Abdullah Barrak
January 10, 2023

Passing AWS Solutions Architect Professional Exam

Around last September 2022, after the expiration of my previous amazon web services certificate [SAA] , I decided to prepare and take the next level professional certificate [AWS SAP].

Preparation

When you have working knowledge in the cloud and AWS specifically, it is optimal to seek first the associate level certificates since they’re information oriented with good study and practice, your chances for passing are high. By doing so, you also prepare for the professional and specialty levels afterward.

And that’s what I did by clearing out the following two certificates!

Certified Developer

This is mostly focused on developer centric roles when working with AWS.

Besides the essentials (EC2, IAM, ELB, R53, RDS, S3, CloudFront, KMS, CloudWatch), other development relevant services and topics are covered with precise questions like lambda workloads, serverless offerings (Dynamo, API Gateway, Cognito), CI/CD offerings, working with secrets and configuration as indicated in the official guide. Also, Practical DynamoDB, lambda, and S3 questions with snippet of code are expected.

Notably, I found this one the easiest in the associate category. 💡

Certified SysOps Admin

This is basically the most involved exam in the associate level in my experience.

There’s focus on CloudFormation, Systems Manager, Logging and monitoring, Event Bridge, AWS Config, among other services as detailed in the 6 domains. Uniquely, this one includes a lab section with 3 practical questions which you would solve through the AWS Console.

Solutions Architect Professional

And Finally, the happy result letter came in with success! 🎉

Here things are more interesting than the associate exams. The breadth and depth of domains are much higher. Most if not all of the questions are compound items that explore a combination of services placement or integrations together (e.g. IAM organization policies SCP and S3, on-premise gateways and connectors to services). Try to cover advanced networking, IAM, storage and files solutions, and IAM/AD/SSO offerings.

Tips

  • Follow a curriculum to review any gaps you have, and practice with the instructor through labs.
    Maarek’s courses are recommended.
  • The official AWS pages all have PDF exam samples with answers.
    Go through them to know what to expect, questions style, and how domains are examined.
  • AWS open guides are very valuable summary.
    Keep them in bookmarks!
  • Have a good night sleep 😴 and attend 20-15 minutes earlier.

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