My Journey to Certified Solutions Architect 2020 — SAA-C01
Background
I’ve been working in Big Data now for 5 years, so when I decided to get the certification I was already familiar with some terms like Data Warehouse, networks, caches, performance, etc. I also knew some AWS services but more in relation to the Big Data world.
Let’s start with a bit of my background. In 2016, I started working with Amazon for close to 2 years. After reading this you might think I had a lot of experience with AWS, but that’s far from the truth. I can summarize my experience in launching EC2 instances and configuring security groups, and that’s about it. As you can see my knowledge in Amazon was pretty limited, but it was a start.
The Journey
First Step
I wanted to start from the absolute beginning, so my first goal was to achieve the Cloud Practitioner Certificate. This in my opinion is the easiest of all the certifications.
I decided to take the course from acloud.guru with Ryan Kroonenburg. This course is about 7 hours long and he covers pretty much everything you need in order to pass the exam. He also provides an exam simulator to test your knowledge before you go to the real exam. This took me about 5 days (note that you have 7 days for a free trial). I passed the exam with a score of 880 in the first try.
This helped tremendously in gaining experience and getting to know a bunch of AWS Services.
If you have a lot of experience, you could skip this step, but for those that don’t, I really recommend it. Everything you learn here will be really useful for the Solutions Architect exam. By taking this exam you get 50% off in the next AWS exam that you take which is a really cool feature.
Second Step
After passing the exam, I jumped right away into the Solutions Architect Associate course from acloud.guru. This course is a little longer coming in at 14 hours and it covers all the topics needed for the exam. This step took me a week and a half.
I watched most of the videos at 1.5–1.75 speed. After finishing every topic, you take a small quiz in relation to what you just studied. I found some of the quizzes confusing because they can ask you questions that weren’t covered in the videos. Besides that, they were very helpful.
After completing the course, I went to the exam simulator, took the exam, and failed miserably. It was a bit discouraging. I took another one and got the same result.
While failing might be disheartening, overall it points you to the right direction and tells you where you need to focus more.
Third Step
I felt like my knowledge wasn’t solid enough, so I decided to take Neal Davis course from digitalcloud. This course is 22 hours long and structured completely differently than acloud.guru. The way it was structured helped me to solidify all the knowledge that I learned from the previous course. It comes with practice exams as well which are key.
After I finished the course I started doing the exams and I kept failing. So after every exam I’d review all the questions one by one, and research them thoroughly. As time consuming as this may seem, I believe it’s necessary in order to become familiar with each question. I re-took all the exams and I passed them all with 800 average(you pass the exam with 772).
Fourth Step
Lastly, I purchased Jon Bonso udemy practice exams, which includes 6 exams. I passed them all at the first go, with a score between 73–86. I realized I was gaining more knowledge with each course and familiarizing myself with all of the concepts. I repeated the ones I passed with low scores. These exams are amazing and I highly recommend them! The way they are explained really helped a lot to understand some concepts I wasn’t feeling very sure about.
The Test
Some people tell you that booking the exam a couple of months in advance should be the first step in the process to gain your certification. For me personally, I disagree and would suggest against this only because if you don’t feel ready when that deadline comes, there’s a chance you might fail the test. My advice here is to book it when you feel ready, and not to worry, there are always plenty of spots.
Now the question here is, how do you know when you’re ready? In my case I felt ready once I started to pass the exams from the fourth step. Sometimes it can feel like there is so much material, that you could be studying forever. There is a lot of data and some of it can be hard to fully learn, and that’s ok. Once I finished all the practice exams I booked right away because at that point I felt like I wasn’t going to learn anything else.
As long as you follow all these steps you won’t find any surprises on the exam
My recommendation for the exam is to have a very clear understanding of the following concepts:
- EBS Volumes
- EFS
- S3, CloudFront
- VPC — Security Groups,Subnets, NAT Gateway/Instances, etc
- Redshift, DynamoDB
- RDS — Multi AZ and Read Replicas
- EC2 — Elastic Load Balancers and Auto Scaling Groups
- IAM roles, policies, groups
For me, fully understanding these was the backbone of the exam. Play with them as much as you can in the AWS console and you will solidify all the concepts learnt in the videos.
Tips
The Solutions Architect Certification can be a bit overwhelming because there are a lot of concepts that you really have to understand, and I realized that when I was half way of the course. I felt that it was going to be too much of a sacrifice and I thought of quitting. Since I already was half way (or I thought so, I was actually at 15% of the way) I kept pushing. I learnt a lot preparing for this exam and I think it was a great decision to take.
Don’t give up! It’s a lot of hours of work and there is a good chance you will fail a lot of the practice exams, but don’t let the fear of failure deter you. You have to start somewhere!