My AWS Certification Journey

Mon, Dec 12, 2022 1088 words 6 minutes

Contents

Some may say certificates are not important. You just get some paper you can proudly hang on the wall or put badge in your CV. However, getting certificate gives you a chance to pack together all knowledge you have and check how good you understand a certain topic.

During last year I’ve got some AWS certificates mostly required by my job. Still, I want more certificates. Why? Because you learn a lot when you pass them, and also, when you fail. There are two major things certificates bring you:

they help you fill up your knowledge gaps
they advance your self-confidence (when you pass, of course).

AWS certification program is built in a such way that during exam you are puzzled with questions so much close to real life. You are provided with use cases most probably you face in your day-to-day business. And doing certification not only gives you a shiny badge you can add to your LinkedIn profile, but also a lot of useful knowledge you can immediately apply on your job.

For now, I hold 3 AWS certificates. I aced all exams with the first time and can share resources I’ve used to get prepared for the exams.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA)

The most general exam to take. A few tips:

make sure you can match services with given use case
- not all services are in the exam, just ones that are regularly used
- no need to know all services in details, just what they do, when are used and how they more or less work
pay a close attention to IAM, confirm you understand how IAM works (Allow vs Deny)
VPC is another major topic in the exam, make sure you understand VPC and basic VPC security (Security Groups, NACL, …)

Studying Resources:

A Cloud Guru - The most common course a lot of people start with. I can recommend this course to someone who never used AWS before and has limited knowledge about cloud computing. But taking this course alone is not enough to get ready for the exam. The course material does not dive deep enough by far, and will not prepare you in full for the exam. Actually this applies to A Cloud Guru as a whole. If you take this course, be prepared to read up a lot of other resources as well before going to the exam. I actually watch A Cloud Guru video course and took the 2 practice exams at the end of the course. The exam questions based on real world use cases felt very tough. Failed in both the practice exams.
Udemy Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate I did not take this course. Lot of my colleagues took part and everyone’s feedback was super positive. Rating of this course on Udemy is also very high. In general Stephane Maarek always has great content and offers great courses. 1 practice exam is available within this course.
Tutorials Dojo AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams Jon Bonso’s exams are always recommended. This pack is huge, but after taking these tests and hammering the knowledge into your head, you are very well-prepared for the exam. Tip: don’t be alarmed when you don’t score very high, at least at first: these tests are slightly tougher than the actual exam. Just be sure to read all the explanations, especially for the questions you got wrong or guessed. The explanations are VERY thorough and backed with a lot of AWS material. These tests are more or less a course on their own!
YouTube course from freeCodeCamp.org Very concise and informative course. It is only 10 hours long in comparison with 40 hours of course from Cloud Guru. Respect to the course creators, I can not imagine how much time they spent to make it and this course is absolutely free.

AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA)

Focal points of the exam:

Everything in the Code* suite, especially: CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit
X-Ray
DynamoDB
Elastic Beanstalk (though not extremely deep)

If you have previous experience in developing services with AWS and you used CDK, various AWS SDKs and have completed AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam, this would be not a big challenge for you to ace AWS Certified Developer exam. Furthermore, I recommend to do AWS Solutions Architect Associate and AWS Certified Developer exams together if you have plan to get both certificates as there are a bunch of overlapping topics and this would be easy to learn it in parallel.

Studying Resources:

YouTube course from freeCodeCamp.org Very concise and informative course. Highly recommended.
Udemy Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate I did not take this course. But Stephane Maarek always has great content and offers great courses. So not a doubt in my mind that this would be high quality. Also offers 1 practice exam.
Tutorials Dojo AWS Certified Developer Associate Practice Exams Jon Bonso’s exams are always highly recommended.

AWS Certified Database - Specialty (DBS)

Main focus of the exam is deep understanding of the AWS DB services. Exam validates your ability to design, implement, deploy, and maintain database solutions.