Yes, I passed! Now I’m a certified AWS Solution Architect Associate! So, it is time to summarize my path of study on AWS and share my experience about the certification test.
Resources
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The official documents for AWS, including technical manuals and best practice guides. You need to read through specific whitepapers according to your test coverage and requirements. This is also the most updated and reliable source for AWS knowledge, so whenever you have doubts about any technical specification, you need to search here.
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AWS Training and Certification site
The place where you can find information about certification tests, register you account, get instructions, and make appointments for your test.
One thing that I would like to mention here is that I had a small issue with creating my certification account: there is a optional blank for company in the registration form so I left it blank, but it did cause problems later and would not let me create my account without explicit error information. I had to contact with the customer service to figure this out.
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Linux Academy has very comprehensive courses about AWS Solution Architect, and provides a smooth approach from basics to expertise. I would recommend starting with courses here if you found it hard to read the whitepaper effectively. But it does not cover all contents for the certification test, so don’t rely on it only.
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Braindump sites
This is solely for the test. There are some websites which provide braindumps of previous tests, for example this one. The accuracy of the information is not guaranteed, so don’t rely on the answer provided or even the question itself, since everything could be wrong. But it is helpful to read the discussions by other people on the commenting board.
The real certification test will have new questions other than what could be found online. In my case, it asked some very detailed questions about AWS Lambda, probably because the concept of serverless is quite popular recently.
Thoughts
I’m quite amazed by AWS and I like its idea very much, for it introduces new ideas about cloud service to me. Cloud computing, or VPS, is not a new idea. I have two servers online as my sandboxes for years. Sometimes I use them to run web scrapers, or handle my browsing traffic as proxy. A computer on the cloud that I can use remotely, I thought that is all about VPS. But AWS shows me what can be built around that basic idea. Modern cloud service providers like AWS sell not only the computing resources, but also solutions for more specific services with clear goals developed from general purpose VPS.
The coolest thing among AWS products is the Cloud Formation in my opinion. It provides a way to describe the topology of a cloud, including all resources within, and use the description file to store and restore the design of the entire system. Moreover, using a file as the description also make it possible to apply version control, which brings great convenience in both development and management. That’s the innovation I like: do it smart in the right way.
And yes, with this certification as a milestone, I think it’s time to move on and have a new adventure.