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  

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-creating-snapshot.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ServerLogs.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placement-groups.html

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/snapshot-ebs-raid-array/

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/latest/userguide/as-instance-termination.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Security.html

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-security-best-practices.pdf,   Page 2

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/vpc-nat-comparison.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Internet_Gateway.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/vpc-nat-gateway.html

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_NAT_Instance.html

http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-bastion-host-nat-instances-vpc-peering-security/

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/instance-store-vs-ebs/

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/DeveloperGuide/emr-kinesis.html

https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/   

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

I also found this post on A cloud guru very useful, https://acloud.guru/forums/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/discussion/-KSDNs4nfg5ikp6yBN9l/exam_feedback_-_20_specific_po

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

That's it.... :)