AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional

So I recently needed to re-certify my AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional certification. I tried to keep track of everything I did, found helpful or what wasted my time. Hopefully this can aid someone looking at doing this certification, there is so much content to cover.
I spent roughly 2 months prepping for this certification, I did take a week break in the middle, and did skip a couple days here and there.

Roughly, I did about 100 hours of video content courses and YouTube, 10 practice exams and whole a bunch of reading.

Courses & Video Content

A Cloud Guru:
I have always been a fan of ACG, however I found this course lacking in details to be honest. The actual videos felt like summaries and then you are pointed at other external resources. If you recently did your associate certification, I don't know if you'll get much out of it.
I used this as a a starting point, and it was a good "refresher". The exam simulator as another source of practice, and that is quite good.
https://acloud.guru/learn/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-2019

Linux Academy:
This course covers a lot of the content in some good detail, and gets you to actually try it out in labs. I would recommend everyone signup for this. The instructor and other students are also quite active on their slack channel. I found some of those discussions and exam feedback useful.
https://linuxacademy.com/amazon-web-services/training/course/name/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-2018

Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (Digital):
https://www.aws.training/transcript/curriculumplayer?transcriptId=ui4o3L6JBUuG_Zx7hkNvwA2
Was a complete waste of 3 hours of my life.

You Tube / Re:Invent:
Search YouTube for AWS Re:invent deep dive or 300/400 level for any topic you need to cover.
Here are my playlists:
Level 400s - Watch all of these
Level 200-300s - Watch what required

This is my Architecture:
I generally enjoy this format, quick, real-life examples of working architectures.
https://aws.amazon.com/this-is-my-architecture/


Notes

I didn't read a single FAQ, I personally don't like the format. I rather used the aws-cheat-sheets from tutorialdojo.
https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/


Practice Exams

ACG, Linux Academy:
Both had 1 test each, pretty good, would recommend everyone do them. I just found their explanations only focused on the correct answer, where actually identifying incorrect answers is just as important.
https://acloud.guru/learn/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-2019
https://linuxacademy.com/amazon-web-services/training/course/name/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-2018

Whizlabs:
These have a bad rep amongst other people taking the test, and I would agree to some extent, I don't know if they added that much value, except for the practice in reading / dissecting questions at speed, and their explanations on some concepts were useful.
https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional-whizlabs/

Jon Bonso / Tutorials Dojo:
These were good, I would say a little easier than my actual exam, but again great to practice, great to review explanations for correct and incorrect answers
https://www.udemy.com/aws-solutions-architect-professional-practice-exams-2018/

General Reading

• AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency
• AWS KMS Best Practices
• AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
• AWS Storage Services Overview
• AWS Cost Optimization Pillar
• AWS VPC Connectivity Options
• Secure Content Delivery with CloudFront
• Backup & Recovery Approaches Using AWS
• Infrastructure as Code
• An Overview of AWS Cloud Data Migration Services
• Migrating AWS Resource to a New Region
• Overview of Deployment Options on AWS
• SaaS Storage Strategies
• Web Application Hosting in AWS Cloud
• Extend your IT infrastructure with vpc

The Exam

Topics covered in my 75 questions (as much as I can remember) :

• AWS Organizations scenarios - Multi AWS accounts, SCP, SAML IAM  4+
• Lambda + Api gateway 4+
• AWS Systems manager - Patch, Run command, automation, maintenance:  4+
• Amazon Aurora vs RDS vs EC2 hosted: 3+
• Elastic Beanstalk: 3+
• ECS & Fargate: 3+
• Cloudformation - nested stacks, stacksets: 3+
• CloudFront - Caching & Lambda@Edge: 3 
• SQS: 3
• EBS - Provisioned IOPS & GP2: 2+
• DynamoDB: 2+
• ELB & Autoscaling : 2+
• Redshift (one HA / quick recovery scenario) : 2+
• AWS CodeDeploy & CodePipeline: 2+
• Cloudwatch / CloudWatch Logs: 2
• Cloudtrail: 2
• Direct Connect & Direct Connect Gateway: 2
• VPN & Direct Connect routing BGP preferred: 2 
• Data Migration Service:  2
• AWS WAF & Shield & Shield Advanced (DDoS) : 2
• Transit VPC vs Transit Gateway / VPC Peering:  2
• Kinesis - family video, firehose, analytics 
• NAT Instance / Nat Gateway
• Route 53
• AWS Config
• Application Discovery
• Snowball, Snowmobile
• AWS Batch
• Athena & Quicksight
• AWS Rekognition
• Trusted Advisor (Business Level Support)
• Lex
• OpsWorks
• Service Catalog
• AppStream
• VPC Flow Logs
• VPC Endpoints - Private DNS, S3
• Storage Gateway - File and Tape
• X-Ray
• Amazon Connect

My experience writing:

Going to start by saying, I found it harder and the questions less obvious than any of the practice tests. I have a certification exam technique where I flag questions I am not 100% sure of... not necessarily to go back to, but as a counter... I know if I marked less that 20 out of the 75 questions, I would be pretty sure that I would pass.. and can just complete the exam.

I started, Question 1: easy... ok nice can relax, I got this...

I then proceeded to "flag" the next 7 questions due thoughts ranging from "mmm ... unsure" to "I have no clue, wtf?".

Anyways, that trend continued throughout the exam.. couple correct, a whole bunch of "I'm not sure.". I got to the end with around 40 minutes to spare and realised that I had flagged 39 questions, I was quite disheartened at that point, so I went back and tried to review as much as I could.. I got through about 20 flagged questions when I had 9 minutes left, and I resigned myself to the fact that this was my first attempt and starting thinking what should I go back and learn for when I write again in 2 weeks.

Amazingly, I saw the words... "Congratulations, you have successfully passed ... bla bla bla."
I had to read that a couple times.. and actually still didn't believe it until I actually got my score report the following day.
I somehow managed to get: 880

So after receiving my score and re-evaluation my exam, I guess my main piece of advice would be:

The way the questions / scenarios are structured are purposely meant to be a little unclear. Be sure to pay attention to the key words / synonyms / phrases that the question is actually asking for:
cost, fewest changes, fastest processing time, least ongoing maintenance, most secure, highly available, most scalable, least downtime, fastest recovery time... etc
Then apply what you have learnt about the services, even if you're not 100% sure on the actually implementation of the scenario, make sure it satisfies the core requirement.

To anyone reading this and planning to write, Good Luck! This is a tough one.

AWS Solutions Architect - Professional Certification

Update:
Check out my updated re-certification on the new 2019 exam... here

Let me start by saying, for this certification I studied and prepared more than any certification I have done before and I have done a number of certifications throughout my career; Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Oracle and now AWS. It does feel like there is a mountain of content to get through, and then ensuring you know it at the correct level of detail for the exam.

I booked the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam 5 weeks after the associate level one and set a couple hours a day aside to study... During the last 2 weeks however, those couple hours became all my available hours every day, it was all I focused on, including 8+ hours a day on the weekends.

Main 4 resources I used:

• YouTube
• The re:Invent sessions videos are an essential resource
• My major topics playlist: 




• Watch these twice:


• Linux Academy 
• These guys really impressed me, the content in the pro level certificate was excellent, I found it had more depth than A Cloud Guru, well worth the $29 per month subscription.
• Cloud Guru
• Decent structured content that covers the highlights of all the topics defined in the exam blueprint.
• The discussion forum is an excellent source of tips and discussions on the practice exam questions.
• The official practice exam
• This was a good eye opener, into how hard some of the questions can be. I do feel that some of the questions are badly articulated which makes them almost impossible to answer, however working through every question and researching the answers was invaluable. There were also a couple of those questions on the real exam... word for word.

Other Resources (Summary  / Study Notes):

• http://jayendrapatil.com
• blue-clouds.com - study notes
• Clay Moore - Blog

The main aws faqs to look at:

• https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/faqs/

Final thoughts:

All the guides and sites recommend reading a ton of white papers, but to be honest, I read only 4 or 5 of them..and I felt that the time spent was a waste. It seems all the content was in all the youtube vids and online courses already.

I did see a lot of people mention that they were pressed for time during the exam, but I found that I finished the 77 questions with a good hour to spare. To mention though: I did not go back and review any of my answers. I have always found in the past, that I rarely change my initial answer during the review phase, and I was reasonably confident that I had done enough.

End Result:

Overall Score: 83%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 High Availability and Business Continuity: 90%
2.0 Costing: 100%
3.0 Deployment Management: 85%
4.0 Network Design: 57%
5.0 Data Storage: 81%
6.0 Security: 78%
7.0 Scalability & Elasticity: 90%
8.0 Cloud Migration & Hybrid Architecture: 85%

AWS Solutions Architect - Associate Certification

I have been messing around with AWS on little side projects and experiments for about the last year. I did find it quite a daunting experience as there is just so much to learn, do, try, break, struggle, deploy, re-learn and then eventually cheer when everything works.
So I decided to focus a little more and spend the time actually learning how to hopefully do all this properly. I have always found a good way to force myself into the theory and step back from diving directly into implementing solutions is certifications.

I booked the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam for 4 weeks into the future and set a couple hours a day aside to study.

Main 2 resources I used:

• A Cloud Guru
• I did watched and worked through both the Associate Developer and Associate Architect courses. There is quite a bit of overlap, but still that just meant that I had covered some of the really important bits more than once.
• I really enjoyed Ryan's courses, I did mostly watch on 1.3x speed as it does sometimes feel a little slow and I had set myself a 4 week dead line.
• I would recommend them to anyone starting who's looking to learn about AWS, for practical real life use or certification.
• The discussion section / forum is a great source of tips for the exams as well.

• Cloud Academy
• I only signed up for their 7 day free trial, so did not work through all of their labs. However they have a ton of quiz questions and explanations which is a great way to study / practice specifically for the certification.
• Their summary video was also good and covered some content not covered in depth on a cloud guru.
• They also had some quick easy reading blog posts highlighting important practical information when starting with AWS... listed in Other resources below.

Other Resources:

• http://jayendrapatil.com
• http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-bastion-host-nat-instances-vpc-peering-security/
• http://cloudacademy.com/blog/top-13-amazon-virtual-private-cloud-best-practices/
• http://cloudacademy.com/blog/introduction-to-aws-billing-and-cost-management-tools-part-1-of-3/
• http://cloudacademy.com/blog/introduction-to-aws-billing-and-cost-management-tools-part-2-of-3/
• http://cloudacademy.com/blog/introduction-to-aws-billing-and-cost-management-tools-part-3-of-3/
• http://cloudacademy.com/blog/your-first-day-on-aws-10-pitfalls-and-how-to-avoid-them/

The main aws faqs to look at:

• https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/
• https://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/

In the end I felt I had personally learnt a lot, not only on the exam topics but in general practical application as well. Main areas were especially with regards to VPCs, Networking and Security. It was well worth the intense 4 week study session.

End Result:

Overall Score: 90%
Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Designing highly available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, scalable systems : 90%
2.0 Implementation/Deployment: 83%
3.0 Security: 90%
4.0 Troubleshooting: 100%











Next up.. AWS Solutions Architect - Professional

Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Python, Flask and Sci-Stack Docker

This actually took me longer than I'd like to admit to get working, but in the end the solution is quite neat and simple, so it was probably worth it, and hopefully this could save other people some time.

The Amazon Docker file looks like this: 
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Dockerfile - Github

This installs the contents of the root folder requirements.txt before running your Docker file. So for my application the basic "non-sci" packages could be installed simply enough.

Root Folder: requirements.txt:
Then to install the sci related packages... numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn and nltk. I created another requirements.txt in an aws-post-install folder. This is to be run once the Amazon linux OS has been updated and all the required OS dependencies have been installed.

Post Docker requirements.txt:
My custom docker file, that builds ontop of the Amazon image looked as follows:

Docker File:

Next step is to get my docker image to be used directly so that the Elastic Beanstalk app doesn't have to do all the downloads and installs every time should be simple enough according the AWS you tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLw6MLqwmew