Technology

AWS Certification Advice

Lee Gondorchin

Mar 8, 2022 • 9 min read

Amazon's Certification Chart

Disclaimer: These thoughts are my own and no one pays me anything! Apparently I am doing this content creator thing all wrong :)

My recommendations here are sincere. I get nothing in return for suggesting these other than knowing you as a reader might learn something!

Many people ask me how I prepared for AWS certifications. As such, I've decided to make a mega-sized post about how I personally prepared for AWS certifications.

There are far more detailed write-ups about these certifications available at other sites if you would like to dig deeper. AWS has official training paths and courses you can take to prepare, and there are even AWS Partners who can run training classes for you to attend. I personally have not done many of these. As such, below is what helped me prepare for certifications, which occasionally does include those official courses.

Lastly, I really love working at Amazon and AWS, so I live and breathe it. That's the only reason I earned these! Before you consider biting off a bunch of certifications, think about why you want to spend your time doing them. You really don't need all of them, but that decision is up to you. Also, please don't just study the test - get in there and build! It's the best way to learn.

Cloud Practitioner

The Cloud Practitioner certification is considered foundational. I did not particularly study for this outside of the training course AWS offers since the concepts were familiar for me; I already had many years of experience with Azure. Study some of the core AWS service names and take the preparation course, and most technical people should be OK with the exam. It also has a merciful threshold for the passing score compared to later exams.

The exam itself is covering core services, what they do in a sentence summary, and the value proposition of the cloud along with DevOps delivery models.

AWS Cloud Foundations Learning Path: A free 11.5 hour course that should be enough for most people. You may not walk away remembering everything if you are new to the Cloud, so you should just study a bit more in that case. This is a wonderful learning path.
AWS Certification page: Preparation Course and live training sessions happen regularly, so just checkout the website and see what is currently offered
A Cloud Guru: A Cloud Guru used to advertise their cloud practitioner but I do not currently see it. Maybe the site is just moving around, but it was a good course if you can see it listed here later.

AWS Solutions Architect Associate

Here is an extremely popular certification to hold. This is likely not going to surprise you, but the general preparation for this exam is best achieved by knowing the major conceptual design behind EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticache, Lambda, etc. in order to know the "how" of architectural design. As such, this is the most unsurprising of exams by its topic, so completing a course with the targeted materials is very good preparation.

Stephane Maarek's Udemy Course: This is hands-down the best preparation for the exam in covering the breadth of topics while not taking 100 hours to prepare.
Official Study Guide and Tests: I found this book by Ben Piper and David Clinton to be very good if not overly detailed. There is more content than the exam needs, but it is a good reference. You will finish it truly understanding the topics.

AWS Solutions Architect Professional

This exam is difficult, especially due to the mind-numbing 75 questions. It is truly long, and in most cases, the question will have several answers that are somewhat correct. Your best bet is narrowing down the wrong answers immediately. It is incredibly important to pay attention to the question when it says something like "the most cost-efficient solution that improves availability" because you shouldn't be picking a glorious two-regions solution with multiple redundancies in that case. The devil is always in the details.

I honestly think the technical memorization questions are far worse on the Associate exams. For me, reading and keeping track of some of the longer questions was the most difficult part when I took the exam. If you take my advice about anything, this is it: look for keywords on a first scan, and then read the full answer.

Practice Exams: There is a lot to unpack in my recommendation, but I suggest that you just buy these. It primed me for taking the actual the test. I actually found very few similar questions, but about five questions were almost the exact same as the exam. The practice exam
Stephane Maarek's Udemy Course: I do not think this course helped prepare me as much as his Associate course did, but his sections that aggregate architecture patterns and solutions makes it valuable.
AWS Exam Readiness: This is short but it is free. If you don't recognize anything they talk about during the session, go study the topic.

SysOps Administrator Associate

There is a heavy number of questions on VPC setup, NAT instances and Gateways, and Egress-only design. I had two questions about subnet overlapping and the like. Know details about troubleshooting caches and EC2 instances as well as persistent data stores and their differences. IAM and permissions come up often, as you would expect, but other administrative topics such as Organizations and Billing are present, too. Know how to set and read those policies!

There was also a surprising number of questions about API Gateway and the role of logging, as well. Overall, I found this simpler than the Developer exam due to its narrow scope despite some fairly tricky questions.

Joe Bonso's Practice Exams Udemy: If you possess a strong working knowledge of operations on AWS and perhaps just need to feel confident, take Joe Bonso's practice tests. They are great for preparing you with content areas even if some questions were questionably close to those I saw on the exam...
Stephane Maarek Udemy Course: I otherwise recommend Stephane's course for a fuller preparation, but it went from $10 to $25 dollars so I am hesitant to say it is worth it. Perhaps browse other offerings first, especially since it was too light on some networking and administrative components, which I supplemented with good ol' FAQ pages.

Developer Associate

The topics on this exam cover a lot of material in preparation, but the tested concepts are much narrower in my experience. Focus on all database and caching technologies by understanding their use cases. Know the APIs for CloudWatch, and know some of the basic CLI for S3.

Despite this being just a Developer exam and not a Solutions Architect, be comfortable with basic tradeoff questions on design. There are many questions on Lamba, API Gateway - even IAM roles appear, too, so be able to read policies. Elastic Beanstalk and deployment models are addressed often; know the types of deployments as well as implementation details. I had roughly five questions on that alone.

Official Study Guide: This is for the readers out there. It's excellent but almost 3x thicker than the SA guide! It is a lot to prepare, but I like it as a reference document, as well.
Stephane Maarek's Udemy Practice Tests: This is great for studying to find the spots you're weak on while getting in the mindset of a long exam. Highly recommended!

AWS DevOps Professional

Like the Developer Associate, the topics here cover a lot of material in prepartion, but the tested concepts are much narrower. The is effectively "Cloudwatch: The Test". Know CloudWatch extremely well. Focus on database types and how they work for both backups and multi-region support, too.

Additionally, there are a ton of nit-picky questions on very intricate details on the services, but you will know them if you know the services inside and out. Invest study time on the limits, quotas for queues, etc, because they will show up for a good five questions. There are also oddball questions on Server Migration Services, OpsWork, and VM imports/exports. Expect many questions about or involving Organizations, SCPs, and IAM roles, as well.

Tutorial Dojo Practice Exams: This is a smaller test bank than other courses, but it does cover a considerable breadth still. That is ultimately the key here. If you don't recognize the topoic, you need to go back and study it well.
Stephane Maarek's Udemy Course: Stephane's course is again excellent but very long at over 20 hours of content. It is right around $20 at any point in time.

Machine Learning Specialty

This is tough one if you are just studying for the exam and don't have experience with machine learning, but it is doable. Of course, that goes back to my concern with certifications not actually demonstrating expertise, but I'll leave it at that. In general, this exam will cover a lot of ground in the domain and I do not recommend it without ML experience.

It is "Sagemaker: The Test". Know everything about Sagemaker and I mean it. Know all of its specific offerings and tangential services as well as the built-in ML models that are available to you. Understand how to access data (it's basically always S3 in the answer), use custom models, and work with the built-in models to meet your needs. Working with models includes optimizing them; everything is fair game. Additionally, do not discount the need for deep understanding of data engineering and modeling itself. I had easily four questions about remarkably specific models which I do not use.

Udemy Course: This is a short class with a lot of topics, so you will need to supplement it with your own practice for understanding. It includes a test to help you gauge your confidence, as well.

Data Analytics Specialty

This exam threw me a big curve ball. It was formerly known as the Big Data specialty and that made a lot of sense. I think this needs a revision. I spent a good chunk of time brushing up on Greengrass and IoT technologies along with some complicated data storage and analytics patterns only to have literally no questions related to that. The closest thing on the exam for me was a question saying '20 Iot sensors send data', and the question itself was about Kinesis streams.

What was particularly jarring for me was that I had at least 8 questions directly about specifics of Quicksight. I didn't study for it much at all, but I thankfully helped customers with a lot of Quicksight over the last 2 years, so I knew the correct answers. On the whole, my exam really was a test of Quicksight, Kinesis, and Redshift more than anything. I was blown away when I saw MSK show up on the exam.

As such, I don't have a lot to recommend beyond reading the FAQs for database services, Redshift, Quicksight, etc. and probably taking a few of the practice exams available on Tutorials Dojo, though I think the value there is to find what service you don't know about to better prepare. That is my sole recommendation for this exam:

Database Specialty

I believe this is an extremely difficult exam if you have not worked with databases on AWS much. Even if you have, you likely have not interacted with all of the different varieties covered on the exam. I was shocked at the breadth of content for the specialty. Interestingly, when I took my exam on PearsonVUE at home, the test crashed half way and I had to do the exam again. So instead of 65 questions, I saw just about 100 live test questions in total. The first 35 were dramatically different than what I saw covered on my second, full exam. I saw genuinely almost no overlap.

You need to know RDS and its offerings as well as Aurora and its differences from RDS. This includes high availability, read replicas, cloning, cross-region support, etc. - all of it is there. You need to study DynamoDB and know plenty about GSIs, LSIs, keys, WCU/RCU, etc. in addition to high-level understandings of Quantum Ledger, timeseries, and other speciality data stores. Even some S3 interactions and a few questions on Redshift required deep understanding.

Do not skip brushing up IAM knowledge. This includes reading policies and understanidng what they say on top of the different authentication types, how it works with different database services, and what is needed for actual database roles. Finally, be aware that the database migration service is going to show up often and in every way you can think of it interacting.

Stephane Maarek and Riyad Sayyad Udemy Database Course: I can't recommend Stephane's joint course with Riyad Sayyad as highly as I do some of his others, but it's there as an option. Skip the separate test that is available to purchase as it is not up to the same level of quality as his other courses unless you feel very uncertain.
Tutorial Dojo cheat sheet: This is a free compiled list of important bullet points about services. See how many of the facts you see and say "I know this" as you browse. If you don't know it, go hit the AWS FAQs page.
Tutorial Dojo practice exams: I was very pleased with the breadth and type of questions here. It's a good final step before your exam to see how prepared you are.