Resources

• Note
• AWS Whitepapers

Study Guide

• Cloud Guru suggestion Free course
• Get the book from Amazon: AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide. It is also available on Safari

The path is suitable for both certificate exams and interviews.

1. You need to understand the concepts, and explain some use cases that suit moving to cloud computing.
2. explain the terms, rules.
3. demo the ability to answer questions, troubleshooting.
4. build real world examples.

Certificate Difficulty

1. Certified Cloud Practitioner
2. Solutions Architect Associate
3. Developer Associate
4. Sysops Administrator Associate
5. Security Specialty
6. Big Data Specialty
7. Advanced Networking Specialty
8. Machine Learning Specialty
9. Devops Professional
10. Solutions Architect Professional

Cloud Practitioner

This one is good for non-technical people: such as business analyst, product owner, scrum master, maybe a manager as well.

For technical people, you can study all three (SA, Dev, Sysops) associates together. Two professionals usually take another 6 weeks to prepare. You need to understand many core cocepts: such as IAM, VPC, S3, EC2, RDS, Dynamo, EBean, SQS, SNS, Cloudwatch, and so on.

Suggested Steps

1. take an AWS training class
2. review exam guide and sample questions
3. practice with labs and exam prep quest
4. study AWS whitepapers
5. review AWS FAQs
6. take exam prep workshop
7. take practice exam
8. schedule your exam and get certified

FAQs

• Is in-classroom training necessary? Not absolute needed in my opinion. Too expensive, too little details.

• What about online courses? Amazon provides some free online courses. Good to watch, but not enough.

  Third-party websites such as “A Cloud Guru” and “Cloud Academy” are great.
  “A Cloud Guru” annual membership $300/year. “Cloud Academy” $79/month. Qwiklabs provides excellent labs too. Pro: * You can adjust play speed * review multiple times * check out exam tips * exam simulator is an excellent practice before shooting real target

• Whitepapers
  • You don’t have to read them all.
  • read all overview/big picture ones, e.g. “Architecting for the cloud: AWS best practices”, “AWS secruity best practices”
  • read topics you are not familiar.
• Videos
  • AWS event videos on youtube: re:Invent sessions
    • youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices/playlists
    • foundation videos
    • 400-level are very useful
    • slideshare hosts the slides in video sessions
• Case studies
  • google “aws case studies”, on amazon.com too.