Aws Certified Solutions Architect - Professional 2019 Reviews

How I passed the Solutions Builder Professional with mostly free content🥇

First off, well done to anyone starting the journey to certification. Just being willing to study and have an exam puts y'all ahead of nigh others, and then you should be rightly proud. For me, I like the goal of condign certified and the structured content every bit a way to keep me motivated.

I was fortunate enough to laissez passer the AWS SA Pro exam in the terminal month with an online proctored exam. I've had a few people ask what I thought of the grade/test, and also the online feel. Each individual has their own approach which works for them, then I'll just set out what worked for me and how I establish it.

Course

The AWS SA Pro is reputed to be toughest AWS test but don't permit that put you off. AWS is growing at such a rapid footstep, at that place is no way y'all tin can have detailed knowledge most all services. Instead, I just focused on getting a skilful agreement of a number of core services, and so being able to sympathize use cases for many others. The test is testing your understand of what makes a good architecture, and is not trying to take hold of you out on small technicalities.

I'm lucky to take a work subscription to ACloudGuru. For anyone studying for an examination there are a number of paid-for courses including from Linux Academy, WhizLabs and Examination Pro. There are some fantastic free resources available online such equally AWS Training and FreeCodeCamp.

I found the practice exams were what helped most to go the right experience. I had a free voucher code so I likewise took the online AWS do exam. I fabricated a conscious decision I didn't want to get bogged down in detail, and so for the online courses I tended to speed them up, and only brand minimal notes. I also got huge value from watching re:Invent and re:Inforce videos on YouTube and reading a number of the AWS Whitepapers and Service FAQs.

Although the course content is broken down into 5 domains, many of information technology is cantankerous-cutting, and then the post-obit is what I personally found about important, and this was reflected with the questions I had in the test.

Network and VPC Blueprint

A solid understanding of network and VPC design is crucial. This covers the dissimilar ways of connecting AWS to on-premises as well as connecting VPC to VPC. This as well includes VPC design. Past this stage, yous need to sympathise differences between Security Groups, NACLs, public and private subnets, NAT Gateways, Cyberspace Gateways and Egress-only net gateways. It besides includes basic knowledge of CIDR ranges and how to expand or alter these in an existing VPC.

Video:

• AWS re:Invent 2019: Avant-garde VPC design and new capabilities for Amazon VPC

Whitepapers:

• Building a Scalable and Secure Multi-VPC AWS Network Infrastructure

IAM

Another crucial topic is IAM. There is a common thread effectually being secure by design and applying least privilege, and this extends itself to agreement IAM and policies. You lot need to empathise dissimilar policy types and their employ cases. Yous too need to understand cross-account roles, the Security Token Service and federating identity either through SAML or web identity federation.

A useful tip is to call back the PARC model which stands for Principal, Action, Resource and Condition, and make sure you understand how each of them are used.

            {     "Version": "2012-10-17",     "Argument": [         {             "Effect": "effect",             "Main":"principal",             "Action": "activeness",             "Resource": "arn",             "Condition":{                 "condition"{                     "key":"value"                 }             }         }     ] }                      

Conditions are specially powerful. Common examples including enforcing SSL admission only

                          ...       "Event": "Deny",       "Resources": [...],       "Condition": {         "Bool": {           "aws:SecureTransport": "faux"         }       ...                      

and even restricting regions:

                          ...        "Condition": {             "StringEquals": {                 "aws:RequestedRegion": [ "eu-w-1", "eu-west-2" ]             }         }         ...                      

Video:

• AWS re:Invent 2018: Go an IAM Policy Master in hour or Less

Multi Business relationship

The exam guide talks about designing a 'multi-business relationship AWS surround for complex organizations'. This means look out for questions on AWS Organizations and how to use information technology. I set upward AWS Organizations with a number of fellow member accounts and applied different service control policies and looked at different options on consolidated billing and AWS Budgets, and it meant I could answer whatsoever of the questions I got on the exam.

Video:

• AWS re:Inforce 2019: Managing Multi-Account AWS Environments Using AWS Organizations

Migration

Migration planning is called out equally its ain domain in the test guide, and is another important topic. This covers migrating both applications and information, and choosing the most advisable arroyo based on timescales, amount of data to transfer, blazon of application. There are useful sites that look at dissimilar options for hybrid cloud storage, online data transfer and offline information transfer:

Sites:

• Migration and Transfer
• AWS Cloud Information Migration Services

Videos:

• AWS re:Invent 2019: Become your information to AWS: How to cull and apply data migration services

Whitepapers:

• Migrating Applications Running Relational Databases to AWS

New Solutions / Improving Existing Solutions

According to the guide, threescore% of the exam content is on designing new solutions and improving existing solutions. This is when noesis of modernistic application design and core AWS services is crucial, so get familiar with the AWS Well Architected Framework:

• One of the blueprint principles for performance efficiency is to "utilise serverless architectures" so pay particular attention to AWS Lambda, X-Ray, API Gateway, Cognito and DynamoDB amongst other services.
• You demand to understand how to use services like SQS, SNS, Kinesis and EventBridge to decouple consumers from producers.
• You need to understand how to utilise Route53 and Load Balancers to increase availablility and support failover.
• With best do also being infrastructure as code, you volition besides demand to empathize CloudFormation. This includes the basic template beefcake, and what a valid template may look similar, for example creating an EC2 instance from an AMI

                          Resource              :              MyEC2Instance              :              Type              :              "              AWS::EC2::Instance"              Properties              :              ImageId              :              "              ami-0ff8a91507f77f867"                      

• Repeatable builds and deployments are crucial, so empathise how CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy and ElasticBeanstalk can back up various different deployment approaches such equally A/B and canary.
• Yous need to sympathise at a high level the different EBS book types and EC2 case types. Personally, I didn't feel I needed to know the exact network functioning or volume size, only just empathize the differences between general purpose, compute optimised, memory optimised and and then on
• You need to understand when to apply a relational vs key-value vs columnar vs ledger database

This is too where it'south important to understand some of the cardinal service limits. For example, if processing will take longer than fifteen mins so AWS Lambda is non advisable. If you need a FIFO SQS queue then you demand to know that y'all tin can't catechumen an existing standard queue.

Videos:

• AWS re:Invent 2019: Optimizing your serverless applications
• AWS re:Invent 2019: Data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB
• AWS re:Invent 2019: Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Avant-garde blueprint patterns
• AWS re:Inforce 2019: How Encryption Works in AWS

Whitepapers:

• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Implementing Microservices on AWS

Taking the Exam Online

Information technology was a unlike experience taking the exam online. To showtime off with, you lot need to have some software installed which also checks there is nothing else running. You then have to accept pictures of your workspace, and you stop upwardly sitting there for around 15 minutes, waiting for these to be checked, earlier you can start the test. It as well felt unlike taking the exam at dwelling house, rather than a specific venue, simply in one case I started it didn't have any consequence.

It'due south of import not to rush the questions and make sure you think through the arroyo for your called answer. For any question I was unsure on, I focused on the different possible answers, and it was oft clear that they differentiated in ane small aspect due east.g. one suggested S3 and another EFS, ane suggested SQS and another Kinesis. This really helped to focus on what the question was targetting, as it is very piece of cake to get bewildered by the length of some of the questions. Where the answer was non obvious, I used a process of elimation, which is why it was good to think some of the fundamental service limits and what services integrate with what. This at least increased the chances of selecting the correct answer.

I had flown through all of the practice exams, and expected to finish with enough of time left. This didn't happen, but mainly equally I was taking my time and making sure I didn't throw away any easy marks by rushing. You do need to continue track of the time, to make sure you don't spend and so long on one question information technology forces you to speed up. After a number of minutes, if yous still aren't certain, I e'er put my best answer downwards and marked for review and then I could come back at the end.

Determination

So that was it. I'd managed to gain a sought later on certification merely more importantly increased my knowledge of AWS that tin only brand me better in my part. I genuinely savour learning and testing myself. Hopefully this has helps some of you, and encourages others to give it a go. Reach out if you have any questions.

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Source: https://dev.to/aws-heroes/how-i-passed-the-solutions-architect-professional-with-mostly-free-content-ine

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