Your second month — Building the foundation.

The first month was all about building up your stamina and fitness.

This month is about keeping up the pace, and building upon what you already know.

Udemy — Amazon EC2 Masterclass (with Auto Scaling & Load Balancer)

Wrapping your head around load balancing, auto scaling, and the combination of two, can run circles in your mind until you’re dizzy and puking all over your keyboard.

The course goes over Auto scaling and Load balancing, how they work as individual services, and how they work together. The course is taught by Stephane Maarek, who does an exceptional job in really explaining the services, and providing hands on labs that mimic real scenarios.

If you’re not fully comfortable with these two services, then this course is a must.

The course clocks in at just 5 hours.

Udemy — AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2019 (OPTIONAL)

This course is another extensive overview of the core AWS services.

Released in March of 2019, this is one of the most up to date courses out there, and is again taught by Stephane Maarek.

Although this course is entirely optional, I highly recommend you skim through it at 1.5x speed. There will still be a good amount of information to be picked up here, and the teacher makes it extremely easy to watch and understand.

At this point, a lot of the material here should be review for you.

If not, then this is a good sign you need extra time to study.

The course clocks in at 18 hours. However you don’t need to necessarily watch all of it. Focus on the topics that you feel most weak in.

Udemy — AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams

That’s it. This is what you’ve been waiting for.

This is the one.

This Udemy course is the absolute best when it comes to providing practice questions that resemble those from the actual exam.

There is absolutely nothing out in the market that closely resembles the exam, and adequately prepares you for it, like this course does.

The course comes with 6 practice tests. Each test focuses on a specific category of AWS, and provides detailed explanation of each answer, why that answer was correct, and why the others were incorrect.

This is the closest thing you’ll get to the actual exam, and the detailed explanations of each answer provides you with meaningful insight, that you won’t get anywhere else.

I have to emphasis the sheer amount of work that went into this. There is nothing out there that comes close to this.

The problem with other practice exams is that they are either too easy, or focus on the wrong things.

Many of the practice exams, paid or unpaid, do a poor job of accurately replicating the actual exam, and giving you an insight to what kind of questions the exam will ask.

Most practice exams will either focus on the wrong subjects, or ask about extremely minute details, and end up just frustrating you all together.

The real exam does not care about how much something costs if it ran x amount of hours, or how much IOPS you need to provision on a 20gb general purpose ssd instance.

The exam is focused entirely on how services work together, to provide the best (and cost effective) solution for the situation presented.

Recap

You’ve completed everything mentioned in this list, and gone over the practice exams from the Udemy course, over and over again.

You’ve written detailed notes, and your study guide expands over 50 pages.

You’re almost passed the finished line. There is just a little more work to do.

If you feel like you’re ready to take the exam, I highly encourage you to take an extra 2 weeks to go over your material, and do the practice exams from the course mentioned previously.