How I passed all three AWS Associate certifications in 10 days

To start the only AWS experience I have is some limited exploration before I purchased training material. Through Udemy (now aCloud.Guru) last year I watched the AWS Certified Solutions Architect (CSA) course and tried to multitask while studying. When I took the test it was very apparent that I wasn\’t prepared and my score showed at 63%. My interests changed at the time so I gave up. A year later I decided it was time to become more educated on AWS and REALLY study this time. To go ahead and put this out there I did some leg work before the 10 days of certification. After 40ish hours of studying I took CSA on 5/17/2016 and scored 85%. This test has really changed from when I took it last year! My score was also a big change from when I took the exam last so how did that happen? Well I actually studied this time and took notes! I ran through the labs twice which really made the concepts stick. The CSA exam blueprint I believe is the foundation for all things AWS. Having a thorough understanding of these concepts will be critical with the other two exams. Being someone that doesn\’t work with AWS at all I feel extra practice was critical to become certified.

Before taking the exam I wanted additional questions to test and make sure I was prepared. After searching the Google and crawling some forums looking for additional practice questions I came to the conclusion that $20 for the ones you can purchase from AWS aren\’t worth the time. Sure you might see some of those on your actual test but you can only take the practice exam once. I\’m more concerned with being able to use process of elimination and apply the concepts I\’ve learned to multiple practice exams. With that I stumbled on LinuxAcademy.com which was a great resource especially since they are selling their membership for $9/month. I went ahead and looked at some of the content and it seemed to be on par with what I\’ve already watched through the other platform. The practice quizzes were a great resource and I highly recommend as the quizzes are well written and just nice to see how someone else might write a question and expect you to answer. LinuxAcademy is a subscription though and you will be charged $29 the following month if you don\’t cancel the recurring payments. Could you pass just using aCloud.Guru or LinuxAcademy? Sure. But if you want to ensure a pass the first time I always like to combine resources if possible to ensure the best outcome.

I purchased the rest of the courses from aCloud.Guru. After some encouraging words from @acloudguru on Twitter I went ahead and took AWS Certified Developer – Associate (CDA) 3 days later on 5/20/2016 and scored 81%. So what is CDA? In my opinion it\’s the CSA lite course with a focus on DynamoDB which is Amazon\’s push button scale out NoSQL database. There\’s also some additional understanding needed for CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk , and how to use different software development kits (SDKs) as well. A lot of the concepts overlap so study time was minimal to obtain this certification. My experience was to pretty much study the concepts listed above and you\’re good to go with everything you previously learned and were tested on in CSA. The test questions weren\’t the exact same but they were the same concept. Going back to what I said earlier that the CSA is the foundation for AWS. Understanding those concepts will be extremely helpful when reading all other exam questions! Since I was still in my one month with LinuxAcademy I used their practice quizzes as supplementary learning to ensure my study was well rounded.

Moving on to AWS Certified SysOps – Associate this test is a beast of it\’s own. I think the only reason I passed this exam is because of how well I paid attention in CSA, CDA, details of services offered by AWS, and having the multiple testing engines to ensure I\’ve seen questions from two different sources and really test my understanding of concepts and process of elimination. The aCloud.Guru course could use some updating but my brain was so fried at this point that I wouldn\’t be able to give the best feedback as to what they need to update. They cover some key concepts but I believe this exam has added many questions since the content was first created. I wouldn\’t pass over it but I would definitely look to supplement somewhere else until this course is updated. I passed with 70% on 5/27/2016 and while I\’m not necessarily proud of the score but my wife told me \”A pass is a pass.\”

My exam tips and how to be successful:

1. Listen to the instructor – they will tell you critical concepts and not to go on without understanding them

2. They will provide exam tips. I took notes of these

3. Read your notes before you go into your exam. I sat in the parking lot of the testing center almost an hour ahead of time and would review my notes. I used Evernote so I could take screenshots of slides in videos, things I got from AWS documentation, and my own notes and thoughts.

4. Do the labs more than once! I had some very tricky questions and without getting hands on through the labs I would have failed.

5. Understand networking before taking any of the exams! It\’s all around VPC but not just how to build it – you need to understand route tables, network ACLs, security groups, NAT, and everything else associated to networking services.

6. If you don\’t immediately know the answer in the test then mark it to review later. I marked about half of the questions on all tests. I was very nervous going in so getting some of the easier ones out of the way helped my nerves. Once I was collected I was able to review and analyze each question appropriately. Most questions are pick two or three answers out of a group so you must understand the scenario given and how to best answer.

This was a long journey and it\’s an awesome feeling to achieve all three certifications in 10 days. I intend to study for the AWS Solutions Architect – Professional exam in the near future but before that I\’m starting to look at studying things like JavaScript and Lambda. The noise around Serverless can\’t be ignored! I\’ve also considered learning more about Microsoft Azure to have a well rounded understanding of why someone might choose Azure over AWS and the different use cases. If you have any questions leave them in the comments or send me a message on LinkedIn and I\’ll do my best to give a quality answer.