This blog post will be about how I studied for and passed the AWS-CSAA with a 840/1000 (720 needed to pass) exam in two months, and some tips and tricks along with some resources I used.
First thing I did was sign up for taking an exam, which was good because the exams were only available 2+ weeks out. They are online due to COVID though so it’s nice to be able to do it at home. Here’s the link to sign up for an exam.
Next I signed up for a Udemy course. My company provides free access to specific courses within Udemy and this one seemed to have great reviews both on Reddit and on their site. It’s the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course by Stephane Maarek. He summarizes things in a good way and draws diagrams and has a bunch of practice exams so that was really helpful.
I allocated about an hour a day for the first month to get this done. I finished his course by the end of the month, doing one section a day.
The second month was just full of practice exams. I did all the practice exams he offered with the course, along with the three that he offered in a separate course here.
I then did this one with 6 practice exams, they weren’t as good as Stephane’s but still learned a bunch.
Finally, I did this one with 2 exams but it was pretty poorly made. Still learned things but the answers and explanations were pretty much one-liners. Worth it if free, not worth it otherwise.
I took the exam in early September and passed. It was 2.5 hours and had some 65 questions. Apparently you can’t mumble to yourself during the exam, even though you’re home cause the proctor doesn’t like it, hah.
Anyway, the questions were pretty good, only one of them I thought was poorly written. They were mostly scenario based and made you choose what you thought would be a good solution. A few key things to make sure you study after all this:
- Redshift.. learn about backup strategies, cross region snapshots, etc.
- DynamoDB was on there ALOT. Make sure you know the difference between accelerator (DAX) and on-demand.
- DynamoDB.. do you know how to grant access to an instance? Do you know what instance roles are?
- When you deploy an instance, know the IPv6 options. Can you run out of IPv6 space? Can you customize an IPv6 subnet? that one caught me off guard.
- Learn a lot about datasync and hybrid cloud solutions, I think there were like 3 questions on that. Can datasync dump directly into glacier?
- Know the difference between geolocation vs latency routing with route53
- Know your databases in general… which ones give sub 1 second queries, etc.
Here are my detailed notes:
Good luck and hope this helps you!