AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam (CO3)

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:16:56 +0000

AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam

The AWS Solutions Architect exam is an intermediate exam in the programme of AWS certifications and is arguably the most desired certificate of them all. Or at least to begin with. It is a great step on from the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam as well. It is very popular with people starting out in a career in IT but AWS does recommend some experience working with AWS before taking the exam. I would like to reiterate this advice too. Oh yes.

Studying

I would be lying if I said I enjoyed the process of studying for this exam! On the one hand, I did learn an awful lot and more than I have ever had to learn for any exam, ever. But that said, the sheer volume of the material required for the exam meant I had to pretty much take the same A Cloud Guru course twice. Every course I found that covered the AWS SAA-CO3 seemed to last anywhere from 25 to 50 hours. I started studying back in September 2022 and had made it to half way through my first course when….. the exam changed! It moved from CO2 to CO3! And it was contained fairly big changes and additions too! This hindered my plan to take the exam in October/November but I ended up taking in December 2022 instead. So I urge you to check the certification website and make sure you plan your learning journey to exam timeline. At this point in time I can tell you the the DevOps Pro exam is changing in March 2023 for example. But no biggy but it was a bit frustrating and I wished I had planned things better. Still, I studied on average from two hours to five hours a night, five nights a week, which is my usual sort of routine when I have an exam coming up.

Learning material

Course wise I began by taking the A Cloud Guru SAA-CO3 course which is around 45 hours long although this includes a rough estimate on each of the hands-on labs. I really like the hands-on labs that A Cloud Guru provide. They are top notch and really help but they could sometimes do with going into a bit more detail on occasion. They also had handy dots next to each new section when they made updates to the course and really useful summary videos. I would’ve preferred it if they could’ve stayed with the same instructor for the whole course but I still liked taking and it was generally very good.

I also bought this book AWS Solutions Architect Associate Study Guide by Ben Piper. Twice in fact! For reasons mentioned earlier…. I found this useful as I like to read as well as do and listen so added an extra dimension to my learning and I had no issues with the book at all. There are handy questions at the end of each section to test you and they are quite taxing but then so is the exam. More on that later.

I also took some Neal Davis Practise Exams from Udemy and the Tutorial Dojo practise tests by Jon Bonso which came highly recommended and which were very, very difficult to begin with and really did feel like the real thing.

Exam experience

This exam was the final death knell to my remote exam experience! I have done so many of these things and the last AWS one by Pearson Vue was the only one that didn’t have some kind of minor/major hiccup so I was hoping for a smooth experience. I hoped wrong! I had run the recommended tests. I was in a quiet meeting room in my place of work. I had no distractions. No work VPN. No problems. I even had an unlabelled bottle of water. I felt good. For goodness sake I even had my wife’s Windows 11 laptop! But hey ho I couldn’t get into the exam for love nor money. Not that I offered either. I got so far and the application would time out and fail. So I complained to Pearson Vue and they admitted that there was some kind of fault and I was due a refund. Frustrating but this led me to take the exam at a test center in Leeds. I tried to book a Pearson Vue exam but there were none available until Feb/March time so I opted for the a PSI centre in Leeds where I could take the exam in a few weeks in early December. It was a totaly breeze if slightly odd blast from the past being in a grey office in the centre of a city on a grey and very cold day in Yorkshire. I’m glad I took my coat. The staff were friendly even though it was minus 4 in the room. It was the usual set up of machines flanked by screens. The questions were VERY tough and much harder than expected. I did rattle through them though and did a lot of flagging. Questions that is. I went back over the flagged questions then bidded my farewells and was out in an hour and a half with about 40 minutes left I think. You get 130 minutes to take the exam.

I received my result in about 24 hours time. I had a pass mark 80s and was very happy with the result. Hugely pleased and a big weight was lifted from my shoulders and I could safely return to reality armed with a wealth of information which was already making my job easier in terms of architecting for AWS.

I’m not in a rush to take another AWS exam or any platform for that matter. I feel a bit odd paying so much to take an exam for a proprietary bit of kit that I have to pay to use that isn’t open source or that stands for the kinds of things that matter to me or that is such a behemoth in everybodys daily lives BUT that said it has been massively useful and beneficial to my role as a DevOps engineer. If I needed to use another platform I would still consider taking an exam as it’s a great way to get to grips with the service.

AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 09:02:50 +0100

N.B. Correct as of 2021!

The AWS Cloud Practitioner is a foundational level exam that is important for an overview of AWS as a whole and arguably one of the most important exams you can take at the moment if you’re interested in a career in cloud engineering or devops. https://aws.amazon.com/certification

I studied for this exam over six months ago and then was sidetracked by taking the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam that I had to complete at the Linux Foundation. I finally completed the Cloud Practitioner exam recently and thought I’d share my path to passing the certification.

Firstly, I took the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course. It is a six-hour course that prepares you to take the exam and obtain the certification. It might have changed since I took it but only in terms of keeping up with the change in delivery of skills training at AWS and to add new features. I really, really liked this course. Along with Google, I think they deliver some of the best training I’ve seen. Along with this training I also took the LinkedIn Learning course Prepare for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam by Hiroko Nishimura. This was a really nice course and very well presented but was aimed at total beginners rather than people who are already working in IT. I also took Michael J. Shannon’s course on Percipio to prepare. His course was aimed a little better in my experience but I preferred the deliver style of Hiroko if I’m honest. Although if I’m honest I think the AWS course itself is still the best and contains more than enough information in order to pass the exam.

BUT! I also viewed example questions on YouTube (you know how to use YouTube don’t you?) and bought the Udemy course by Neal Davis AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 500 Practice Exam Questions. This was fantastic. I only had time to complete about 4 of the mock tests but not only do you get to review your answers at the end, he has provided lots of cheat sheets and information about the answers to help you revise. I would say the exams provided were harder than the real thing but not by very much. You really do need to know a fair bit of detail about the services provided by AWS to answer the questions. Particularly, deploying different types of software or migrating to the cloud etc.

I took the exam with Pearson Vue having taken several exams at home before. I can truthfully say this was the best experience I have had. The mobile app was a bit funny about uploading the pictures of my workspace but that was all. I also had to borrow a family members laptop in order to take the exam as I don’t use Windows or MacOS. But the executable that Pearson Vue sent worked flawlessly and the instructions from Amazon also made sense to me. I checked in half and hour earlier and had my ID and work area ready to go. You have approximately 90 mins to complete the exam and it took me about 30 mins to finish. It is multiple choice unlike the practical LFCS or CKA exams and you can flag questions for review. I did this but I didn’t change anything in the end.

The only odd thing I found was that the exam tells you whether you have passed or failed after a brief survey. And then it just closes the software… That’s it. No email or anything. Nothing to say that they’re not viewing you anymore. No goodbye!

I received a digital Credly badge in an email the next day which was great because it put my mind at rest. I was checking the AWS account page for confirmation that I had passed and it almost looked as though the exam had never happened! Anyway, I still believe that this is a great exam to take if you’re looking to move into a career at a company that utilises cloud computing, which is basically every large business in the world at the moment. I chose this for work reasons. If you choose an exam make sure that it’s relevant to where your job is or might be i.e. Google or Azure are alternatives and have their own certifications available.

https://cloud.google.com/certification