How you score AWS-Associate Architect exam 900+ marks.
Here I thought to share my learning path to achieving 900+ marks in AWS- Associate Architect exam.
With the current trend and demand for cloud computing and cloud technologies, Amazon web service is the finest and number one popular cloud in the industry nowadays. So I thought to give a try and get certified.
Today I have achieved my goal and passed with 945 marks. Here I decided to share my journey with you and hope you will get valuable information and motivation to get it for you as well.
So the journey began 3 months ago, once I got motivated to get certified, trust me, I did not have any industry experience on it except I have tried a few things on the cloud environment. So here is my plan and experience throughout the last 3 months.
I was looking for below things to get it done myself with self-study.
- Tutorials (video tutorials) which I always prefer to learn something.
- Use cases with real-world examples.
- Sample questions — of course, I have an interesting story about it which I will explain later.
- Understanding of how I use my current software designing experience for this.
- Do the practicals as much as possible.
- And the most important part is to trust your experience and instincts.
Here are the resources that I used to learn. (both are same, you can get some discounted price from Udemy)
So below I planned to explain below things that I believe help you.
- Reading and watching tutorials
- Do the practicals and follow Guide given by Amazon with practicals always.
- Read Cheatsheet or your short notes very frequently.
- Do follow use cases given by Amazon.
- Sample questions and Trust your experience, instincts of solution design.
- Facing to the exam.
- Reading and Watching Tutorials
The above video tutorials gave me an overall understanding of the study areas and also it helps me to refresh my memory from time to time when I look them on the train, when I having my lunch, basically on the go and in my office work.
Cheat sheets above help me to summarize the content as I did not want to summarize everything I learn from the video tutorials.
But trust me, most of the part was done by the materials given by the Amazon FAQs and white papers. I have almost read more than 150+ FAQ pages, white papers and followed tutorials from the Amazon site.
Above mentioned youtube channel from Amazon helps me a lot to understand most of the use cases of AWS and use of their product.
Above mentioned AWS This is my architecture series that help me to understand and imagine architectural diagrams and the use of AWS components.
2. Do the practicals and follow Guide given by Amazon with practicals always
First I followed the practicals given in video tutorials. Those are very basics and some parts are skipping. So I recommended to find out the guide for the relevant area in the Amazon guide and follow it as well. ( you can always use your free account to do it). sometimes I got spend some $10-$20 for some of the things, but trust me it is worth a lot.
3. Read Cheatsheet or your short notes very frequently.
When you do the readings and practicals you will get or feel with your instincts that you will not remember this area than others, Note it down somewhere or bookmark your cheat sheet to read it when you travel by bus, train or while you having your meal and keep in touch with those.
4. Do follow use cases given by Amazon
This is the product of Amazon, so features that you can use with your application architecture are well explained with their use cases. Trust me, all the questions are based on use cases of them. If you learn it you can get it through.
Example of use cases:
5. Sample questions and Trust your experience, instincts of solution design.
If you search AWS- associate architect sample questions in google search, you will get a lot of exam dumps that need to be paid and there are few pdfs with 20–30 questions. When I see these questions and answers, I am so happy with it. Once I learned tutorials and practicals, I thought to give a try with some sample questions. I was so scared when I see my answer selection with the given answers. I pick 10–15 correct answers out of 30–40 questions. I was almost studied for one month completely and ended up with bad results. ( so I extend the exam from another 3 weeks from a scheduled date because of lack of confidence and that time I decided to read FAQs document and white papers as much as I can)
But always trust your instincts, when I pick an answer, I always thought if I design this solution what should I do with my experience and what is the AWS solution for that. So I always believe and trust my instincts and thought to have a look again and map the given answer, my answer and Amazon FAQs (this is so easy if you have a couple of years of experience in solution designing and architecting). I realized that most of the cases I was correct according to the amazon. So I gave up with believing answers published with questions online. But you must practice some questions.
When I do sample questions, I have noted down some of the topics which I need to repeat learning or reading more. Take a piece of paper and write down just keywords.
Here is my one. :P. The list will narrow down when you going through the content.
Book mark important readings as you want.
6. Facing to the exam
- Read the questions properly and understand the problem.
- Identify keywords such as high availability, scaling, load balancing, attack, security, network, static site, dynamic content, cost-effective, minimum effort, not want to manage the infrastructure to the management so on.
- Try to remind the solutions provided by Amazon for those kinds of problems. ( Amazon provided use-cases helps on this situation)
- Apply your practical or solution design to the problem.
- Choose the most appropriate answer/s. ( and trust me this is the correct answer)
I hope this article will help you to learn any certification that you read for.
I am planning for my next AWS-professional or AWS- Cloud Security exam soon. I will write another article once I went through it.
Cheers. Good luck with your learning. Do let me know if you want any additional information from me.
and don’t forget to give a clap if this is useful to you. :)
