Basic Guide to the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam!

After much procrastination, I finally signed up and passed the SA associate exam, giving myself exactly 2 weeks to get ready. I must admit that I took the exam with much trepidation as I felt that I had not given myself enough time to prepare. Although, the exam turned out to be less tough than I expected, it is certainly not a cake walk. In the section below, I have tried to include some pointers that may aid you in smashing the exam:

Download the exam guide

1. Read all the white papers especially the Security and S3 papers.
2. Read all the faqs.
3. Sign-up for an AWS free-tier account to get practical experience on all the AWS services. As you read each topic in the white papers, try to get hands-on the following areas in particular:
1. setting up instances in a public and/or private subnet, route table, setting up a NAT instance to create a route to the internet for the private subnet, security groups, ACLs
2. IAM: setting up users, group, roles, policies, MFA, Access key ID, secret access keys and learn about best practice to setup access to your AWS infrastructure.
3. Setup an ELB which will point to your EC2 instance and then create a route53 zone which will point to your ELB.
4. Specific topics that you can focus on:
1. learn about route53 and different record types. Dabble with Route53 and load balancers, if you can although it may cost you a few pennies.
2. learn about when and how to setup bastion hosts
3. differences between SG and ACLs, allowing/disallowing SSH and RDP traffic 
4. amazon directory service and how to use it with your current security infrstructure.
5. launch configurations for auto-scaling groups
6. ELB: cross-zone load balancing, can you load balance across regions?
7. EBS and S3 encryption options
8. know what services in which cases (DynamoDB, Elasticache, EFS, RDS) you can use to store application state, session stickiness
9. IAM: learn how to setup users and roles, access keys 
10. Billing: I think you can ignore the detailed billing examples from the FAQs; these may be more relevant to the professional exam. For the associate, I think it is mostly important to know when you are charged for Elastic IP, sport instance.
11. Know the USP of each AWS service and key differentiator for between similar services e.g. DynamoDB vs RDS vs S3  
12. Understand the zone and region limitation of services e.g. is it possible to attach EBS volume from another region (You can attach an EBS volumes to one of your instances that is in the same Availability Zone as the volume)
13. Snapshotting of EBS
14. EBS backed vs instance backed volumes, performance characteristics of EBS volume types.
5. Do take a practice exam if only to get familiar with how to time yourself.
6. Finally, there is no substitute to setting deploying your local web/database stack on EC2. It will clear-out any questions that you may have and also expose you to the flexibility/limitations of the platform.

 Also, there is a lot of well-meaning guidance out ther, especially answers to practice exams questions and you should definitely explore them. However, take care that any answers that not all answers may be correctly marked and you should form your own opinion about each question.

Good Luck!!! and if you do have any questions please feel free to contact me at wilbur.desouza@ness.com.