My road to AWS Certified Solution Architect

I recently passed the ‘AWS Solution Architect-Associate’ and have also passed ‘AWS Cloud Practitioner’ in the month of Jan 2020. I have had no exposure to AWS prior to this exam. In this document I will cover all resources I used to study for the exam

Step 1:

Before you start preparation, I advise you to look at sample questions and see where you stand and understand what kind of questions they might ask. Sample questions link is below.

https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs/AWS_Certified_Solutions_Architect_Associate_Sample_Questions.pdf

https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sa-assoc/AWS-Certified-Solutions-Architect-Associate_Sample-Questions_v4.0_FINAL.pdf

Step 2:

Pick any one video courses available on YouTube or Udemy or Linux Academy and one mock test series available on Udemy or Whizlabs. I provided necessary links for these resources when needed.

I would say start with ‘freecodecamp.org’ YouTube videos. I would have recommended Udemy if you have met me few months back, but now there is so much free content available in the market and YouTube is a great place to learn for free.  If you think YouTube videos are not good enough or share a different opinion from me use Udemy video lectures in the below link. I personally used Udemy.

Following is the link for Udemy video lectures

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/

Following is the link for video course for freecodecamp.org video lecture

Read below White Papers on AWS website:

Overview of Amazon Web Services

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-overview.pdf

Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices.pdf

How AWS Pricing Works

http://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws_pricing_overview.pdf

AWS Security Best Practices

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/AWS_Security_Best_Practices.pdf

AWS Well-Architected Framework

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf

Blue/Green Deployments on AWS

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Blue_Green_Deployments.pdf

Read below FAQs on AWS Website:

Amazon SQS

https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/faqs/

Amazon DynamoDB

https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/faqs/

Amazon Kinesis

https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-streams/faqs/

AWS Lambda

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/

Amazon ElastiCache

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/faqs/

Amazon API Gateway

https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/faqs/

AWS Key Management Service

https://aws.amazon.com/kms/faqs/

AWS IAM

https://aws.amazon.com/iam/faqs/

Amazon EC2

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/

Amazon S3

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/

Amazon VPC

https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/

Amazon Route 53

https://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/

Amazon RDS

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/

Elastic Load Balancing

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/faqs/

Few other YouTube videos which I felt are very foundational for this exam preparation are below.

About VPC:

About Networking:

About Cloud Computing:

Step 3:

Once you complete reading and watching above material buy a mock test series on Udemy or Whizlabs. In my opinion both are equally good but if you don’t want to spend too much money go with Udemy (sometimes you might get a good deal).

Udemy Mock test link

Below one has better reviews

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-amazon-practice-exams-saa-c02/

I prepared with below test series

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-practice-tests-k/

Whizlabs mock test link

This one might cost you the double the price of Udemy. I used one of my friend’s subscription to make use of this test series.

https://www.whizlabs.com/aws-solutions-architect-associate/practice-tests/ 2