How I passed AWS - Solutions Architect

The AWS Solutions Architect exam is an excellent overview of what’s offerings are available on AWS. It’s a great place to start for those new to the cloud, those with on-prem experience, or a cloud veteran.

Why?

You’ll become familiar with many AWS offerings, EC2, RDS, VPC, S3, SNS, SQS, Data center migrations, Hybrid cloud, and more It’s A LOT!

Clearing an exam is lovely; in tech, continued education is the key to continued success. This post is to detail the resources I used to pass this certification on the first attempt.

I studied for about a month and have knowledge of on-prem and cloud infrastructure. Despite that knowledge, I learned a lot of helpful information.

LinkedIn learning track

This course offers a general overview of the AWS services for the exam but offers little practical application. Using your library card to sign up for LI learning opens the entire catalog for free.

There are better offerings to better prepare for the AWS - SA exam.

Stephane Maarek’s Udemy course

This course is the one. It includes hands-on for every AWS service, detailed instructions, and a practice test. The LI learning course offered a high-level overview, while Maarek’s course dove deeper into the various services.

I watched the videos at 1.75 speed for the familiar topics and slowed things down on new information.

I completed the course in roughly two weeks. I also took his practice tests which are a separate Udemy course. (Not a big fan of those, though) The wording was tricky

Cloud resume project

The Cloud Resume Challenge - offers a book or a checklist of things to complete.

As a solutions architect, I choose to only use the checklist.

It’s a 16-step process, basically building a resume and CI/CD pipeline using Python, using JavaScript. (I know very little JavaScript before this challenge), use Git, Lambda, CloudFront, S3, and more. It was a lot of fun and a way to apply what I was learning.

My cloud resume - The resume content’s still a work in progress; however, the site is live. As I update the content and layout, those changes will be pushed to the live site upon commit.

What’s next?

I’m planning to take the AWS Developer certification next.

AWS offers certification paths -> https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs/AWS_certification_paths.pdf