How to crack AWS certified solutions architect Associate in 2 weeks

This certificate will help you show off your skills in AWS. My main motive was to clear my concepts of AWS and by preparing for this certification I was able to do that. In this article, I will share my experience and resources for this certification.

I prepared for 2 weeks for this one. I had some basic experience with AWS like managing EC2 instances, security groups but didn't know about all aspects. Also, I was always afraid of managing VPC’s as there were a lot of things in it and this is where this certification helps a lot. You can take the exam on Pearson OnVue from your home. You will need an AWS certification account which you can create by signing up here.

Things you should know before appearing for your exam:-

• There will be two types of questions — Multiple choice and Multiple response.
• The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score.
• You need to score 720+ out of 1000 to pass this exam.

Resources that will help you clear this exam:-

• A cloud guru — This course will give you a basic understanding of AWS services. It helps a lot in understanding how and where these AWS services are being used. This course is available on Udemy but will be removed after 14th June 2021.
• Practice Exams — These practice papers helped me most in clearing the exam. They have a lot of different questions with proper solutions and explanations. After every practice test, I read all the explanations. This will cover everything that was missed in a cloud guru course.
• FAQs — AWS has FAQs for all its services. These will help a lot in getting a basic understanding of common scenarios in which you can use a particular service. You can read FAQs of these services for this exam — EC2, VPC, ELB, S3, SQS, RDS, API Gateway, and Kinesis.
• More Practice — I did some research and found this website — examtopics.com. I got a lot of questions which were on this site. I would definitely recommend going through all of them. Few things to keep in mind:-

- Solutions given arent correct. You can refer to discussions but some of those might be wrong. But at this stage, you should be able to know which is the correct option. You can search on google to find the answers.
- After page 250 it won’t let you read more questions as it requires you to get contributer access. I found a work around for this — you can just open those pages by opening the website in incognito and change the url to the page number you want to access. It will ask you to verify you are not a bot everytime but its totally worth the time.

Exam tips:-

• Don't overthink, most of the questions are simple and easy.
• These questions will be similar to what you have already practiced.

Good luck! for your exam.