0

Passed SAA-C03
- I wanted to give my personal experience. I have a background in IT, but I have never worked in AWS previous to 5 weeks ago. I got my Cloud Practitioner in a week and SAA after another 4 weeks of studying (2-4 hours a day). I used Cantril's Course and Tutorials Dojo Practice Exams. I highly, highly recommend this combo. I don't think I would have passed without the practice exams, as they are quite difficult. In my opinion, they are much more difficult than the actual exam. They really hit the mark on what kind of content you will see. I got a 777, and that's with getting 70-80%'s on the practice exams. I probably could have done better, but I had a really rough night of sleep and I came down with a cold. I was really on the struggle bus halfway through the test.

- I only had a couple of questions on ML / AI, so make sure you know the differences between them all. Lot's of S3 and EC2. You really need to know these in and out.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

1

Passed SAA-C03 - Feedback
- Just passed the SAA-C03 exam (864) and wanted to provide some feedback since that was helpful for me when I was browsing here before the exam.

- I come from an IT background and have a strong knowledge in the VPC portion so that section was a breeze for me in the preparation process (I had never used AWS before this so everything else was new, but the concepts were somewhat familiar considering my background). I started my preparation about a month ago, and used the Mareek class on Udemy. Once I finished the class and reviewed my notes I moved to Mareek’s 6 practice exams (on Udemy). I wasn’t doing extremely well on the PEs (I passed on 4/6 of the exams with 70s grades) I reviewed the exam questions after each exam and moved on to the next. I also purchased Tutorial Dojo’s 6 exams set but only ended up taking one out of 6 (which I passed).

- Overall the practice exams ended up being a lot harder than the real exam which had mostly the regular/base topics: a LOT of S3 stuff and storage in general, a decent amount of migration questions, only a couple questions on VPCs and no ML/AI stuff.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

2

My Study Guide for passing the SAA-C03 exam
- Sharing the study guide that I followed when I prepared for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 exam. I passed this test and thought of sharing a real exam experience in taking this challenging test.

- First off: my background – I have 8 years of development.experience and been doing AWS for several project, both personally and at work. Studied for a total of 2 months. Focused on the official Exam Guide, and carefully studied the Task Statements and related AWS services.

- For my exam prep, I bought the adrian cantrill video course, tutorialsdojo (TD) video course and practice exams. Adrian's course is just right and highly educational but like others has said, the content is long and cover more than just the exam. Did all of the hands-on labs too and played around some machine learning services in my AWS account.

- TD video course is short and a good overall summary of the topics items you've just learned. One TD lesson covers multiple topics so the content is highly concise. After I completed doing Adrian's video course, I used TD's video course as a refresher, did a couple of their hands-on labs then head on to their practice exams.

- For the TD practice exams, I took the exam in chronologically and didn't jumped back and forth until I completed all tests. I first tried all of the 7 timed-mode tests, and review every wrong ones I got on every attempt., then the 6 review-mode tests and the section/topic-based tests. I took the final-test mode roughly 3 times and this is by far one of the helpful feature of the website IMO. The final-test mode generates a unique set from all TD question bank, so every attempt is challenging for me. I also noticed that the course progress doesn't move if I failed a specific test, so I used to retake the test that I failed.

- The actual AWS exam is almost the same with the ones in the TD tests where:

- All of the questions are scenario-based

- There are two (or more) valid solutions in the question, e.g: Need SSL: options are ACM and self-signed URL. Need to store DB credentials: options are SSM Parameter Store and Secrets Manager

- The scenarios are long-winded and asks for: MOST Operationally efficient solution, MOST cost-effective, LEAST amount overhead

- Overall, I enjoyed the exam and felt fully prepared while taking the test, thanks to Adrian and TD, but it doesn't mean the whole darn thing is easy. You really need to put some elbow grease and keep your head lights on when preparing for this exam. Good luck to all and I hope my study guide helped out anyone who is struggling.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

4

I scored 858. Was practicing with Stephan's udemy lectures and Bonso exam tests. My test results were as follows Test 1. 63%, 93% Test 2. 67%, 87% Test 3. 81 % Test 4. 72% Test 5. 75 % Test 6. 81% Stephan's test. 80%
- I was reading all question explanations (even the ones I got correct)

- The actual exam was pretty much similar to these. The topics I got were:

- A lot of S3 (make sure you know all of it from head to toes)

- VPC peering

- DataSync and Database Migration Service in same questions. Make sure you know the difference

- One EKS question

- 2-3 KMS questions

- Security group question

- A lot of RDS Multi-AZ

- SQS + SNS fan out pattern

- ECS microservice architecture question

- Route 53

- NAT gateway

- took extra 30 minutes, because English is not my native language and I had plenty of time to think and then review flagged questions.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

5

Passed SAA-C02: It took me 68 days straight of hard work to pass this exam with confidence. No rest days, more than 120 pages of hand-written notes and hundreds and hundreds of flash cards.
- In the beginning, I hopped on Stephane Maarek's course for the CCP exam just to see if it was for me. I did the course in about a week and then after doing some research on here, got the CCP Practice exams from tutorialsdojo.com Two weeks after starting the Udemy course, I passed the exam. By that point, I'd already done lots of research on the different career paths and the best way to study, etc.

- Cantrill(10/10) - That same day, I hopped onto Cantrill's course for the SAA and got to work. Somebody had mentioned that by doing his courses you'd be over-prepared for the exam. While I think a combination of material is really important for passing the certification with confidence, I can say without a doubt Cantrill's courses got me 85-90% of the way there. His forum is also amazing, and has directly contributed to me talking with somebody who works at AWS to land me a job, which makes the money I spent on all of his courses A STEAL. As I continue my journey (up next is SA Pro), I will be using all of his courses.

- Neal Davis(8/10) - After completing Cantrill's course, I found myself needing a resource to reinforce all the material I'd just learned. AWS is an expansive platform and the many intricacies of the different services can be tricky. For this portion, I relied on Neal Davis's Training Notes series. These training notes are a very condensed version of the information you'll need to pass the exam, and with the proper context are very useful to find the things you may have missed in your initial learnings. I will be using his other Training Notes for my other exams as well.

- TutorialsDojo(10/10) - These tests filled in the gaps and allowed me to spot my weaknesses and shore them up. I actually think my real exam was harder than these, but because I'd spent so much time on the material I got wrong, I was able to pass the exam with a safe score.

- As I said, I was surprised at how difficult the exam was. A lot of my questions were related to DBs, and a lot of them gave no context as to whether the data being loaded into them was SQL or NoSQL which made the choice selection a little frustrating. A lot of the questions have 2 VERY SIMILAR answers, and often time the wording of the answers could be easy to misinterpret (such as when you are creating a Read Replica, do you attach it to the primary application DB that is slowing down because of read issues or attach it to the service that is causing the primary DB to slow down). For context, I was scoring 95-100% on the TD exams prior to taking the test and managed a 823 on the exam so I don't know if I got unlucky with a hard test or if I'm not as prepared as I thought I was (i.e. over-thinking questions).

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

6

Passed SAA: How did I prepare for AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Level certification?
- For me, Practical knowledge is 30% important and rest is Jayendra blog, enoumen.com blog and Dumps.

- Buying udemy courses doesn't make you pass, I can tell surely without going to dumps and without going to jayendra’s blog not easy to clear the certification.

- Read FAQs of S3, IAM, EC2, VPC, SQS, Autoscaling, Elastic Load Balancer, EBS, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway, ECS.

- Read the Security Whitepaper and Shared Responsibility model.

- The most important thing is basic questions from the last introduced topics to the exam is very important like Amazon Kinesis, etc

- ACloudGuru course with practice test's

- Created my own cheat sheet in excel

- Some questions were your understanding about which service to pick for the use case.

- many questions on VPC

- a couple of unexpected question on AWS CloudHSM, AWS systems manager, aws athena

- encryption at rest and in transit services

- migration from on-premise to AWS

- backup data in az vs regional

- Whitepapers are the important information about each services that are published by Amazon in their website. If you are preparing for the AWS certifications, it is very important to use the some of the most recommended whitepapers to read before writing the exam.

- Data Security questions could be the more challenging and it’s worth noting that you need to have a good understanding of security processes described in the whitepaper titled “Overview of Security Processes”.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

7

Testimonial: I passed SAA-C02... But don't do what I did to pass it
- The exam materials that I used were the following:

- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate All-in-One Exam Guide (Banerjee)

- Stephen Maarek's Udemy course, and his 6 exam practices

- Adrian Cantrill's online course (about `60% done)

- TutorialDojo's exams

- Five days before the exam, I finished Stephen's course, and then did his final exam on the course. I failed miserably (around 50%). So I did one of Stephen's practice exam and did worse (42%). I thought maybe it might be his exams that are slightly difficult, so I went and bought Jon Bonso's exam and got 60% on his first one. And then I realized based on all the questions on the exams, I was definitely lacking some fundamentals. I went back to Adrian's course and things were definitely sticking more - I think it has to do with his explanations + more practical stuff. Unfortunately, I could not finish his course before the exam (because I was cramming), and on the day of the exam, I could only do Bonso's four of six exams, with barely passing one of them.

- Please, don't do what I did. I was desperate to get this thing over with it. I wanted to move on and work on other things for job search, but if you're not in this situation, please don't do this. I can't for love of god tell you about OAI and Cloudfront and why that's different than S3 URL. The only thing that I can remember is all the practical stuff that I did with Adrian's course. I'll never forget how to create VPC, because he make you manually go through it. I'm not against Stephen's course - they are different on its own way (see the tips below).

- So here's what I recommend doing before writing for aws exam:

- Don't schedule your exam beforehand. Go through the materials that you are doing, and make sure you get at least 80% on all of the Jon Bonso's exam (I'd recommend maybe 90% or higher)

- If you like to learn things practically, I do recommend Adrian's course. If you like to learn things conceptually, go with Stephen Maarek's course. I find Stephen's course more detailed when going through different architectures, but I can't really say that because I didn't really finish Adrian's course

- Jon Bonso's exam was about the same difficulty as the actual exam. But they're slightly more tricky. For example, many of the questions will give you two different situation and you really have to figure out what they are asking for because they might contradict to each other, but the actual question is asking one specific thing. However, there were few questions that were definitely obvious if you knew the service.

- I'm upset that even though I passed the exam, I'm still lacking some practical stuff, so I'm just going to go through Adrian's Developer exam but without cramming this time. If you actually learn the materials and practice them, they are definitely useful in the real world. I hope this will help you passing and actually learning the stuff.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

8

I passed SAA with (799), had about an hour left on the clock.
- Many FSx / EFS / Lustre questions

- S3 Use cases, storage tiers, cloudfront were pretty prominent too

- Only got one "figure out what's wrong with this IAM policy" question

- A handful of dynamodb questions and a handful for picking use cases between different database types or caching layers.

- Other typical tips: When you're unclear on what answer you should pick, or if they seem very similar - work on eliminating answers first. "It can't be X because oy Y" and that can help a lot.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source: r/AWSCertifications

9

Testimonial: Passed SAA-C02 with a score of 833/1000
- Just a quick note - recently passed SAA-C02 with a score of 833/1000, the exam was pretty tough and only had ~10 mins left at the end after checking a few flagged questions.

- Had a few questions that were not covered in -any- of the material I studied. One of which was on the Rekognition and Textract services - so might be worth reading those before you take the exam!

- The whole process took me ~6 weeks, I booked the test after I was halfway through the video content. I'm the sort of person that isn't motivated unless I have a deadline. :)

- Background: I'm a Data Engineer with a background in software engineering. Been using AWS for ~1.5 years but really had absolutely no clue on a AWS networking (VPC, CIDR Ranges, Security Groups, NACLs etc...) and other more "web developer" (Route53, CloudFront etc) based services. The databases and other data related questions were pretty easy!

- Study route:
Stephane Maarek Udemy videos, watched the whole course on 1.5 speed, went over some of the difficult sections a few times. I'd write notes on the whole course in a notepad as I went through the course, I found this made things stick a little better. Overall I found the course really good and would highly recommend it, it took me around 3 weeks to complete - trying to do an hour or so a day. Got ~60% on the practice test at the end, found this really tough and I'll be honest I felt the pressure a bit with such a low score. link
- Tutorials Dojo practice tests, again scored around 60% on the first practice test. Used the "review mode" and did every single question on there and learned the concepts I was struggling with. This involved writing a set of notes in notion for each service I didn't know well. There are 6 tests, and by the end I was scoring 80 - 85% on these. Went through and redid the tests I had lowest on and got 90+% on these. These questions are -very- similar to those that you'll find in the real exam.

- I also bought the practice tests from Stephane Maarek, I found these much harder than the real exam - if you're consistently doing well on these (80+%) you'll pass the exam no problem. I completed all of his 6 tests, again writing notes on things I got wrong, and was scoring 80-90% by the time I had finished these.

- bought a set of practice tests from Whizz Labs 2 days before my exam and was scoring 80-90% on each of these - I wouldn't recommend buying these as the explanations were pretty poor and questions weren't like the real exam. The day before the exam I read through all the comparisons of the services on tutorials dojo, this was -super- helpful and I'd recommend this to get things to finally stick.

- I also stumbled across some official practice questions on the AWS skill builder site, I scored 19/20 on these, so felt pretty confident going into the exam.

- So I'd say I probably spent 50% of the time on video content and 50% on doing exam papers and writing up notes on questions I got wrong. I tried to do an hour or so each evening, I found it much better to be consistent and do an hour each evening than skipping days and trying to cram. It was taking me approx 1 hour to do a practice test by the end (and score relatively well), but the real exam took longer!

- The Exam:
The test centre experience was good, I'd much rather take the test in a centre and not have to worry about being recorded, stress of internet cutting out etc. One thing that did catch me off guard is all the text for the questions are tightly packed together on the screen, which makes it a bit difficult to read. I didn't get my results for ~24 hours - so hang tight

- The exam questions seemed to be quite long (make use of those extra 30 mins). Although I felt for questions where I was confused , with options given it is not quite hard to pick the right answers (use elimination method). I got a lot of questions on S3 , Aurora, Dynamo DB, VPN.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source2: r/AWSCertifications

10

Passed the SAA-C02 (after being sure I would fail!)
- So I was sure I would fail my SAA- there were a fair number of trick questions. The place I took the exam was in a shady neighbourhood with a rock band practising next door. The guy holding the exam said I couldn't take a toilet/water break even though the rules said I could (and I didn't want to argue with him). The last 30 minutes were a torture, with me just hoping the exam would finish already, swearing I was going to give this up, forget all about AWS etc etc

- So I was surprised when I passed with 833 :O

Anyway.

- I used Stephen Maarek's Udemy course, with Neal Davis as backup. I bought practice exams from Stephen, TD and Neal Davis. I personally found Neal's were the closest to the real exam. TD had a good feature where you could practice individual areas, like EC2, to see where your weak points were.

As for questions:

- I was surprised to see 5-6 questions on containers-- make sure you know the difference between ECS/EKS, and when to use Fargate vs own EC2. And how IAM policies work with containers (you should allow permission for just the task, not the whole container)

- Make sure you are solid on the difference between SQS and SNS-- not just high level stuff but dead letter queues, message delays etc. I was-- and yet the very last questions stumped me as both SQS and SNS were valid answers. I ultimately guessed SQS, which I suppose was correct.

- Had a surprising number of questions on Redshift, and almost none on Aurora-- surprising as I thought AWS was pushing Aurora? there was one question where the answer was Aurora serverless, that's it

- Another suprising thing: had 2 questions about a company moving from on premise to cloud and choosing disk space; in the 2nd one, it was about a web server using static data. Now, static data is normally stored on S3, but on both the questions, it said something like "The company doesnt want to refactor the application". I knew that using S3 involves some re-write, so I went with EFS, as it is a "standard" hard disk and applications can use it without any changes. I assume I was correct, just a tricky question.

- Source1:AWS Solutions Architect Dumps Blog at enoumen.com

- Source2: r/AWSCertifications

0

Read FAQs and learn more about the following topics in details: Load Balancing, DynamoDB, EBS, Multi-AZ RDS, Aurora, EFS, DynamoDB, NLB, ALB, Aurora, Auto Scalling, DynamoDB(latency), Aurora(performance), Multi-AZ RDS(high availability), Throughput Optimized EBS (highly sequential), Read the quizlet note cards here
AWS topics for CSAA SAA-CO2 and SAA-CO3

1

Know what instance types can be launched from which types of AMIs, and which instance types require an HVM AMI
AWS HVM AMI

2

Understand bastion hosts, and which subnet one might live on. Bastion hosts are instances that sit within your public subnet and are typically accessed using SSH or RDP. Once remote connectivity has been established with the bastion host, it then acts as a ‘jump’ server, allowing you to use SSH or RDP to login to other instances (within private subnets) deeper within your network. When properly configured through the use of security groups and Network ACLs, the bastion essentially acts as a bridge to your private instances via the Internet."
Bastion Hosts

3

Know the difference between Directory Service's AD Connector and Simple AD. Use Simple AD if you need an inexpensive Active Directory–compatible service with the common directory features. AD Connector lets you simply connect your existing on-premises Active Directory to AWS.
AD Connector and Simple AD

4

Know how to enable cross-account access with IAM: To delegate permission to access a resource, you create an IAM role that has two policies attached. The permissions policy grants the user of the role the needed permissions to carry out the desired tasks on the resource. The trust policy specifies which trusted accounts are allowed to grant its users permissions to assume the role. The trust policy on the role in the trusting account is one-half of the permissions. The other half is a permissions policy attached to the user in the trusted account that allows that user to switch to, or assume the role.
Enable cross-account access with IAM

5

Have a good understanding of how Route53 supports all of the different DNS record types, and when you would use certain ones over others.
Route 53 supports all of the different DNS record types

6

Know which services have native encryption at rest within the region, and which do not.
AWS Services with native Encryption at rest

7

Know which services allow you to retain full admin privileges of the underlying EC2 instances
EC2 Full admin privilege

8

Know When Elastic IPs are free or not: If you associate additional EIPs with that instance, you will be charged for each additional EIP associated with that instance per hour on a pro rata basis. Additional EIPs are only available in Amazon VPC. To ensure efficient use of Elastic IP addresses, we impose a small hourly charge when these IP addresses are not associated with a running instance or when they are associated with a stopped instance or unattached network interface.
When are AWS Elastic IPs Free or not?

9

Know what are the four high level categories of information Trusted Advisor supplies.
#AWS Trusted advisor

10

Know how to troubleshoot a connection time out error when trying to connect to an instance in your VPC. You need a security group rule that allows inbound traffic from your public IP address on the proper port, you need a route that sends all traffic destined outside the VPC (0.0.0.0/0) to the Internet gateway for the VPC, the network ACLs must allow inbound and outbound traffic from your public IP address on the proper port, etc.
#AWS Connection time out error

11

Be able to identify multiple possible use cases and eliminate non-use cases for SWF.
#AWS

12

Understand how you might set up consolidated billing and cross-account access such that individual divisions resources are isolated from each other, but corporate IT can oversee all of it.
#AWS Set up consolidated billing

13

Know how you would go about making changes to an Auto Scaling group, fully understanding what you can and can't change. "You can only specify one launch configuration for an Auto Scaling group at a time, and you can't modify a launch configuration after you've created it. Therefore, if you want to change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, you must create a launch configuration and then update your Auto Scaling group with the new launch configuration. When you change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, any new instances are launched using the new configuration parameters, but existing instances are not affected.
#AWS Make Change to Auto Scaling group

14

Know how you would go about making changes to an Auto Scaling group, fully understanding what you can and can't change. "You can only specify one launch configuration for an Auto Scaling group at a time, and you can't modify a launch configuration after you've created it. Therefore, if you want to change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, you must create a launch configuration and then update your Auto Scaling group with the new launch configuration. When you change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, any new instances are launched using the new configuration parameters, but existing instances are not affected.
#AWS Make Change to Auto Scaling group

15

Know which field you use to run a script upon launching your instance.
#AWS User data script

16

Know how DynamoDB (durable, and you can pay for strong consistency), Elasticache (great for speed, not so durable), and S3 (eventual consistency results in lower latency) compare to each other in terms of durability and low latency.
#AWS DynamoDB consistency

17

Know the difference between bucket policies, IAM policies, and ACLs for use with S3, and examples of when you would use each. "With IAM policies, companies can grant IAM users fine-grained control to their Amazon S3 bucket or objects while also retaining full control over everything the users do. With bucket policies, companies can define rules which apply broadly across all requests to their Amazon S3 resources, such as granting write privileges to a subset of Amazon S3 resources. Customers can also restrict access based on an aspect of the request, such as HTTP referrer and IP address. With ACLs, customers can grant specific permissions (i.e. READ, WRITE, FULL_CONTROL) to specific users for an individual bucket or object.
#AWS Difference between bucket policies

18

Know when and how you can encrypt snapshots.
#AWS EBS Encryption

19

Understand how you can use ELB cross-zone load balancing to ensure even distribution of traffic to EC2 instances in multiple AZs registered with a load balancer.
#AWS ELB cross-zone load balancing

20

How would you allow users to log into the AWS console using active directory integration. Here is a link to some good reference material.
#AWS og into the AWS console using active directory integration

21

Spot instances are good for cost optimization, even if it seems you might need to fall back to On-Demand instances if you wind up getting kicked off them and the timeline grows tighter. The primary (but still not only) factor seems to be whether you can gracefully handle instances that die on you--which is pretty much how you should always design everything, anyway!
#AWS Spot instances

22

The term "use case" is not the same as "function" or "capability". A use case is something that your app/system will need to accomplish, not just behaviour that you will get from that service. In particular, a use case doesn't require that the service be a 100% turnkey solution for that situation, just that the service plays a valuable role in enabling it.
#AWS use case

23

There might be extra, unnecessary information in some of the questions (red herrings), so try not to get thrown off by them. Understand what services can and can't do, but don't ignore "obvious"-but-still-correct answers in favour of super-tricky ones.
#AWS Exam Answers: Distractors

24

If you don't know what they're trying to ask, in a question, just move on and come back to it later (by using the helpful "mark this question" feature in the exam tool). You could easily spend way more time than you should on a single confusing question if you don't triage and move on.
#AWS Exa: Skip Questions that are vague and come back to them later

25

Some exam questions required you to understand features and use cases of: VPC peering, cross-account access, DirectConnect, snapshotting EBS RAID arrays, DynamoDB, spot instances, Glacier, AWS/user security responsibilities, etc.
#AWS

26

The 30 Day constraint in the S3 Lifecycle Policy before transitioning to S3-IA and S3-One Zone IA storage classes
#AWS S3 lifecycle policy

27

Enabling Cross-region snapshot copy for an AWS KMS-encrypted cluster
Redis Auth / Amazon MQ / IAM DB Authentication
#AWS Cross-region snapshot copy for an AWS KMS-encrypted cluster

28

Know that FTP is using TCP and not UDP (Helpful for questions where you are asked to troubleshoot the network flow)
TCP and UDP

29

Know the Difference between S3, EBS and EFS
#AWS Difference between S3, EBS and EFS

30

Kinesis Sharding:
#AWS Kinesis Sharding

31

Handling SSL Certificates in ELB ( Wildcard certificate vs SNI )
#AWS Handling SSL Certificates in ELB ( Wildcard certificate vs SNI )

32

Difference between OAI, Signed URL (CloudFront) and Pre-signed URL (S3)
#AWS Difference between OAI, Signed URL (CloudFront) and Pre-signed URL (S3)

33

Different types of Aurora Endpoints
#AWS Different types of Aurora Endpoints

34

The Default Termination Policy for Auto Scaling Group (Oldest launch configuration vs Instance Protection)
#AWS Default Termination Policy for Auto Scaling Group

35

Watch Acloud Guru Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break - Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready
#AWS ACloud Guru

36

Watch Linux Academy Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break - Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready
#AWS Linux Academy

37

Watch Udemy Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break - Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready
#AWS Linux Academy

38

The Udemy practice test interface is good that it pinpoints your weak areas, so what I did was to re-watch all the videos that I got the wrong answers. Since I was able to gauge my exam readiness, I decided to reschedule my exam for 2 more weeks, to help me focus on completing the practice tests.
#AWS Udemy

39

Use AWS Cheatsheets - I also found the cheatsheets provided by Tutorials Dojo very helpful. In my opinion, it is better than Jayendrapatil Patil's blog since it contains more updated information that complements your review notes.
#AWS Cheat Sheet

40

Watch this exam readiness 3hr video, it very recent webinar this provides what is expected in the exam.
#AWS Exam Prep Video

41

Start off watching Ryan's videos. Try and completely focus on the hands on. Take your time to understand what you are trying to learn and achieve in those LAB Sessions.
#AWS Exam Prep Video

42

Do not rush into completing the videos. Take your time and hone the basics. Focus and spend a lot of time for the back bone of AWS infrastructure - Compute/EC2 section, Storage (S3/EBS/EFS), Networking (Route 53/Load Balancers), RDS, VPC, Route 3. These sections are vast, with lot of concepts to go over and have loads to learn. Trust me you will need to thoroughly understand each one of them to ensure you pass the certification comfortably.
#AWS Exam Prep Video

43

Make sure you go through resources section and also AWS documentation for each components. Go over FAQs. If you have a question, please post it in the community. Trust me, each answer here helps you understand more about AWS.
#AWS Faqs

44

Like any other product/service, each AWS offering has a different flavor. I will take an example of EC2 (Spot/Reserved/Dedicated/On Demand etc.). Make sure you understand what they are, what are the pros/cons of each of these flavors. Applies for all other offerings too.
#AWS Services

45

Ensure to attend all quizzes after each section. Please do not treat these quizzes as your practice exams. These quizzes are designed to mostly test your knowledge on the section you just finished. The exam itself is designed to test you with scenarios and questions, where in you will need to recall and apply your knowledge of different AWS technologies/services you learn over multiple lectures.
#AWS Services

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I, personally, do not recommend to attempt a practice exam or simulator exam until you have done all of the above. It was a little overwhelming for me. I had thoroughly gone over the videos. And understood the concepts pretty well, but once I opened exam simulator I felt the questions were pretty difficult. I also had a feeling that videos do not cover lot of topics. But later I realized, given the vastness of AWS Services and offerings it is really difficult to encompass all these services and their details in the course content. The fact that these services keep changing so often, does not help
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Go back and make a note of all topics, that you felt were unfamiliar for you. Go through the resources section and fiund links to AWS documentation. After going over them, you shoud gain at least 5-10% more knowledge on AWS. Have expectations from the online courses as a way to get thorough understanding of basics and strong foundations for your AWS knowledge. But once you are done with videos. Make sure you spend a lot of time on AWS documentation and FAQs. There are many many topics/sub topics which may not be covered in the course and you would need to know, atleast their basic functionalities, to do well in the exam.
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Once you start taking practice exams, it may seem really difficult at the beginning. So, please do not panic if you find the questions complicated or difficult. IMO they are designed or put in a way to sound complicated but they are not. Be calm and read questions very carefully. In my observation, many questions have lot of information which sometimes is not relevant to the solution you are expected to provide. Read the question slowly and read it again until you understand what is expected out of it.
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With each practice exam you will come across topics that you may need to scale your knowledge on or learn them from scratch.
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With each test and the subsequent revision, you will surely feel more confident.
There are 130 mins for questions. 2 mins for each question which is plenty of time.
At least take 8-10 practice tests. The ones on udemy/tutorialdojo are really good. If you are a acloudguru member. The exam simulator is really good.
Manage your time well. Keep patience. I saw someone mention in one of the discussions that do not under estimate the mental focus/strength needed to sit through 130 mins solving these questions. And it is really true.
Do not give away or waste any of those precious 130 mins. While answering flag/mark questions you think you are not completely sure. My advice is, even if you finish early, spend your time reviewing the answers. I could review 40 of my answers at the end of test. And I at least rectified 3 of them (which is 4-5% of total score, I think)
So in short - Put a lot of focus on making your foundations strong. Make sure you go through AWS Documentation and FAQs. Try and envision how all of the AWS components can fit together and provide an optimal solution. Keep calm.
This video gives outline about exam, must watch before or after Ryan's course. #AWS Services

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Walking you through how to best prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 exam in 5 steps:
1. Understand the exam blueprint
2. Learn about the new topics included in the SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 version of the exam
3. Use the many FREE resources available to gain and deepen your knowledge
4. Enroll in our hands-on video course to learn AWS in depth
5. Use practice tests to fully prepare yourself for the exam and assess your exam readiness

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Storage:
1. Know your different Amazon S3 storage tiers! You need to know the use cases, features and limitations, and relative costs; e.g. retrieval costs.
2. Amazon S3 lifecycle policies is also required knowledge — there are minimum storage times in certain tiers that you need to know.
3. For Glacier, you need to understand what it is, what it’s used for, and what the options are for retrieval times and fees.
4. For the Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), make sure you’re clear which operating systems you can use with it (just Linux).
5. For the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), make sure you know when to use the different tiers including instance stores; e.g. what would you use for a datastore that requires the highest IO and the data is distributed across multiple instances? (Good instance store use case)
6. Learn about Amazon FSx. You’ll need to know about FSx for Windows and Lustre.
7. Know how to improve Amazon S3 performance including using CloudFront, and byte-range fetches — check out this whitepaper.
8. Make sure you understand about Amazon S3 object deletion protection options including versioning and MFA delete.

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Compute:
1. You need to have a good understanding of the options for how to scale an Auto Scaling Group using metrics such as SQS queue depth, or numbers of SNS messages.
2. Know your different Auto Scaling policies including Target Tracking Policies.
3. Read up on High Performance Computing (HPC) with AWS. You’ll need to know about Amazon FSx with HPC use cases.
4. Know your placement groups. Make sure you can differentiate between spread, cluster and partition; e.g. what would you use for lowest latency? What about if you need to support an app that’s tightly coupled? Within an AZ or cross AZ?
5. Make sure you know the difference between Elastic Network Adapters (ENAs), Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) and Elastic Fabric Adapters (EFAs).
6. For the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), make sure you understand how to assign IAM policies to ECS for providing S3 access. How can you decouple an ECS data processing process — Kinesis Firehose or SQS?
7. Make sure you’re clear on the different EC2 pricing models including Reserved Instances (RI) and the different RI options such as scheduled RIs.
8. Make sure you know the maximum execution time for AWS Lambda (it’s currently 900 seconds or 15 minutes).

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Network
1. Understand what AWS Global Accelerator is and its use cases.
2. Understand when to use CloudFront and when to use AWS Global Accelerator.
3. Make sure you understand the different types of VPC endpoint and which require an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) and which require a route table entry.
4. You need to know how to connect multiple accounts; e.g. should you use VPC peering or a VPC endpoint?
5. Know the difference between PrivateLink and ClassicLink.
6. Know the patterns for extending a secure on-premises environment into AWS.
7. Know how to encrypt AWS Direct Connect (you can use a Virtual Private Gateway / AWS VPN).
8. Understand when to use Direct Connect vs Snowball to migrate data — lead time can be an issue with Direct Connect if you’re in a hurry.
9. Know how to prevent circumvention of Amazon CloudFront; e.g. Origin Access Identity (OAI) or signed URLs / signed cookies.
AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS

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Databases
1. Make sure you understand Amazon Aurora and Amazon Aurora Serverless.
2. Know which RDS databases can have Read Replicas and whether you can read from a Multi-AZ standby.
3. Know the options for encrypting an existing RDS database; e.g. only at creation time otherwise you must encrypt a snapshot and create a new instance from the snapshot.
4. Know which databases are key-value stores; e.g. Amazon DynamoDB.
AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS

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Application Integration
1. Make sure you know the use cases for the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Simple Notification Service (SNS).
2. Understand the differences between Amazon Kinesis Firehose and SQS and when you would use each service.
3. Know how to use Amazon S3 event notifications to publish events to SQS — here’s a good “How To” article.
AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS

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Management and Governance
1. You’ll need to know about AWS Organizations; e.g. how to migrate an account between organizations.
2. For AWS Organizations, you also need to know how to restrict actions using service control policies attached to OUs.
3. Understand what AWS Resource Access Manager is.
AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS

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Jon Bonso list of helpful exam prep materials that you can use.
1. The official AWS SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 Certification Exam page.
2. The official AWS Exam Guide.
3. The official AWS Sample Questions
4. The official AWS Ramp-Up Guide: Architect PDF
5. Tutorials Dojo SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 Study Guide
Pass your SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 (AWS Solutions Architect Associate) exam with these Top 5 Resources

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Udemy Practice Exams - Tutorials Dojo
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exam from Tutorials Dojo in Udemy Udemy Practice Exams - Tutorials Dojo

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New SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 AWS Services that you should prepare for:
1. AWS Global Accelerator
2. Elastic Fabric Adapter — Amazon Web Services
3. AWS ParallelCluster - Amazon Web Services
4. Amazon FSx File Storage
5. Amazon Elastic Network Adaptor (ENA)
6. AWS DataSync
7. AWS Directory Services