AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA) - Exam Review & Recommendations For Network Engineers

This exam review is written for Network Engineers in mind in order to help them with mindset required for the exam. If you are an existing Cloud Practitioner or DevOPS Engineer you probably wouldn't need my advice anyways. 😇

Study Resources I used for Preparation

- A Cloud Guru AWS Cloud Practitioner Video Course - Since this was the first time I started exploring AWS itself. I went through this quick course to get the required background and get familiar with AWS.

- A Cloud Guru AWS SAA (2018) Video Course that also includes practice exam for each section and a full length practice exam at the end. The video course is definitely good to get started and understand the AWS services in general with some nice demos on the console. Strongly recommended to lay the good foundation for exam prep.

- AWS Official SAA Certification Guide - It's not updated for current exam and is probably 2-3 years old. But still serves the purpose to prepare for some of core topics of exam. 

- AWS Live Lessons - Good Video Training Course to compliment A Cloud Guru Video Training Course. Some of topics are better covered.

- Free Practice Exam From Whizlabs - You can actually go ahead and buy paid ones as well. But I came to know about this few days before exam only. So only attempted their free exam and it was good experience. What I liked about them that they also give you explanations in case you get something wrong.

- AWS Recommended White papers and FAQs. - White papers are really important to go through cover to cover. FAQs are important but too many, I would recommend to at least go through Compute, Storage & Database FAQs.

- Practice on Live AWS Console using Free Tier Account - Just make sure you set up billing alerts to ensure you don't end up spending a lot of money from your credit card as people often forget to delete the configuration after practice sessions using free tier accounts. 

The Beginning & Initial Challenges
As I mentioned earlier, This was my first step to learn more about cloud and AWS in particular. Since I didn't have enough background on AWS Services so I started with A Cloud Guru AWS Cloud Practitioner Video Course. The course is quick and short introduction to give you high level perspective on AWS services in general. Some of the topics covered in course are unique in the sense that those are not covered later in AWS SAA Exam Blueprint. 

Later I went through A Cloud Guru AWS SAA Video Course 3 Times. Why 3 Times... I'll tell you later. :)

The SAA Video course is good to gain intermediate level skills and each topic is covered in much more depth compared to Cloud Practitioner course. At the end of each section they have got practice quiz which are good to test you skills on a given topic. I pretty much scored 90 or above during all practice sessions in first go (After 3rd reading). Also scored 94 in full length practice exam in first go. Interestingly last 3-4 sections in the video course don't have any practice exams such as Application Services, Well Architected framework etc. if I remember correctly. Also you must try to go through all Demos that instructor walks you through on Live AWS Console on your own.

While Practice on the live console is really good way to get familiar with services. In the exam in particular you didn't get any questions around Configurations itself such as Configuration snippets to be verified, Steps to configure a given service or scenario etc. Or at least that was the case in my exam.

2 Weeks before exam I also purchased AWS Live Lessons on one friend's recommendation and quickly went through it. The course gives you fresh thoughts and few new perspectives. Some of the topics IMHO are better covered compared to A Cloud Guru Video Course. 

There are couple of Challenges I faced during the exam prep as follows. So you must have a plan to get rid of those.

1. The Cloud Practitioner Mindset - This is probably the toughest challenge to overcome for Network Engineers. There are couple of ways to looks at it. Adopting the mind set is probably the one part of it. But personally IMHO the other challenge is the assumption that most of self paced Video Courses have is that they assume you are an Application Guy. The SAA exam is 95% about Application and only 5% around stuff like Networking, Load Balancing & DNS etc theory that we as Network Engineers are mostly familiar with. I remember A Cloud Guru instructor Ryan mentioning at the end of VPC section that " This is by far probably the most difficult section for you guys" and I was like " Dude it was so easy and only section I understood 100%" :)

That's the reason I have to go through the Video Course 3 times. In the first run it's too much of new information around Application stuff you would need to get familiar with. Also details like different flavors of storage, compute etc and how pricing is done for each offers you too much of information to remember. So In first run I probably only understood and can remember 50% of stuff. To overcome this challenge I started taking notes in 2nd run. But it was very time consuming as you often got to pause the video and start writing. 

2. Learn Lot more about Application - This is another great challenge. It might be easier to overcome for people with Computer Science background from university education background perspective. Initially I thought I exam must be more IaaS focussed but I was completely wrong here. The exam is not about general Compute, Storage & Virtualization discussion. But more focussed around deep level storage understand, life cycle management, Event Logging, Monitoring , Different Types of Databases and Database Scalability techniques etc. Which means as a Network Engineer you got to spend lot of time researching to get more and detailed understanding of such topics. This is where none of Self Paced video training vendor met my expectations in particular including official exam certification guide. Since they only teach you very fundamental skills while exam requires much more advanced skills. 

For example a Database Scalability problem can be solved in many different ways - Scale Compute, Spin New Instances, Use Auto Scaling, Go multi AZ, Spin New Read Only Instances, Run Traffic Distribution with DNS and LB Techniques, Move to Non Relational DB, Using DB Caching Techniques, Use Database Acceleration Techniques etc. As you can see if you get a question in exam around Database Scalability issue, you really got to think through all these option based on what kind of scenario is given with specific requirements and current landscape including keeping in mind details like if given requirements are talking about a problem with read only scalability, read write scalability or write only scalability including scenario where it's queries that are taking longer to respond. Also it could be around data coming from multiple streaming resources such as IoT kind of setup or maybe online gaming. So as you can see there is could be lot of things going in parallel in exam. Now throw things like lambda in the mix :) 

3. Outdated Exam Certification Guide - The official exam certification guide is very outdated except it still helps with some core topics like EC2, Storage, DNS. If I were to study today using book, I would rather pick the following which seems to be updated for new exam. 

4. Practice Exams - None of full scale practice exams included under Self Paced Video training courses were anywhere close to the real exam in terms of complexity. 

5. Study Group - In past for all my Cisco CCIE and CCDE exams I use to run study groups. But this time the idea didn't work out for many reasons. Different Time Zones, Different Backgrounds etc were causing issues. But personally I would still recommend to create one if possible and throw challenges and scenarios on each other.

The Exam Day

In exam you gonna get 65 questions that to be answered in 130 Mins. Personally I think that time is more than enough if you are well prepared. I finished my exam in 90 mins or so. I spent 15 mins to review some questions and change my answers for those I tagged for review earlier. This was bit different from Cisco exams where you are not allowed to go back and make change or revisit a question later.

Some of the questions will have lot of text to read though covering requirements and current landscape & expected outcomes. I used A4 sheets given to me by exam center to note down key requirements from entire text to ensure I stay focussed and don't have to read through the entire question few times. They don't however allow you to highlight it on the screen itself like Cisco CCDE lab exam. IMHO that would be cool though. 😎

The exam result be flashed momentarily at the end of exam and they don't show score right away. It took them around 24 hrs to post my score and certificate under my aws certification account online. You will likely only see a Congratulation message or a Sorry message when you end exam. Which means what is easy to figure out 😋

EC2, Storage, Database, DNS & Lambda itself covered 75% of my exam. Misc. topics such as Application Services, Cloud Trail and Cloud Watch, Beanstalk & Cloud Formation were also on exam. 

HTH...
Evil CCIE / A Network Artist