Software Architecture

Observations on a learning process

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I Passed!

18 Jan 2021

I am now an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate. This took a lot of preparation.

Here was my process:

  1. I watched “the LinkedIN Learning course called “Prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam (SAA-CO2). I tried not to take notes because it can interfere with uptake. For confusing topics, I went to the official AWS documentation.
  2. I worked through “AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide”. I have a digital copy, which I recommend and I took copious notes from this. This guide has sample questions and exercises. The exercises were invaluable and mostly used the AWS free tier. I spent about $20 on the exercises over a month. If you’re doing the exercises, look at the billing console every day! You could save some money.

Now, for note-taking, I had a document with several sections:

  1. Missed example questions
  2. Confusing example questions (including ones that had misleading wording).
  3. Notes table (2 columns: subject and details)
  4. Copied diagrams
  5. Flash cards: eg. Default Max ec2 instances/account = 20

I would love to share it on this blog, but it’s mostly cut/paste from sources that have copyrights.

I did almost all of the exercises in the Study Guide. It’s genuine fun to get your hands dirty, and it helped solidify some conceptual notions. Assigning a role to an ec2 instance so you can access a bucket without credentials was more fun than it should have been.

In the run-up, I re-read the giant document several times. I also went back to the study guide and read the chapter summaries in case I missed anything. I re-watched videos on some subjects that had a lot of details (IAM, security).

Finally, on the day of, I relaxed before the test and took a nice walk. You’re going to be staring at questions on a screen for 2 solid hours. Make sure your eyes and your brain are ready!

A note on the test: it was difficult. A lot of detailed questions with very similar answers. Take your time and don’t panic. Read every question a couple of times. You have time. Close your eyes occasionally and breathe. If you rush through this test, you’ll probably make stupid mistakes.

Now, I have one more job to do: cleaning up my AWS account. I don’t want to open it up in a year and try to figure out if “My First VPC” is actually doing something useful…