Been an age since I've done any exams so decided before Christmas that I may as well try and use some of the AWS exams to formalise my knowledge a bit.
First one I picked was the AWS Solution Architect Associate and passed it this morning so figured I'd give some feedback on how I found the exam.
In terms of material I used, apart from obviously just using AWS practically and reading quite a few books over the last year on AWS, the main material I used for exam prep was the ACloudGuru training courses.
I went through all the ACloudGuru AWS associate level training material (Architect, SysOps, Developer) and the AWS Solution Architect Professional material before doing the Architect Associate exam. That's probably not necessary but I listen to a lot of material in the car so managed to get through all of them over the last two months. At the price point the ACloudGuru exams are at (very inexpensive), I would recommend that you buy all of them. The quality of the material is very high, they're interesting to listen to, they highlight a lot of exam specific questions and also are updated very frequently, which due to the pace as which new products and services are released on AWS, is essential for these exams.
I also used the official practice exam that costs $20, and this was actually worthwhile as it was reasonably close to the real exam.
So, onto the exam itself..
If you're not familiar with it, it's a 60 question, 80 minute proctored computer based exam. Similar to all the ones you've probably done before in IT in that sense.
Coverage of topics was pretty much in line with what the ACloudGuru courses stated, and with a strong emphasis on EC2, S3, the security responsibilities of users vs AWS and a lot on which combinations of AWS services to use in different scenarios. A few question on RDS, DynamoDB, Route 53 and some billing/management questions.
About 80% were scenario questions, with around three or four lines to read in each scenario. Nearly all were choose two/three of the following four answers, rather than choose one. These are more like the scenario questions you get in the practice exams, but more awkward and complex.
The remaining 20% were straight forward questions like you’d see in the ACloudGuru examples.
Most questions were effectively based on application of the knowledge you get in the Udemy/ACloudGuru course. e.g. If you know private subnets don’t include routes to the Internet, you can rule out certain answer options that include systems on the Internet accessing instances on these subnets.
The wording I thought was very poor and appears designed to catch you out, rather than test your knowledge, which always annoys me. You spend more time reading the scenarios to try and figure out what they’re actually asking, instead of clearly understanding what the requirements are and answering the question based on this. Of course, it could be said that this is probably close to having to actually interpret people’s attempts at giving you requirements in real life… :-)
Also, I noticed the fonts change in the exam questions (even when it isn’t designed to indicate a different context), which indicates pretty poor quality control on the user experience and creation of the questions (guessing copy/paste between materials).
There was at least one question where all the answers were incorrect, but two of the four answers were so completely wrong that it could only have been the other two (incorrect) answers.
In terms of timing, I got through all 60 questions in 55 minutes but had marked around 17 questions for review. I took another 10 mins for reviewing those and finished up with around 15 minutes to spare. Normally I get through these types of exams in around 60% of the time allocated so this was about right based on previous exams.
I would say though that marking questions for review is very strange for me and marking almost 30% is really high as I normally don’t ever bother reviewing any. However, some of them were so strange that I needed to re-read them at least three/four times and even then it still wasn’t entirely clear what they were asking in a few of them.
In terms of confidence in my answers.. I really couldn’t have said at the end if I passed or not, or even if I got 40% or 90%.. In the end I got 81%, which wasn’t too bad as I realized after that I’d gotten two obvious questions wrong.
To be fair, as an Architecture related exam, it’s actually does focus on application of knowledge of AWS, rather than just regurgitating lists of answers learned off. So in that sense I think it's actually a really good approach to take for this kind of exam.
However, I think it could definitely do with tightening up on the quality of the question wording as that’s key if you want the exam to be focused on application of knowledge, rather than just pick the right list of answers.
Overall, I'd definitely recommend doing this exam, especially as it gets you to learn bits of AWS that you may not use on a day to day basis yourself, and with how quickly new services pop up, this can't be a bad thing..
I'll definitely drive on with these and just need to figure out if I want to do all of the associate level exams now or just go straight to the Solution Architect Professional exam...
First one I picked was the AWS Solution Architect Associate and passed it this morning so figured I'd give some feedback on how I found the exam.
In terms of material I used, apart from obviously just using AWS practically and reading quite a few books over the last year on AWS, the main material I used for exam prep was the ACloudGuru training courses.
I went through all the ACloudGuru AWS associate level training material (Architect, SysOps, Developer) and the AWS Solution Architect Professional material before doing the Architect Associate exam. That's probably not necessary but I listen to a lot of material in the car so managed to get through all of them over the last two months. At the price point the ACloudGuru exams are at (very inexpensive), I would recommend that you buy all of them. The quality of the material is very high, they're interesting to listen to, they highlight a lot of exam specific questions and also are updated very frequently, which due to the pace as which new products and services are released on AWS, is essential for these exams.
I also used the official practice exam that costs $20, and this was actually worthwhile as it was reasonably close to the real exam.
So, onto the exam itself..
If you're not familiar with it, it's a 60 question, 80 minute proctored computer based exam. Similar to all the ones you've probably done before in IT in that sense.
Coverage of topics was pretty much in line with what the ACloudGuru courses stated, and with a strong emphasis on EC2, S3, the security responsibilities of users vs AWS and a lot on which combinations of AWS services to use in different scenarios. A few question on RDS, DynamoDB, Route 53 and some billing/management questions.
About 80% were scenario questions, with around three or four lines to read in each scenario. Nearly all were choose two/three of the following four answers, rather than choose one. These are more like the scenario questions you get in the practice exams, but more awkward and complex.
The remaining 20% were straight forward questions like you’d see in the ACloudGuru examples.
Most questions were effectively based on application of the knowledge you get in the Udemy/ACloudGuru course. e.g. If you know private subnets don’t include routes to the Internet, you can rule out certain answer options that include systems on the Internet accessing instances on these subnets.
The wording I thought was very poor and appears designed to catch you out, rather than test your knowledge, which always annoys me. You spend more time reading the scenarios to try and figure out what they’re actually asking, instead of clearly understanding what the requirements are and answering the question based on this. Of course, it could be said that this is probably close to having to actually interpret people’s attempts at giving you requirements in real life… :-)
Also, I noticed the fonts change in the exam questions (even when it isn’t designed to indicate a different context), which indicates pretty poor quality control on the user experience and creation of the questions (guessing copy/paste between materials).
There was at least one question where all the answers were incorrect, but two of the four answers were so completely wrong that it could only have been the other two (incorrect) answers.
In terms of timing, I got through all 60 questions in 55 minutes but had marked around 17 questions for review. I took another 10 mins for reviewing those and finished up with around 15 minutes to spare. Normally I get through these types of exams in around 60% of the time allocated so this was about right based on previous exams.
I would say though that marking questions for review is very strange for me and marking almost 30% is really high as I normally don’t ever bother reviewing any. However, some of them were so strange that I needed to re-read them at least three/four times and even then it still wasn’t entirely clear what they were asking in a few of them.
In terms of confidence in my answers.. I really couldn’t have said at the end if I passed or not, or even if I got 40% or 90%.. In the end I got 81%, which wasn’t too bad as I realized after that I’d gotten two obvious questions wrong.
To be fair, as an Architecture related exam, it’s actually does focus on application of knowledge of AWS, rather than just regurgitating lists of answers learned off. So in that sense I think it's actually a really good approach to take for this kind of exam.
However, I think it could definitely do with tightening up on the quality of the question wording as that’s key if you want the exam to be focused on application of knowledge, rather than just pick the right list of answers.
Overall, I'd definitely recommend doing this exam, especially as it gets you to learn bits of AWS that you may not use on a day to day basis yourself, and with how quickly new services pop up, this can't be a bad thing..
I'll definitely drive on with these and just need to figure out if I want to do all of the associate level exams now or just go straight to the Solution Architect Professional exam...
