Have some patience and be sure you’re reading the question AND options closely. In the end I had three or four questions left that I just gambled on, submitting my best guess. Then I did another few passes to see if any answers became obvious, which some did! Coming back to more difficult questions after I’d answered some I was sure about gave me much more confidence-it’s a strategy I’d recommend. I did a first pass through the exam and submitted questions where I was sure of the answer. If you select an option for a question, though, you can’t skip to another question until you’ve cleared that option. You can skip around through questions and, as long as you don’t submit them, come back to answer them when you’re ready. When actually taking the exam, once you click Submit on a question, the answer zips off to the server and you can’t change it. With that being said, the sample questions were vital to my study because when I got one wrong, I went back to the prep material to understand why I was wrong, and thus improved my knowledge. In this respect, I’m not sure learning by rote-practicing the same questions over and over again-will really benefit a candidate. And while the themes and required knowledge were similar, never once did I see a practice question on the actual exam. Don’t expect to see the same questions you studied in the actual examĭuring my exam prep, I answered hundreds of sample questions. While the exams don’t have any labs, using the labs to get firsthand experience applying the theory improved my mental model and made it easier to recall the material.

I found it tempting to power through all the theory material and come back to the labs later, but it was more effective to do the labs immediately after learning the relative theory. Learn the theory and do the labsĪWS provides plenty of certification prep and training opportunities. Also we found that a little healthy and jovial competitiveness pushed us to do our best.

A few other colleagues were also preparing for certification, so we partnered up to study on occasion, which provided me much more motivation. I have plenty of colleagues who have gotten certified and I picked their brains relentlessly. Getting AWS certified is very much encouraged by our leadership. I was a bit stressed in the days leading up to the exam, but had I not put the pressure of a deadline on myself, who knows how many more false starts I would have had. Finally, I decided I needed to set myself a hard deadline, so I actually booked the exam. I’d be good for about a week, putting in an hour or two of study every night, but then I’d allow something to interrupt my routine. When I first set out to get an AWS certification, I had a few false starts. Book the exam, but give yourself enough time With that in mind, here are some tips for anyone looking for advice about preparing for and taking an AWS certification exam. Recently I became interested in AWS Lambda and the Amazon API Gateway, and I’ve built a few pet projects using serverless functions. I’ve used hosted static websites using Amazon S3 and Amazon Route53. I have a good deal of experience with Amazon EC2 and Elastic Load Balancing. I’m a technical support engineer at New Relic, and in my previous job I was a DevOps engineer. While the information was fresh in my mind, I wanted to put together a post on my experience to help anybody else thinking of going for a similar certification. Recently, I passed my Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect-associate exam.

Aws certified solutions architect