How I Passed AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam

I should had written this blog in January, when I passed the exam, but I was focused on coding so ended up delaying til now. There is lock down going on due to Corona virus so why not resume my blog? So I passed AWS CPP exam by the end of August then on first week of September, I started my first developer job. I was super excited and nervous. Contract clearly stated that I'm on probation for 3 months and I can be terminated at any time. I was happy that I was able to find a full time developer job in a month after I graduated from bootcamp, but now I had to survive. I was faced with unfamiliar stack like AngularJS, Node.js, Redis, Cassandra and more. There was absolutely no time to study anything but angular in first month of the job. In order to say I understand the basics of AWS, I knew I had to pass at least Solutions Architect Associate exam. It was always stuck in back of my head. After 2 months on the job, I felt more comfortable with balancing life and work. By November, I was ready for another battle with AWS.

First the content was definitely much bigger in Solution Architect Associte. I knew it was going to take serious efforts. I'm amazed how some people post how they passws SAA exam in less than a month on reddit. I knew I wasn't one of those, but that's okay. I'll keep persistent and move forward at my own pace, I told myself. Once again, I took no prisoner when it came down to investing in study materials. From WhizLab, Neal Davis Notes& Exam, Andrew Brown's SAA course, AWS Study Guide, Linux Academy and Jon Bonso's practice exam, I studied them all. It was overkill, but I that's the way I do.

Here I'll provide short breakdown of each of the study materials.
1.Linux Academy- Over whopping 54 hours of videos. It comes with interactive diagram and flashcards. Video course is thorough. However, question pool for final exam is not big enough. Quality of question is not comparable to actual exam. This is only downside. However, if you are interested in DevOps, this is best study material you'll find especially after Cloud Guru bought them off. They provide study materials for all DevOps related exam.
2. Neal Davis Notes& Exam- Pretty detailed notes, but better to read after you are familiar with materials. Exam is brutal as expected. If you can get 70% on his exam, you'll have no problem passing actual exam. There are six practice tests.
3. WhizLab Tests- I only used their practice tests and they are easier than Jon Bonso and Neal Davis, but still worth it. Valuable one is sectional test that test your knowledge per subject like Dynamo DB and ELB.
4. Jon Bonso Practice Tests- If you go over reddit on how to pass AWS exam, you'll this guy name all over the place. There is a reason. His practice tests resemble the actual exam except his exam is slighly more difficult. Extremely thorough explanation on the solution is what separates his practice tests from others. It's like full study notes and exam combined. This is a must have. Only $13CAD in udemy. Can't go wrong.
5. Andrew Brown SAA video course- It's available for free. It's made of chains of short videos and he gets right to the point. His cheats sheets are well summarized and helps you refresh the materials you learnt. I used this course at the last stage of my exam preparation and helped immensely.

I did read couple of whitepapers and FAQS for important services. As far as what you need to study, there is nothing surprising. Instead of focusing on each individual AWS service, try to focus on how each service interact with each other like relationship between ELB and auto-scaling, DynamoDB and API Gateway. It was tough journey, but well worth it. After passing AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam, I was going for my 3rd AWS certification by studying for Developer Associate, but I'm junior developer and I don't get to use AWS in my work. So I thought it would be better for me to get my focus back to pure coding. I felt that I was stretching out myself too thin. However, I am planning to create MEAN stack app as side project and deploy on AWS using various services like Elastic Beanstalk or serverless technology like Lambda, DynamoDB and API Gateway. Not quite sure where my coding journey will go from here, but as long as I continue learning, I know that my hard work will eventually pay off.