AWS Solution Architect Professional — Tips and Notes (July 2020)

Introduction

I have recently given my AWS SAPro exam, passed with ‘920' score and want to share my experience and throw some light into the details of the examination along with some tips.

Certificate

First, to start off, this exam covers huge set of services in depth and you will still be surprised to find few more very new during the exam, for me, AWS eventbridge / AWS Transcribe are brand new.

Do not underestimate the SAPro. Its a very tough one and checks your knowledge and experience. The questions are lengthy and the options are very close to each other. We really need to know the interactions between services in depth with what can achieve performance and at what cost.

For example, you are getting 100s of thousands RPS at peak (key point), and the solution suggests, CloudFront with API-GW + Lambda or CloudFront with ELB + EC2/ASG. At the first glance both looks great and both can handle the load, but remember API-GW can support 10000 RPS where as ELB needs pre-warm if the traffic hits only at peak. In a lengthy question with many options which each one makes sense but only 1 option is right.

Notes

Lets, cover the courses I took and few notes on each.

First, I used Adrian Cantrill’s Course on LinuxAcademy (LA). The LA course is in depth and from my experience it doesn’t cover a lot of new services, which you would need to know, at least the basics. I think Adrian is creating a new course for SAPro @ https://learn.cantrill.io/. Wait for it to be completed, I do like his in depth approach for covering the services and his cats penny, ruffle, truffles and winkie. He is more demo oriented in the new course. To complete this course efficiently you would need 2 months. 52 total hours.

Second, I finished all the practice tests at https://tutorialsdojo.com/ . These tests go in depth with the same type of questions you see in the exam. More points are mentioned in each answer explanation about why it’s correct and why it’s not. Please concentrate on reading about why an answer is not right. Do it 2–3 weeks before the exam.

Third and last one, Stéphane Maarek course on Udemy. Particularly this one → https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-solutions-architect-professional/learn/lecture/18436272#overview. The course is very fast paced and covers very important topics that you would need to crack the examination. To the point and good for revision after LA course and practice tests from Jon Bonso @ tutorial Dojo. Do it in the last week before the examination.

Don’t get disheartened if you fail in first attempt in any of the practice tests here and there. I failed the official AWS SAPro practice test scored 60%.

My scores in each for your perusal and my final score attached.

LA course practice test, 66% and second attempt 88% (repetitive Qs).

Tutotial Dojo, 76%, 80%, 72%, 78% and the last one 97%. Last one delivers questions from first four.

CloudAcademy, had free sessions for a week, only took their exams. Practice test scored 60% and course final exam 78%.

I highlighted the scores, if you notice; technically I failed all of these .. or passed with border scores at first attempt. So, make sure you read all answers from first attempts to boost your confidence with the last ones.

But finally my score in AWS SAPro is 920 (92%). So, it all depends on gaining knowledge from the failed attempts.

Score

The 180mins is sufficient enough if you practice a lot. Try to finish tutotial Dojo exams in 2 hrs or 2hrs 15mins tops. That will give you the actual exam experience. I finished only 19 questions in the first hour. So no revision at the end and finished at 179 mins, with the last question.

Tips

1. Don’t panic and try to keep your cool.
2. If you are attempting the exam from your home, prepared to show around using your laptop or webcam, complete 360 degrees and show hands for ‘no-smart-watches’ rule etc., desk needs to be cleared off every thing except for your laptop or PC. They were strict about this. They even asked me to unplug the TV in my room.
3. A clear water bottle with no label is allowed. Thank God for that. No coloured bottled.
4. 3 hours is just sufficient enough, so come up with a good game plan to manage your time.
5. Finish tutorial Dojo exams in 2 hrs as a target. His questions are a bit short compared to the actual exam.
6. Know which service AWS recommends for what, meaning like Kinesis streams can be used for log ingestion and analytics etc., To confuse; question might give you cloud watch logs + insights as option too. If log ingestion + real time analytics go for Kinesis brand of products.
7. Read about EventBridge, Greengrass IOT, MechnicalTurk, App stream, Lex, Transcribe, Elastic transcoder, Connect, CloudSearch, DeviceFarm, Recoknition etc.,
8. From Stephane Maarek’s course, go through his flow charts using different AWS services interactions, very helpful to visualize the questions in exam.
9. Also know the limitations on each service, they are very important to eradicate some answers for a given question. Like CloudFront supports 100000 RPS, ALB 10000 RPS etc., DynamoDB 4KB, SQS/SNS 256Kb limit.
10. Look at different DR strategies AWS recommends and read the blogs from AWS with different services and the options they provide. Read here a bit → https://medium.com/@prashix/disaster-recovery-strategies-in-cloud-or-in-general-c1a01f192a3
11. Migration services like DMS, SCT, SMS and their limitations.
12. Go through this blog to get a proper understand of the services that will be covered in the exam. → https://acloud.guru/forums/aws-csa-pro-2019/discussion/-L_joCzK9FTbpP2P7H0Z/how_i_passed_the_new_aws_solut
13. Questions sometimes doesn’t mention any performance wise or cost wise, just says, whats the best option. At least couple of answers can be doable, so to eliminate stick with AWS recommendations.
14. Orgs and SCPs are heavily concentrated on compared to others in IAM.
15. Federated options , directory services requires special understanding. AWS recommends SSO and Cognito services, if you can’t make decision with the answer stick with above services.
16. Use cases for Priv and Public VIFs in DX. A deep dive probably need as these covers at least 5 questions. (Hybrid networks basically).
17. This one, am not sure which is correct option, need to do some research. Upload 20TB to S3, via transfer acceleration or DX.
18. Encryption options in S3, using KMS, CloudHSM etc.,
19. X-Ray vs Guard Duty vs Trusted advisor vs Inspector
20. Systems manager, Patch manager, Secret Manager vs parameter store. Remember if key rotation or RDS integration comes up, by default go for Secret manager.

Conclusion

Don’t panic since we will not have any time to recover, my grave mistake as I panic’ed in the beginning and was able to cover only 19 questions in first hour. Because I had to read each question 2–3 times to gain confidence for selecting an answer.

It’s very tight time and with long questions, it takes your full attention for 3 complete hours. Very tiring. I slept for solid 2 hrs after the test, just flat out on bed.

If you like these tips and notes, please show by clapping.

All the best !!