They're putting it in other words, but it's basically what I said. Here is where things start to get cloudy.

The available material to study. Okay. Not a big deal so far. Some white papers and the official training. But it does not specify the services that we need to master, at least not clearly. Take a look at this table and see how the questions are going to appear in the exam. It's almost telling you to know everything.

They were not fair in this part. Almost all the topics have the same percentage. It's not cool. And also on the content limits, for me, it's not clear enough. If you take a deep analysis, you'll notice that almost anything can come up on these limits. They also have in here some example questions that are a good starting point, but not enough. Don't worry. Let me show you what my study suggestions are, and please let me know if I'm wrong. These are the contents that you should know for the exam. Red means that you need to master them. I mean take a good amount of time to stress all the points you can have in these services. Yellow means that you should know a fair part of the services, specifically how they work together with the red services. And green means that you need to know the general concepts of the service. This course has 11 lectures, including this one. Something around one hour and 40 minutes of video. It's a practical training. I've created an application that we will use during the course. So my recommendation is to make the deployment with me, and after the course, get back on AWS and explore all the possibilities. Again, this is the hot zone. And in this course, I'll spend some time on these services and give you a fair amount of experience exploring the other services by yourself. So be aware of them and know that you must use this course as a kick start for your study. Many people don't create an account at AWS, because they are afraid of having to pay. But most of the services have free tiers. I said free. When you go to the free tier page, you can see all the services that it has.

So I invite you to go to AWS and open an account, and feel what it's like. Also you can make tests and study by yourself, in the way that you want and the time that you want. There's no excuse anymore to not have an account, and the free tier offering is always getting bigger. So keep an eye on this page.

After this course, if you want to take the exam, I suggest you create an AWS account and go do your own tests. There's also some valid information on the AWS pages.

That includes the getting started and the FAQs. I'll show them in a few minutes. Here at Cloud Academy, you should also do all the hands-on labs that you want to at least two times. The AWS certification prep and AWS has a practice test. Take it before the exam. The questions are almost the same as the ones that you'll see on the test. In every AWS service page, at least the ones I've seen, you will find two things: getting started and FAQs, especially for the green services. I think that it's important to take some time on the getting started and on the FAQs. There are many potential exam questions in here to read. It's not going to hurt you. Some services also have videos for the getting started part. They're pretty good and they're going to be very helpful for you when it comes to knowing the general concepts of every service. Also, the certifications have their own FAQs, and I want to show you this question. Yes. AWS doesn't tell us the passing score. I would recommend you aim for at least 70%, just like the Microsoft exams. Take some time on these labs. They're very helpful. Also, do the certification prep questions at least twice. It's very useful to compare how much you've improved over time, and we're always updating these questions. In conclusion, before taking the real exam, go here and take a practice exam. The questions are very close to the ones that you'll see on the real test. It's good to know the style of the questions. I hope you enjoyed this first lecture and that you're excited about this course.