AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate: Exam Guide [2019]

If you are a Solution Architect or want to start your career in Solution Architecting on Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, and planning to take the AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate exam, then read this article where I discussed how to prepare for the exam.

Here I’ve shared tips from my personal experiences on how to study and which all areas to cover. I hope that will help you get well prepared for the exam.

About the Exam

AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate is an intermediate level exam. From February 2018, AWS has introduced a new format for the exam which can be found at the official certification page.

Prerequisites

AWS recommends you have about one year of hands-on experience designing available, cost-effective, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS. But there is no prerequisites that you need to meet prior to taking this exam.

If you don’t have prior experience working with AWS, then you can follow these learning activities:

• Create your own AWS account (free) at http://aws.amazon.com/free. This is a free account as long as you stay within the free tier usage. For more details, do visit the link.

• Learn AWS online courses from different sites like Pluralsight, Linux Academy, Lynda, Coursera, A Cloud Guru etc. and make sure to do enough hands-on learning activities to gain the confidence. Qwiklabs is a great place for hands-on practices.

• Though it is not necessary to take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, but passing that beginner level exam will bring confidence for taking the associate level exam.

• Take the AWS Solutions Architect Associate – Practice exam which costs $ 20 USD before taking the final exam.

Taking the Exam

The old exam pattern is retired in August, 2018. Following are the high-level details about the exam:

Length	130 minutes
No. of questions	65 (Multiple-choice, multiple-answer)
Cost	$ 150 USD

You get 2 minutes per question, however I recommend to target to spend 1 minute per question. If any question is taking longer time then mark that for review and proceed for the next question. This way you can cover all the questions first and later you can revisit the questions which you had not answered earlier. Also, you will have the opportunity to go back and change the answer of any question.

Pro-Tips

Question Format

There are two types of questions – i) single answer and ii) multiple answers.

In single answer type question, you choose one single answer from a list of say 4 answers. In the other type, you may have to choose say 2 answers from a list of say 5 answers.

Testing Center

You have to take this exam at a testing center (PSI or Pearson VUE). These centers are located in most of the major cities. Check the nearest center in your locality and choose the time and date to book an exam.

You need 2 identity proofs – at least one with photo. You need to empty your pocket before entering into the room to take your exam. They will provide you locker where you can put your belongings e.g. wallet and lock it. They provide you pencil and paper for your rough work which I never used. But you have to return that at the end.

Once you enter the exam room, they will log you in into a PC and you need to check if your name and the test that you are taking mentioned on the screen are correct or not. Next you need to agree the AWS Terms which essentially says you are not going to disclose the questions in the exam. Once you agree, your exam starts, timer begins, you get your first question and a clock on your screen starts showing how much time is left.

When you are done, you can submit all the answers. If not, then at the end of 130 minutes your answers are automatically submitted and it shows your results.

Question Breakdown

Exam questions are divided into 5 domains following the Well Architected Framework where each domain corresponds to a pillar in the framework:

Study and Learning

As a Solution Architect, you should know the best practices for designing highly available, cost-effective, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS. The Well Architected Frameworks was created for Solution Architects to be able to have a set of principles or best practice recommendation to follow when designing an architecture for AWS workloads.

To know the best practices, read AWS White Papers and most importantly these two important ones:

• Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices

• AWS Well Architected Framework found at AWS Well-Architected

I highly recommend to read AWS Documentation to make your concept clear. Refer AWS CLI Reference Guide to learn about its capabilities and usage.

Stay Tuned

Cloud is a moving target. New services and features are continuously getting added to it. Subscribe to the Most Recent Announcements from AWS to stay tuned.

Following are some topics from key services which you should have good understanding and hands-on experiences on designing solutions following the best practices recommendations:

Security, Identity & Governance

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

It’s a very important services which is integrated with mostly all other services. Learn the different components in IAM and how to work with those.

• Root account, User, Group, Role, Policy, Policy Document, Permissions

• Best Practices guidelines to secure accounts, MFA, Password Policies

Cognito

• Controlling user authentication

GuardDuty

• Threat detection

• Monitoring malicious activity

Certificate Manager

• Managing SSL/TLS Certificates

Key Management Service (KMS)

• Encrypting and managing keys and credentials

CloudHSM

• Generating and using own encryption keys

Directory Service

• Different Types, and usefulness of each of the types

WAF & Shield

• Safeguarding applications

Management & Governance

CloudWatch

• Monitoring, Metrics, Custom Metrics, Rules

• Integration with other services e.g. EC2 Auto-scaling

CloudTrail

• Logging, Integration with CloudWatch, Investigating Logs

CloudFormation

• Infrastructure as Code, Automating Infrastructure Provisioning

• Stack, Automating solution deployment e.g. WordPress

Config

• Configuration management

OpsWorks

• Chef, Puppet

Trusted Advisor

• AWS’s recommendation service to optimize resource utilization

Compute

EC2

• Instance provisioning, bootstrapping, AMI, EBS, Snapshot, Placement Group

• Instance Type, Instance Family, Instance Role, Security Group, Key Pair

• Auto-scaling Group, Launch Configuration, Launch Template, Elastic Load Balancer

ECS & EKS

• Comparison between these two, Docker, cluster, container, container registry

• Running application on container

Lambda

• Serverless Architecture design, Event-driven Architecture design

• Integration with API Gateway

• Exercise e.g. extracting keyword from text using Lambda

EFS & FSx

• Creating File System, mapping network drive

Elastic Beanstalk

• Deploying Application, Versions

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

• VPC, Subnet, Route Table, NACL, Security Group, Internet Gateway, NAT

• VPC Peering, VPN, Direct Connect, Bastion Host

CloudFront

• Distribution

Route53

• Hosted Zone, Managing Records, Routing

• Health Check, Failover from EC2 Web App to S3 Static Website

API Gateway

• Integration with Lambda, CloudFront

Direct Connect

• Dedicated network connection from on-premises to AWS

Developer Tools

CodeStar

• How it helps developers quickly develop, build and deploy applications

CodeCommit

• How to use source code repository

CodeBuild

• Automating code building

CodeDeploy

• Automating solution deployment

CodePipeline

• CI/CD Pipeline

Database

Relational Database Service (RDS)

• Creating database, managing database, Snapshot, Parameter group

• Multi-AZ deployment, Read replica

DynamoDB

• NoSQL database, Table, High Scalability and Performance, Partition

• Eventual Consistency, Session state storing in DynamoDB

ElastiCache

• In-memory caching, Redis, Memcache

Redshift

• Data warehouse solution, executing queries on large database

Migration & Transfer

Database Migration Service

• Cross engine database migration

Snowball

• Large data transfer

DataSync

• Automating data transfer

Storage

Simple Storage Service (S3)

• Bucket, CLI, Bucket Policy, Life-cycle Policy, Cross-region Replication, Events

• Static Web Hosting, Creating backup and Archiving Solution in S3

• Storage Classes, Glacier

Storage Gateway

• Hybrid storage solution

AWS Backup

• Automating back-up

Application Integration

Step Functions

• Coordinating multiple services

Simple Notification Service (SNS)

• Topic, Subscriber, Usefulness, Event-driven Architecture design

• Integration with other services e.g. S3

Simple Queue Service (SQS)

• LIFO, FIFO

• Decoupling components

Simple Workflow Service (SWS)

• State tracker and task coordinator

Media Services

Kinesis Video Stream

• Streaming videos from connected devices to AWS

• Analytics, ML

Analytics

Athena

• Quering S3

Elastic Map Reduce (EMR)

• Big data processing, analytics using managed Apache Spark and Hadoop

CloudSearch

• Customized search capabilities into applications

Elasicsearch Service

• Hosted Elasticsearch

Kinesis

• Handling real-time streaming data

Data Pipeline

• Data processing between services

AWS Glue

• ETL

AWS Cost Management

AWS Cost Explorer

• Visualizing AWS cost and usage

AWS Budgets

• Controlling AWS cost and usage

Customer Engagement

Simple Email Service (SES)

• Email sending service

After You Pass

There are lot of things which you get after you pass this certification exam.

Email Confirmation

First of all, you receive an email confirmation about the completion of your exam, and it mentions that you are now “AWS Certified”. The email says that it might take up to 5 business days to get your exam result available in you’re a/c, however I got it in the next 2 days.

AWS Certificate

Login to your certification page and go to Achieved Certifications tab. You will find link to your Certificate in PDF format like me.

AWS Logo

You also get a bunch of AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate logos and tags in different file formats which you can use to highlight your skills on your resume. Check the Logo usage guidelines for more details.

Digital Badge

Go to Digital Badges tab where you can find your available badges which can be shared via social media sites (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter).

Transcript

Go to Share My Transcript tab, where you can create and share your transcript via email, to verify and showcase your AWS Certification achievement.

Benefits

Apart from the certificate and logs, you get pretty cool other benefits which for that you need to go to Benefits tab.

AWS Certified Associate: Store Access

You gain exclusive access to purchase AWS Certified branded items. Go to the link provided and register for an account. After signing in there, go to the Account > My AWS Certifications tab and use the code provided.

But remember, these are not free.

AWS Free Practice Exam Voucher

AWS also gives you a voucher for a free AWS practice exam which you can take in a later point in time. Use the code provided there.

AWS Certification SME Program

You can be an AWS Certified Subject Matter Expert in which you get to attend multi-day workshops in which you will help create, validate, and review questions for AWS Certification exams. Refer the link provided for more details.

AWS Certified Exam Discount Benefit

You also get 50% discount on your next exam which could help to take your AWS certification to the next level.

Bottom Line

I’ve cleared multiple certifications (both associate and professional levels) on different Cloud technologies and realized that there is no short-cut to achieve that. The only things that are required to clear these exams are your knowledge and understanding of context. Most of the questions in this exam will be scenario based where they will make you think and choose the best possible answers isolating them from the incorrect answers (they call as “distractors”). You can only expect a very few direct questions. So, in every question you need to understand the context and apply your knowledge to solve that puzzle.

But if you prepare well and get your hands dirty on the key services I mentioned above, you will succeed. All the best for your exam!

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Did you appear for the exam? Then please share your experience in the comments below.