Hey all. I recently took and passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam and few people have asked me for tips and resources on passing the exam so I thought I would post them them here.  I originally took and failed the exam last year with an awful 40% which is possibly my worst exam score ever.  Looking back I can see exactly why, I did very little hands on, I went through a CBT course without verifying it covered the actual content and I did not read anything else apart from that.  I decided to re-take it to continue my path to learning more about AWS/Azure and Cloud computing in general as I really cannot ignore it any longer. 

So here are the resources I used:

1) ACloudguru course – https://acloud.guru/bundle/aws-associate-certification – I highly highly highly recommend this course. It is currently on offer for £65 for 3 Associate courses which is a bargain!! Ryan has one of those rare skills of being able to describe really technical content into simple A, B, C which makes it really easy to understand. In preparation to the test I went through the course twice.  There are also some questions at the end of each section also to verify your knowledge.  Only thing which I think is missing is the ability to download the courses as I spend a lot of my time in hotel rooms with a rubbish internet connection.

2) Acloudguru discussion forums – https://acloud.guru/forums/home – There is a really active forum on acloudguru which is good to stop by and read everybody else’s experience on the exam. Highly recommended to read a few days before the exam to make sure there are no major changes in the exam or anything like that.

3) Whizzlabs exam questions – http://www.whizlabs.com/aws-solutions-architect-associate/ I found these really really useful. There is an exam question pool of 300 Questions and you get instant feedback if you are correct or wrong and more importantly why. A good way to check your knowledge is up to scratch in preparation for the exam.

4) FAQ’s and whitepapers – Whilst the cloudguru course covers most of the content there are some things which I needed to solidify my knowledge on so I read the whitepapers and FAQ documents on Amazon EC2, S3, VPC’s, IAM and Storage

5) Hands on – Can’t stress how important this is.  You can sign up for a free AWS account and you get access to a free tier where you can create instances, VPC’s, storage etc. and it won’t cost you a single penny. So make sure you do hands on to solidify your knowledge even further.

Do all of the above and you will be reward with this:

I am continuing to do all 3 Associate exams then I am going to do some stuff on Azure.  Good luck on your journey!!