You have 1 free member-only story left this month. Sign up and get an extra one for free.

The Ultimate AWS Solutions Architect

Certi cation Guide
Easy peasy lemon squeezy
Ryan Gleason Follow
Jun 2 · 8 min read

Photo by Lukas from Pexels

So you’ve decided to take the AWS Solutions Architect exam. A fantastic

choice! You’re ready to level up in your career and dive deeper into the
fascinating world of AWS.

The only problem is you have no idea where to start because you’ve never
prepared for a certification like this and/or have no experience with AWS.

Do not worry. I was in the same boat not too long ago.

Before starting preparation for this exam, I had very little exposure to AWS.
The most I had done was host a static site using an S3 bucket.

Also, I had never worn the hat of a Solutions Architect — at least in a

professional setting.

/
Less than two months later, I’m certified.

So what made this certification easy? The online learning materials.

The online learning materials are a game-changer when it comes to

studying for these certifications. They will make your life significantly
easier.

I went through tons and tons of resources while preparing for this exam,
and I have curated the ones that will help you get the best possible results.

Some resources will be free, and others will cost you. I’m usually a huge
advocate for free resources, but in this space, you pay for what you get.
Every penny was worth it. Without paid resources, this certification would
have taken months to obtain.

You are lucky you found this article because it’s about to change your life!

Note: If you are looking for tips on how to pass the AWS Cloud Developer
Certification, click here.

. . .

Objective
Help you pass your AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Associate Certification
exam (SAA-C02).

Photo from AWS

. . .

Table of Contents
Why Should You Get Certified

Resources
/
 My Exam Tips

Taking Action

. . .

Why Should You Get Certified

I saw this as an incredible opportunity to learn, and it proved to be precisely
that. In these two months, I was able to gain a holistic understanding of just
about everything there is to know about being a solutions architect.

I have only worn the “developers” hat so far in my professional career, so it

was fun seeing how the applications I work on are architected at an
enterprise scale.

It truly gets you thinking about how you can design your application to be
highly performant, resilient, secure, and cost-optimal (yes, those are the
four objectives you are tested on in the exam :).

Furthermore, everything is touched on spanning infrastructure,

architecture, development, deployment, monitoring, serverless computing,
security, best practices, etc. The list goes on and on regarding what you can
get out of this certification.

If the thrill of learning isn’t enough for you, the average salary of AWS
Certified Associates and Professionals is well over $100,000 (cha-ching!).
Of course, certification is not equal to competence, but it’s certainly a good
start.

. . .

Resources
I tried out quite a few study resources. A couple proved to be incredibly
valuable. I’ll list them in order of usefulness.

ACloudGuru
You can either purchase this as a course on Udemy or through the
ACloudGuru learning portal. I bought it on Udemy for $13. Wait for it to be
on sale — you don’t want to spend $150.

ACloudGuru was the perfect place to start for me. They give lectures and
hands-on labs that are informative and will keep you engaged.

They also do their best to keep their content up to date. Since the AWS
landscape is continuously changing, it can be challenging to find current
resources. /
Something that worked for me while going through this course was to
watch the section summaries first and then watch all the lectures. This
technique helps you focus on the most critical parts of each lecture.

With the ACloudGuru course comes the community. And this is one of the
best assets out there. They have a discussion forum where people talk about
their experience with the exam. If it weren’t for this, I would never have
discovered Tutorials Dojo.

Here’s an example of a forum post that is helpful. Always make sure you’re
reading the most recent posts!

Tutorials Dojo
This resource, in conjunction with ACloudGuru, will get you about 50% of
the way there. If you already have experience with AWS, TutorialsDojo
alone could be enough to prepare you.

Tutorials Dojo offers almost 400 practice questions that explicitly focus on
the relevant topics for this exam.

The package was about $15, and it was the best $15 I’ve ever spent.

Tutorials Dojo not only gives you an abundant supply of questions but gives
incredibly detailed explanations of why each answer is what it is.

Also, they give links to the relevant AWS documentation and cheat sheets
that will help further explain the concepts. These cheat sheets were handy
for this exam.

AWS Certified Developer Official Study Guide

This study guide was especially helpful during the early stages of my
preparation. It helped me conceptually wrap my head around many of the
core services.

Yes, I know this is a study guide for the Developer exam. I took both exams
because there was so much overlap between the two. It truly is an exam on
the same content with a different perspective.

The value of this resource is the digestibility of the content. It’s written in a
way that provides excellent technical depth with minimal ambiguity. The
AWS documentation and whitepapers can be a bit tough to get through
sometimes. This study guide offers a layer of abstraction that doesn’t skimp
out on any of the details.

I will say, however, that some of the review questions in this study guide are
slightly dated. But there is no such thing as wasted knowledge. It’s all good

/
to know. And sometimes, understanding the historical context will provide
a deeper appreciation for the current ideologies and methods.

I was able to get this for free through an O’Reilly Learning subscription that
I have through work. If you don’t have this, it’s $33 on Amazon. If you do
not want to spend this money, no worries, you can still succeed without it.

Also, the O’Reilly Learning Portal provides a good practice exam through
Pearson. I highly recommend checking it out.

AWS documentation and whitepapers

If you are ever confused about a particular subject or concept, the best place
to clear up that confusion is at the source itself.

The AWS documentation and whitepapers are the most current resources
you will find. All of the materials I have listed before derive from here.

I found the “Best Practices” and FAQ sections to be the most useful.

This one, for Amazon FSx, was responsible for three or four questions on
the exam. Luckily, I read through this piece of documentation right before
taking the exam!

Always be wary of any API call or limit you read about from other sources.
Since AWS is ever-changing, these values will change as well. An API call
that was recommended in 2016 may now be deprecated. The same goes for
the limits. AWS Lambda functions used to have a max execution time of five
minutes, and now it is 15.

The documentation is the best place to get the most up-to-date information
for stuff like this.

AWS materials
I paid for the practice exam, and this was mostly a sanity check to ensure I
was studying the right content. It was $20 for 20 questions. Was it worth it?
Maybe not, but it gave me the confidence I needed to schedule my exam.

The questions you see on the practice exam are very similar to the ones in
the Tutorials Dojo package.

Also, they don’t tell you which questions you got wrong. They just give you
a percentage for each section (similar to how they present results for the
real exam).

This resource was also helpful for me: Exam Readiness: AWS Certified
Solutions Architect — Associate. It provided a different perspective on the

/
AWS core services as well as practice questions that are similar to what you
may see on the exam.

I wouldn’t say either of these resources are “required” to do well on the

exam, but it’s always good to see different perspectives on the content. And
this comes straight from the creators of the exam.

. . .

My Exam Tips
Study, study, study your core services!

I recommend learning everything there is to know about EC2, VPC, IAM,

ECS, DynamoDB, SNS & SQS, Lambda, API Gateways, the CI/CD tools,
Kinesis, CloudFormation, CloudFront, CloudTrail, FSx, EFS, S3, EBS, the
Load Balancers, etc.

From the list above, there is a considerable emphasis on the compute

services and the different types of storage available for each.

Security played a significant role in this exam as well. You don’t need to be
a security master, but you need to have at least a solid understanding of
how it all works. Knowing IAM, Cognito, STS, VPCs, subnets, security
groups, Network ACLs, etc. is essential in doing well on this exam. This
cheat sheet from Tutorials Dojo was beneficial for learning about VPC’s and
security related topics.

Make sure what you are studying is up to date if you are taking the SAA-C02
exam. Tutorials Dojo helps you to understand what new services will
appear on this exam.

A fair warning: scenario-type questions appear frequently. This type of

problem tests your comprehensive knowledge about a specific service or a
collection of services and how they work together. This is more of an
applied understanding, so memorization won’t help you here.

If you were planning on just memorizing the Tutorials Dojo practice

questions, I wish you the best of luck. That is not the correct approach here.
Take time to learn about each of the services and what they do.

This is why I urge you to get as much hands-on experience as you can.
Although I didn’t utilize this resource myself, I’ve heard Qwiklabs is
excellent for this.

Know all there is to know about CloudWatch and how you can use it with
your on-prem applications (this specific topic tripped me up on the exam).
/
 . . .

Taking Action
What now? You sign up and ace that exam!

The exam is $150, and you now have the option to take it in your own
home. Make sure you go to the bathroom before, as they don’t allow you to
leave your workspace for more than two hours.

When will you be ready?

It’s almost impossible to know when you’re truly ready. For me, once I got
through the Udemy course (which took about a month), I went ahead and
scheduled my exam two weeks out. Then if I felt like a need another couple
days, I would reschedule and push it back (you can do this up to 24 hours
before your scheduled exam time).

This technique put a little fire under my butt and provided me with the
motivation I needed to get after it. Putting the money down and having it
on my calendar forced me to be accountable.

During the two weeks after the course and before the exam, I did nothing
but reinforce the knowledge I acquired from the Udemy course by taking
practice exams on Tutorials Dojo and utilizing the resources I mentioned
above.

I wish you the best of luck! If you have any questions, comments, or
concerns, please feel free to leave a response, and I’ll get back to you as soon
as possible.

. . .

More Stories From Ryan Gleason

How to Become AWS Cloud Developer Certi ed

How I got certi ed in just six weeks with very little AWS experience

medium.com

How I Used AWS Lambda To Make My Girlfriend Smile

Embark on this fun little side project to lift the spirits of those around you

towardsdatascience.com

/
 Breaking Down AWS’s Identity Access Management (IAM)
Everything you need to know to get started using IAM

medium.com

Thanks to Zack Shapiro.

AWS Solution Architect Cloud Computing Programming Software Development

Discover Medium Make Medium yours Become a member

Welcome to a place where words matter. Follow all the topics you care about, and Get unlimited access to the best stories
On Medium, smart voices and original we’ll deliver the best stories for you to on Medium — and support writers while
ideas take center stage - with no ads in your homepage and inbox. Explore you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade
sight. Watch

About Help Legal