How I passed AWS Solution Architect Professional Certification
Recently I have cleared AWS Solution Architect Professional exam and here I would like to share my preparation and learning experience. As this is a professional exam its focus is on practical skills of AWS services rather than just theoretical knowledge.
Exam Format
The exam format is multiple-choice multiple-answer, the duration is 180 minutes (3 hours) with 75 questions. While time seems sufficient, the questions are pretty verbose and takes time to read and digest, the answers are pretty long too (look my tips at the end to tackle it)
Associate to Professional
I already hold Solution Architect Associate and Developer Associate certifications which I had passed last year. Unless you already have few years of AWS experience under your belt I would recommended to clear one associate level certification before appearing for professional level exam.
Training
I have attended Solution Architect Professional course from A Cloud Guru. While this course doesn’t delve deeper into details, instead it gives an overview and a wide spectrum of understanding about what exam is going to cover. Additionally it also gives links to white papers, blog articles and re:invent video links. This course in its own is not sufficient to clear the exam.
I also went through AWS Documentation and user guides for AWS services
I would highly recommend to go through user guides for below services
Practice Tests
Time is a big factor in this exam and you want to make sure that you have attended similar exams before the D-Day, hence I bought a bundle fo practice tests from Whizlabs to fill my knowledge gap. The topics of the exam are quite broad, and the practice test gives the links to different resources and blind spots. Though Whizlabs provide very extensive list of tests and it definitely helps, some of the questions and explanations were questionable. Don’t feel bad if you fail in practice tests, the key is to test your stamina and concentration during the test.
Scheduling an Exam
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, I decided to take this exam from home, you can find more details about it here. Please make sure to select a quiet location as the exam can be terminated if there is any activity/sound during the exam.
On Exam Day
I decided to take the test at 10 PM on a working day (not a great time). While this is the only time suitable for me due to young kid, it was bit stressful after working for 8 hours. By making sure that I consumed enough caffein, I logged in 30 minutes prior to exam to perform system test, the exam supervisor would call you and verify your surroundings though webcam.
While questions were not difficult, I spent more time per question which led to a bit of stress in final hour of exam. I was also marking questions for review when I was stuck with spending more than 2 minutes. I didn’t get much time to review my questions at the end of the test, so I would advise to keep track of time from beginning.
Few Tips
- Know one liner about all AWS services as there would be few easy questions related to it.
- Read FAQs of Organisations, auto-scaling, ELB, Kinesis, DynamoDB
- Create infrastructure using VPC, Subnets, NAT Gateway, NACL, Security Groups, VPC endpoints, Elastic IP etc Understand difference between Security Groups and NACL
- Understand various way to connect on-premise to AWS e.g. DirectConnect, VPN etc Pay attention to cost-effectiveness and redundancy
- Understand migration planning, different Storage gateway types, EBS & RAID architecture, DMS(Database migration Service), SCT (Schema conversion tool), Server Migration Service, Application Discovery service etc.
- Difference in terms of SSL Termination for ALB and NLB
- Read about Serverless architecture and services like API gateway, Lambda, DynamoDb, Aurora etc
- Before reading the question, glance through answers quickly so that you can rule out few answers easily
- Know the difference between IAM Policies, SCP (Service Control Policies), Permission boundary — check out this re:invent video
- Go through Deployment architecture white-paper to find out different deployment strategies for each service and their use case. Understand the scenarios when blue-green deployment is not a viable option.
I hope this article helps you in your preparation for solution architect professional exam. Overall I found this exam challenging but doable for anybody with some AWS hands-on experience and planned preparation. I went into it with an intention of learning more about designing new solution for an organisation and I learned a lot during the process.
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