In the past few months, we had conversations with many friends and colleagues who were interested in the AWS certificates and were keen to know about the preparation for the AWS solutions architect associate certificate exam. Which resources to avail, which course to do and whether any hands-on practice is required or not etc. Given the interest in this certificate, we planned to aggregate all the information we have and write a blog on what all you need to know about AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certificate. How to prepare for it and pass the exam.

Cloud adoption has picked up in the past few years and now more and more companies are making it part of their core technology stack. Teams are using cloud platforms for various scenarios such as getting the infrastructure up and running asap, scaling up and down based on load, using the out-of-the-box solutions available and a lot more. Organizations are migrating their existing applications to the cloud as well as developing new projects on the cloud.

Looking at the industry trend, among all the cloud platform providers, Amazon Web Services is leaps and bound ahead of the competitors and has become the de facto choice when people think of the cloud. With the growing adoption of AWS, the demand for people with AWS skills has seen exponential growth.

To meet this increasing demand, organizations are encouraging their employees at all levels and in all domains, to learn and get certified in AWS. Individuals out of their interest as well as learning and getting AWS certified.

AWS offers several certificates for different skill levels and various domains. You can know about all the certificates offered by AWS on this link.

AWS Certification Exams

In this blog post, we will discuss the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certificate. How to prepare for it and what resources you can avail to pass the exam.

About the Exam

The AWS certified solutions architect associate exam is oriented toward giving you an overall view of the AWS services and how they can be used together to design a solution. The exam consists of scenario-based questions that test the candidates whether one can understand the given requirement, pay attention to the details and answer the question based on the fact which service or option is best suitable for the given scenario. Below is a sample question which you might get in the exam:

A company hosted an e-commerce website on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The Solutions Architect noticed that the website is receiving a large number of illegitimate external requests from multiple systems with IP addresses that constantly change. To resolve the performance issues, the Solutions Architect must implement a solution that would block illegitimate requests with minimal impact on legitimate traffic.

Which of the following options fulfils this requirement?

• Create a regular rule in AWS WAF and associate the web ACL to an Application Load Balancer.

• Create a rate-based rule in AWS WAF and associate the web ACL to an Application Load Balancer.

• Create a custom rule in the security group of the Application Load Balancer to block the offending requests.

• Create a custom network ACL and associate it with the subnet of the Application Load Balancer to block the offending requests.

Did you get the correct answer? If you got it or not, either way, the main thing is to understand the kind of questions you will face in the exam.

The official AWS link for this certificate

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Resources to Prepare for the Exam

As the demand is increasing for cloud skills, more and more platforms are offering courses, hands-on labs, projects, videos and all kinds of content for learners to consume and gain knowledge.

While preparing for the exam the following 2 courses are useful

Udemy.com

– Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03

– AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams

The first course Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 by Stephane Maarek is a great course on Udemy to give you a very detailed view of all the services, components and their working that are needed to pass the exam.

The second course is a set of practice exams that can help you understand what kind of questions you will face in the real exam and notes for each exam also explain why a given option is correct and why the other options are incorrect in a particular question. The description for each question and options are useful to build your knowledge and fill the gaps in the understanding.

Hands-on practice

There are various other platforms too that offer certificate-specific courses along with hands-on labs in a sandboxed environment where you can practice and get exposure to actual AWS services. A few of them are listed here:

A Cloud Guru

https://learn.acloud.guru/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/overview

Whizlab

https://www.whizlabs.com/aws-solutions-architect-associate/

In addition to the hands-on lab providers, you can also create an AWS account and practice with the real account. You get a lot of services to try with your AWS Free Tier account at no cost for 12 months and there are other services which are always free.

Refer to the link below to know more about the account, and the services offered:

AWS Free Tier

Make sure to use only free-tier services and components. If you mistakenly start or create a paid service you will be billed. So be careful and aware of what you are doing on the AWS console.

Work Experience

People who have experience working in the software industry, or in any industry, would tell you that no amount of study, certifications or any other content can beat the on-job hands-on experience. The details you get to deal with doing the on job work are unmatchable and can rarely be experienced otherwise.

AWS is not different and that’s why if you get a chance to work on an AWS-related project, that can be your best bet to get skilled in the technology. A lot of companies either have started or thinking of starting to leverage the advantages of the cloud, so there are good chances that you land in a role where you get to work on AWS. If you have shown enough enthusiasm and commitment toward learning, you may get the role even if you don’t have any previous experience.

Conclusion

Looking at the industry trend it is very relevant to get skilled on AWS and the certifications are a great way to learn following a curated path. There are a lot of resources available to prepare for the certificate, but this blog should help you to narrow down the required information and understand this certificate exam a little better.

Best of luck for your certificate exam!

We also discussed AWS Heroes in the previous AWS blog. Read it here.

Happy Learning!