AWS Certification

aws certification

My journey to AWS Certification

AWS Certification

This article is a summary of my journey to AWS Certification. I will be going through the process of getting certified and the resources I used to prepare for the exam. Hopefully this will help you on your journey to getting certified.

Why AWS Certification?

I want to get certified because I want to prove my skills and knowledge in AWS. I also interested in learning more about cloud computing and AWS is the leading cloud platform. Ever since graduating from college I have been more and more curious about what I can do with cloud computing. It has been the future of computing and I want to be a part of it.

What Path to take for Certification?

I've done some research and found that the most popular path is skipping the Practitioner exam and going straight to the Associate level. This is because the Practitioner exam is more of a general overview of AWS and the Associate exam is more in depth. However, I didn't take this path as I got a discount for the Practitioner exam and saw that there was a free re-take if I failed. I also wanted to get the Practioner exam out of the way as it would be a good baseline for the Associate exam. Generally if you have a background in IT, you can skip the Practitioner exam and go straight to the Associate exam.

How to Prepare for the exam

I used the following resources to prepare for the exam:

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, this link will take you to the official documentation for the exam. Amazon provides a couple of free resources to help you prepare for the exam. I am going to separate the resources into two sections, free and paid.

Free Resources

Both are great resources to help you for the exam. I personally used freeCodeCamp as it was a good overview of the exam and the practice exam was a good way to test my knowledge.

The only paid resource I used was practice exams from Stephane Maarek - Udemy Course This course comes with 6 practice exams and what I liked about this course was that it has two different types of exams. The first type was exam mode which was a simulation of the real exam. Then the second type was practice mode where you could go question by question and get immediate feedback on your answers. I found this to be a great way to prepare for the exam as it helped me understand the topics that I needed to focus on.

Cloud Practitioner Certification Experience

Overall, I would recommend using the free resources that Amazon provides as it will help you understand the topics that you need to focus on. However, if you want to get a better understanding of the exam and the topics, I would recommend using the paid resources. I also recommend taking the exam at a official AWS testing center as it will be a more controlled environment and you will be able to focus more on the exam. If not possible you can take it at home but it requires a lot more steps and a lot more time to set up.

In order to pass the exam you need to get 700 or higher. I ended up getting 706 on my first attempt. Although I passed, I could have done better. However, I did learn a lot from the exam and I feel confident in my ability to take the Associate exam. One thing I would change to my study regimen is take more timed practice exams. Next exam I will be taking will be the Solutions Architect Associate exam, I will be taking a different approach and will be using more timed practice exams to prepare for the exam. Not only will I be using more timed practices, but I will also be utilizing a strategy that will split the exam into three parts.

The three part Strategy

Generally the exam is going to have questions in varying difficulty. In my experience 25% of the questions are easy, 50% are medium, and 25% are hard. If you are well prepared you should have no problem identifying and categorizing the questions. The order of the questions is random, so in this strategy you will be splitting the exam into three parts. You want to spend most of your time in the middle section as this is where the majority of the questions are. The first and last section are going to be the easiest and hardest sections.

So in phase 1 you will go through all 65 questions in the exam and answer find the easy questions, questions that you can answer within 10 seconds. In phase 2 you will go through the medium questions and try to answer them, also marking the hard questions of the section. This is where you will spend most of your time, methodically going through the questions and answering them. If you cant answer the question, flag it and save it for the last phase. Lastly in phase 3 make note of the time left and go through the hard questions with your remaining time.

This strategy will help you not get overwhelmed by the hard questions and focus on the questions that you know and spend the most time on medium level questions, which the majority of the exam is made up of.