AWS Professional Solution Architect Certification Tips

Having sat and passed all the AWS Associate certification exams and working with AWS technologies for over a year now, I thought it was about time I gave the professional level exams a go. Not only does this give you additional credentials that look great on your résumé, it's a great way to learn a lot more about services you may have never used before in your day-to-day job.

I passed the Professional Solution Architect Certification exam yesterday and haven't seen many blog posts or study guides regarding it (one is coming at https://acloud.guru/ soon!), so I thought I'd write a bit of a guide for those of you who may want to attempt it.

My thoughts about the exam are as follows:

If you are doing this for the first time it will be very long and exhausting. My second attempt seemed to go a lot quicker. It's a massive coverage of almost every service AWS has, I don't feel I had a lot of any particular kind of technology in my exam, it was so wide open to what you may get asked. It was actually a good exam and if you pass this I believe you deserve the credentials. The first time I failed I was so close (61%) and was so disheartened I failed by 2-3 questions, but you really can't bluff your way through it

The format of the exam is 80 mostly scenario based questions in 170 minutes. There's a lot of reading, both questions and answers. You can read the full breakdown at AWS here https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-professional/

That said, these are the services that you should research.

AWS Key Management Service

AWS Import/Export

AWS Security Token Service

CloudFormation

CloudFront

CloudHSM

CloudSearch

CloudWatch

Data Pipeline

Direct Connect

DynamoDB

EBS

EC2

ELB

EMR

ElastiCache

Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Transcoder

Glacier

IAM

Kinesis

OpsWorks

RDS

RedShift

Route 53

S3

SES

SNS

SQS

SWF

Storage Gateway

VPC

...so basically, everything.

At minimum, you should read the FAQ for everyone of of these services. I suggest taking notes to summarise each one.

Other things you should research:

Learn as much as possible about CloudFront. Make sure you are clear as to whether or not it can have dynamic content hosted on it.

Learn about how cross-account roles work

Learn how to mitigate DDOS attacks

Learn the best practices for IDS and IPS

Learn what Mobile Push is

Learn how many IP addresses AWS reserves when dealing with subnets

Learn all the different instance types for EC2 (seriously).

Learn what a WAF sandwich is

Learn about vSphere connector for AWS

Learn how and where you can use Import/Export

Learn about NAT bandwidth bottlenecks

Learn about MFA and MFA delete

Learn about single sign on with Active Directory (you need to know each of the steps).

Learn the difference between RTO and RPO, and what services to use for the time frame provided

My recommended reading list (this is not all you should study, but probably a minimum):

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/DDoS_White_Paper.pdf

https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kinesis/latest/dev/introduction.html

https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/dynamic-content/

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vcenter-portal/

https://aws.amazon.com/developertools/2759763385083070

https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/faqs/

https://aws.amazon.com/datapipeline/faqs/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/walkthru_cross-account-with-roles.html

http://nineofclouds.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/vpc-migration-nats-bandwidth-bottleneck.html

https://aws.amazon.com/articles/2781451301784570

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/SNSMobilePush.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/walkthru_cross-account-with-roles.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Subnets.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingMFADelete.html

http://blogs.aws.amazon.com/security/post/Tx71TWXXJ3UI14/Enabling-Federation-to-AWS-using-Windows-Active-Directory-ADFS-and-SAML-2-0

http://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/migration-best-practices-rdbms-to-dynamodb.pdf