AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional [Latest Exam]

Passed AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional !!

Hello

I passed the Solutions Architect Professional exam this week with a score of 880 and here’s my experience. Hope you can get some help in your own journey ! Heads up, A wall of text ahead !!!

Study Tips:

I took the DolphinEd course ( https://www.udemy.com/course/amazon-certified-solutions-architect-professional/ ) but in hindsight, it was not a great help. All the content is taken from AWS documentation, so the only real benefit of this course is that it is succinct and summarizes the most relevant portions for the exam. If you have time and patience and want to save money, skip this and instead cover all the Well-architected guides, important whitepapers and re:invent videos (exhaustive list given in other posts) and do the practice tests.

The following topics are the most important, you have to go through as much of the user guides as possible.

• Networking & Content Delivery: R53, CloudFront, APi gateway, VPC, Sec groups, NACLs, CIDR, NAT gateway, Direct Connect, VPN
• Compute: EC2, ECS, Batch, lambda
• Storage: S3, EBS, Storage Gateway, NFS
• Security & Identity: IAM, KMS, WAF, ACM, DDoS, CloudHSM
• Cost controls: Cost Explorer, Cost & Usage report, Budgets
• Database: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
• Analytics: Redshift, EMR, Kinesis, ElasticSearch, Data Pipeline
• Migration: Application discovery, Database migration service, Server migration service, Snowball, Snowmobile
• Mgmt & Governance: Organizations, Systems Manager, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, CloudTrail, Config, Trusted Advisor, Service Catalog
• Deployment Tools: SAM, Codedeploy, Codecommit, Codepipeline, OpsWorks, ElasticBeanstalk
• Application Integration: SQS, SNS, Step Functions

I know this is an exhaustive list, but remember your objective is not only to get the certification but also to learn and become a better architect ! Believe me, it will be worth it !

Practice Tip:

This exam really tests your exam taking ability hence practice is a must. I would go as far to say that if you only have a few weeks to prepare, just take the practice tests and analyse the results. I took the braincert tests and would highly recommend it:

https://www.braincert.com/course/10323-AWS-Certified-Solutions-Architect-%E2%80%93-Professional-Practice-Exams#

It has 6 exams with 70 questions each which is more than enough practice as it covers the entire scope of the exam. In addition to the similar nature of the questions, the verbosity level is on par with the actual exam so you really get to feel the time pressure involved. I failed all of them !! which is not entirely a bad thing as you get to cover your gaps. A very important guidance is to analyse the test results. They have links to the relevant AWS documentation, go through each one, not just the ones you were wrong. By the end of the 400 questions, you will feel pretty confident.

Exam Tips:

• This exam is as much about knowledge as it is about your exam taking ability. Time management is absolutely critical. As a benchmark , I kept 2 mins for each question that means you have to complete 30 qs in the 1st hr, 60 qs in the 2nd, then in the last hr, you will have 15 qs left and remaining qs that you have kept for review. I had around 15 qs for review so that meant I covered 30 qs in each of the 3 hrs !
• Around 70 % of the qs were really verbose both the question and all 4 answers ! so you need a technique to quickly filter and arrive at the optimal answer. You will not have time to go through the entire text. In most of such questions you will get 2 groups of answers for e.g. 2 answers that talked about using T2 instances and other 2 proposing C4 instances and this will be in the first line itself ! If the q is about a compute intensive workload, you can safely filter on C4, now you have only 2 to thoroughly read and finalize the answer. These 2 potential answers will most probably have all the same text except for some key differences which will be embedded somewhere within the text ! for e.g. the only difference between the 2 could be “Single-AZ” vs “Multi-AZ” ! The trick is to quickly identify such text.

As for the actual exam, I remember getting questions on the following topics:

1. AWS organizations Multi accounts - Consolidated billing vs All features
2. Service Control Policies vs IAM policies
3. RDS & Aurora - HA, DR, Auto scale
4. DynamoDB Auto-scaling, Use appropriate partition and sort key
5. Config, Cloudtrail, Trusted Advisor
6. Cloudwatch Events, Alarms
7. EC2 - Auto scaling, Instance types, Instance Purchasing options, Placement group, Dedicated hosts, Provisioned IOPS vs GP2
8. ECS Deployment best practices
9. Route53 Routing policies, Health checks
10. CloudFront with WAF & Shield Advanced
11. VPC peering, NAT Gateways, Direct Connect failover
12. ALB vs NLB vs CLB
13. SAML Authentication
14. CloudFormation stack updates, DeletionPolicy
15. SQS for decoupling applications
16. Redshift cluster instance types
17. Systems Manager Patch Manager
18. Cost explorer, Trusted Advisor for identifying cost optimization
19. Snowmobile vs Snowball vs Direct network transfer
20. How to efficiently deploy application updates
21. When to use AWS Connect, Lex, Alexa, Workspaces, Appstream

Hope that helps & All the best !

DolphinED has one for Solutions Architech Pro. (UDEMY, $134.99)

In relation to the Solutions Architect Associates:

• Maark's course is 18 hours.
• DolphinEd's course is 80 hours.

I have no opinion on Maark's courses, as I have not started them.