Tuesday, March 21, 2017

AWS Certified Solution Architect exam experience and few exam related tips

Last week I attempted and passed my AWS Certified Solution Architect exam, in this post I would share my exam experience and a few exam related tips.

I have never been as anxious and scared as I was before this exam and the obvious reason was not having much hands on experience on AWS platform and the exam feedback related posts which I read on different AWS forums where people are talking about how though these AWS exams are however once the exam started and after looking at first few questions all nervousness instantly went away. Now After passing this exam I can say the questions were very fair neither lengthy nor very hard and what I mean by this is, if you study all the AWS services which are covered in this exam and understand the in and out of them, then you are going to pass this exam easily.

Here is my exam score, Overall Score: 98%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Designing highly available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, scalable systems : 96%
2.0 Implementation/Deployment: 100%
3.0 Security: 100%
4.0 Troubleshooting: 100%

I was preparing for AWS CSA as well as Sysops certification from last three - four months and during my preparation I watched ACloud.guru and Plurasight.com CBT videos two – three times as well as read about different AWS service guides on AWS docs site few times times.   

Services I focused for this particular exam : 
S3
IAM
EC2
Storage Gateways
VPC
Route53
CloudWatch
CloudTrail
CloudFront
ELB
CloudFormation
AutoScalling
ElasticBeanstalk
RDS
DynamoDB
SQS
SNS
SES
Redshift


This exam had 60 questions and out of which around 30 questions were scenario based, where you would be tested about your knowledge of different AWS services…Which service fits best where.  

Beside above listed services, read and understand following one page docs, you would find scenario based questions related to these topics  
















And most importantly don’t forget to read the FAQ of S3, VPC, EC2, Route53 and RDS/DynmoDB as well as Security related whitepaper.


Hope this would be helpful in passing your AWS CSA exam....Best of Luck!

That's it.... :)


8 comments:

  1. are you taken any coaching..will you recommend any online coaching to go through for this exam..Please suggest.

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    Replies
    1. I would recommend acloud.guru or Linuxacadamy.com training videos, any of these CBTs + AWS services faqs are suffice to clear the exam.

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  2. Hi Noor.
    Thanks for such valuable information. Can you please share the process of taking exam. Like any class ID is required or anyone can go directly to exam after studying cbts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. yes you can do self study and can directly go for exam...no prior official training or class id required...for further info plz checkout this, https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certification-prep/

      Delete
  3. Hey Noor thanks for the tips, and doing this should suffice to score a descent average right?

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  4. Hey Noor thanks for the tips... Much appreciated...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hey how are job opportunities for a fresher in cloud architecture with aws certs?

    ReplyDelete
  6. That is very interesting; you are a very skilled blogger. I have shared your website in my social networks! A very nice guide. I will definitely follow these tips. Thank you for sharing such detailed article.

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    ReplyDelete