Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect Associate Certification
07 Feb 2017
Yesterday I took my Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect Associate certification exam and I’m stoked to have passed with 90%.
I found the Solutions Architect exam too be much harder than the Developer exam; the questions are much more verbose - you have to make much more of a conscious decision as to what information in the given scenario is relevant and what isn’t.
The major themes in my exam were:
- VPC (ACL, security groups, private subnet connectivity, VPC peering)
- S3 (hybrid cloud storage, ACL/bucket policies/IAM permissions and storage classes)
- EBS (moving volumes between regions/AZs, encrypting volumes, setting up RAID)
If you’re looking to take the Solutions Architect exam I’d also recommend understanding the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.
As with the AWS developer associate exam I took last year I found the whole experience an excellent test of the knowledge I’ve picked up after two and a half years of building and maintaining multiple production environments on AWS.
I can’t recommend the ACloud Guru courses enough; whilst I am very familiar with day to day operations with the vast majority of the AWS services, the guru courses really helped me better understand services that are useful for hybrid cloud environments which I’m unlikely to make as much use of.