YOUR COMPLETE AWS GUIDE, WITH TIPS & TRICKS FOR EVERY AWS DEVELOPER CERTIFICATION EXAM
Welcome, fellow cloud enthusiasts! Are you ready to start your AWS Cloud career? Pull up a chair, grab your favorite drink, and prepare to embark on a journey through the world of Amazon Web Services (AWS) certifications. I’m George, your guide and fellow companion in this adventure, a senior DevOps Engineer who has traversed the AWS cloudscape and conquered every AWS certification known to humankind. I’m here to help you overcome the challenges you may encounter during this adventure and provide valuable advice and insights from AWS to make this ride smooth.
If you have questions like:
- Are AWS certifications worth it?
- Is there an AWS certification roadmap?
- Where should I start?
- Where is the best place to learn?
- Which course is better?
- How hard is a certification exam, or which one is harder?
- What do I have to do to pass an exam?
Look no further—you are in the right place. I will explain and provide answers to these questions and more. As cloud computing continues to dominate the IT landscape, AWS certifications have become precious gems for professionals seeking to demonstrate their expertise. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a wide range of certifications that can validate your knowledge and proficiency in various AWS services and solutions. Achieving AWS certifications can demonstrate your competency in the ever-growing field of cloud computing.
This complete guide will provide valuable insights, tips, and strategies to help you achieve AWS cloud certifications. From understanding the different AWS certification paths and exam formats to preparing for the exams through effective study techniques and practical hands-on experience, this guide will equip you with the tools and knowledge you need to pursue your AWS certification goals confidently.
AWS CERTIFICATIONS LIST
1. AWS CERTIFIED CLOUD PRACTITIONER
General information:
This is the starting line in this journey. The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is a foundational credential that validates your knowledge of AWS services, architecture, and cloud concepts, making it an excellent foundational stone for those new to AWS or cloud computing.
Tips:
Focus on being familiar with as many AWS services as you can. To pass this, you must learn the AWS Fundamentals. This exam assesses your knowledge of basic cloud concepts, AWS concepts, services, and architecture; you don’t necessarily have to know AWS services in depth. If you know what a service does and what it is used for, you should be more than okay with passing this one.
You will often need to choose the one that fits from multiple AWS services.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 90 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Foundational
Passing score: 700
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identifiable in the exam.
2. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT – ASSOCIATE
General information:
As you probably already guessed, SAA (Solutions Architect—Associate) is the big brother of Cloud Practitioner. While to pass the Cloud Practitioner test, you had to have basic knowledge at a general level, to pass the SAA, you need to have a deeper understanding of a large part of the AWS services that you learned for the Cloud Practitioner certification.
The questions are slightly longer and more complex than those on the Cloud Practitioner exam. If, for Cloud Practitioner, you only needed to know what a particular service does, now you must know how all those services are connected. You also need to have a general knowledge of the particularities of the services, like specific aspects of a particular service.
This certification validates the knowledge and skills to architect, build, and maintain secure and reliable AWS-based applications. To pass this exam, you must be familiar with architecture best practices, designing and deploying scalable applications, choosing the right AWS services for specific use cases, understanding AWS networking and storage options, securing AWS resources, and optimizing performance.
Tips:
Because this is the next level compared to the Cloud Practitioner exam, try not to hurry to understand a specific service. Take your time, and if necessary, take the video course twice.
Additionally, you can try hands-on practice to help understand how a service works. Setting up a free-tier AWS account is relatively easy.
Try to get a good understanding of AWS services and be able to choose the most cost-effective, least-effort-on-deployment, or most secure service from a set of presented services because the exam will most likely test you on that. At least, that was the case for me.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 130 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Associate
Passing score: 720
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
3. AWS CERTIFIED DEVELOPER – ASSOCIATE
General information:
Some think this exam is the least difficult one from the associate level. The questions are similar to those in the Solutions Architect—Associate exam. The Developer exam covers fewer services than the Solutions Architect—Associate one but goes more in-depth. In my experience, the focus is on Development with AWS Services and Deployment.
This exam often involves questions about services like CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and Beanstalk. So, make sure you know their specifics.
The certification validates one’s expertise in developing applications using AWS services, including understanding their features, limitations, and best practices. It demonstrates proficiency in designing, building, and deploying applications on the AWS platform.
Tips:
Make sure you know the particularities of different deployment strategies, among others.
Learning by doing is always a great choice. Try setting up a CodePipeline with different stages - such as building (CodeBuild), testing, approval, and deployment (CodeDeploy), and observe the details and specifics of each service.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 130 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Associate
Passing score: 720
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
4. AWS CERTIFIED SYSOPS ADMINISTRATOR – ASSOCIATE
General information:
The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator—Associate exam no longer includes exam labs. They were removed at the end of March 2023 until further notice. This removal is temporary while the exam labs are evaluated, and improvements will be made.
To earn this certification, you must have knowledge covering various topics, including AWS architecture, computing, storage, networking, security, monitoring, and troubleshooting. The exam assesses your ability to effectively manage and operate AWS resources, configure and troubleshoot AWS services, and apply best performance optimization, security, and cost management practices.
A lot of focus is given to ensuring that you know about the monitoring and metrics capability in AWS. The critical services used here are Cloudwatch Alarms and Logs and Cloudtrail.
Another service that the exam is focused on is Cloudformation. In the real world, we would need to provision environments for development, QA, and test teams, which is essential to know.
You should also know how to build networks in a VPC and understand NACLs and security groups.
Tips:
As the name of the exam suggests, you must be well acquainted with OPERATIONS in AWS.
For this exam, hands-on practice is a must.
Ensure you know services like Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail, Cloudformation, and Cloudfront.
Try creating Cloudwatch alarms for an autoscaling group, solving a health-check problem for an ALB, and playing with security groups, NACLs, IAM roles and policies, S3, EC2, Route53, Cloudfront, and Cloudformation.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 130 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Associate
Passing score: 720
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
5. AWS CERTIFIED DATA ENGINEER – ASSOCIATE
General information:
This is the newest and the brightest exam from AWS. The release of this exam is connected to the retirement of 3 AWS exams, or at least to 2 of them (Data Analytics Specialty and Database Specialty). That does not mean that this exam is a combination of those two. This exam validates skills and knowledge in core data-related AWS services, the ability to implement data pipelines, monitor and troubleshoot issues, and optimize cost and performance by best practices. This exam offers you this recognition if you want to use AWS technology to transform data for analysis and actionable insights. As this exam is highly connected to the “data” part in AWS, expect you to be tested at every level related to AWS's “data” field, including the data analytics part.
Tips:
Be knowledgeable about services like AWS Glue, Redshift, S3, Athena, Kinesis, MSK, SNS, SQS, EventBridge, KMS, IAM, and Lambda.
Because this exam is strictly related to data, be aware of data types, differences between data types, differences between data warehouses, data lakes, and databases, and when you can use a data warehouse and when you need to use a data lake.
Be aware of concepts like ETL, ELT, OLTP, and OLAP, as well as what AWS services you need to use when you have an OLAP use case or what is required when you have an OLTP use case.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 130 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Associate
Passing score: 720
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
6. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT – PROFESSIONAL
General information:
Welcome to the professional level. This exam is among the toughest and should not be underestimated. Coming after the associate exam experience, you probably think it’s not that hard, but it’s a lot harder.
The significant differences compared to the Associate exam level are the number of questions, their length, and how they are formulated. Here, we have 75 questions, and the passing score is not 720 anymore; it is 750.
Leaving aside that you need to know the services at a detailed level, the questions are exceptionally long, complex, and quite challenging to read and understand.
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect—Professional certification is among the most prestigious and targeted certifications. To pass it, you must have prior experience with AWS and extensive practical experience. This exam assesses your technical knowledge, problem-solving, and architectural design skills. It covers many topics, including designing highly available and fault-tolerant architectures, selecting appropriate AWS services for specific use cases, optimizing performance, and ensuring data security and compliance.
The difference between the associate level and this one is that you need to understand most of the AWS services in detail. Instead of choosing the right one (you will have questions about where every option will be a good fit), you will need to select the most performant one, the most cost-effective one, the one that is fully managed by AWS or fully managed by the customer.
Tips:
Try to understand AWS services profoundly and how to combine them to obtain the most optimized solution.
Because this exam is exceptionally long (75 questions) and takes only 180 minutes, you will have, on average, just over 2 minutes for each question. Time could be your biggest adversary, so you must find a strategy to save time.
For me, the trick to saving some time is to understand the question (not necessarily the context) perfectly. In my experience, in many cases, you are presented with a very detailed scenario (and you will waste quite some time reading it), and the question is different or related at a shallow level to that scenario.
You may think that all the answers to a question are correct, but the truth is that only one (or more, depending on the requirements) can be the correct answer. You'll need to pay attention to what they ask you exactly, not what the scenario presents.
Look for keywords! Here’s a dummy example:
“Provide only critical recommendations for security.”
Among the answers, you find two similar options:
1) Recommendation with enhanced metrics.
2) Recommendation with default metrics.
You must go for the “enhanced” one.
Exam details:
Format: 75 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 180 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Professional
Passing score: 750
Unscored content: 10 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 10 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
7. AWS CERTIFIED DEVOPS – PROFESSIONAL
General information:
If you are taking this exam before the SA-Pro (Solutions Architect—Professional), here is what you should know in the first place: This exam is a lot tougher than the Developer—Associate and the SysOps Administrator—Associate together. This exam should not be underestimated. After an associate exam experience, you probably think it is not that hard, but it is much more complicated.
The big difference compared to the associate-level exam is the number of questions. Here, we have 75 questions, and the passing score is 750 instead of 720.
You will see many similarities if you take this exam after the SA-Pro (Solutions Architect – Professional).
The previous comparison still stands: the questions are similar to those in the SA-Pro exam, but even though the DevOps exam covers fewer services than the SA-Pro, it goes more in-depth.
This exam covers many topics: continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IAC), automation, monitoring, and security in a DevOps environment.
It would be best to combine what you’ve learned for the Developer—Associate and the SysOps Administrator—Associate and deepen your knowledge.
Tips:
Try to understand AWS services profoundly and how to combine them to obtain the most optimized solution.
The trick here is to understand the question perfectly and choose the answer that provides the most accurate solution.
Be aware of some keywords like “real-time,” “near real-time,” “automatically,” and “private and low latency,” and make sure you can “connect” those keywords with the right option. Let’s say for a “real-time” solution, you will go with Kinesis Data Stream, and for a “near real-time” solution, you will opt for Kinesis Firehose. When you see “automatically,” go for an event-driven option, and most of the time, when you see “private and low latency” in the connectivity context, go for Direct Connect.
Exam details:
Format: 75 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 180 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Professional
Passing score: 750
Unscored content: 10 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 10 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
8. AWS CERTIFIED SECURITY – SPECIALTY
General information:
This will be easy if you take this exam and already have the associate and professional levels.
This exam will validate your AWS security skills because security is among the most important.
To pass this exam, you must have in-depth knowledge and experience in securing applications and infrastructure on AWS. This certification validates your skills in designing and implementing secure solutions on AWS to protect against various security threats and vulnerabilities.
The exam covers various security topics, including identity and access management, encryption, network security, incident response, auditing, and compliance.
Topics like securing data at rest and in transit, implementing secure access controls, configuring network security, and designing secure architectures using AWS services are most likely included.
Tips:
As the name suggests, this is a security test, and to pass it, you need to have a profound understanding of security services like IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Security Hub, Inspector, WAF, Shield, and a few more.
You must learn only a few services to pass this, but you must study at a deep level.
Again, you must understand the question clearly and remember that this is a security exam, so… most of the time, choose the most secure answer, if not explicitly required in another way.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 170 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Specialty
Passing score: 750
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
9. AWS CERTIFIED MACHINE LEARNING – SPECIALTY
General information:
This is the twin brother of the Networking Specialty exam, in difficulty.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming industries worldwide, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is at the forefront of providing cutting-edge solutions in this space. The AWS Certified Machine Learning—Specialty certification is designed to validate your expertise in building solutions for and deploying ML using AWS services.
This one requires a deep understanding of certain specific services, such as SageMaker, Amazon S3, Athena, Glue, and different machine learning algorithms and models. Although you do not need to know how to train a model, you must be able to choose the appropriate model for the job from a list.
It is also essential to understand the flow of a data set before you feed it into ML. Most of the services required to know in this exam were in the retired AWS Certified Data Analytics—Specialty exams, such as Glue, Kinesis, Redshift, S3, Athena, and EMR.
Tips:
As this exam is almost as tricky as the Advanced Networking Specialty, you must be careful when reading the questions and ensure you understand what they ask.
To pass this exam, you must be able to express the intuition behind basic ML algorithms, have experience performing basic hyperparameter optimization, have experience with ML and deep learning frameworks, and be able to follow model-training best practices, deployment best practices, and operational best practices.
This exam is challenging because of the topic and because you cannot have any “strategies” to “guess” the answer. Either you know the right solution, or you don’t.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 180 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Specialty
Passing score: 750
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
10. AWS CERTIFIED ADVANCED NETWORKING - SPECIALTY
General information:
The fun is over!
This exam is one of the hardest; even ChatGPT would be amazed at how these questions are formulated.
The AWS Certified Advanced Networking—Specialty certification is widely regarded as one of Amazon Web Services' most demanding certifications.
This one requires a deep understanding of advanced networking concepts, including Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) architecture, hybrid infrastructure, connectivity options, routing, security, and performance optimization on AWS. It would be best if you had a solid foundation in networking principles. You should be familiar with various AWS networking services such as Amazon VPC, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Transit Gateway, VPN, Route53, and more. The breadth and depth of knowledge required for this certification can be challenging, especially for those new to AWS or with limited networking experience.
The exam presents complex networking scenarios requiring critical thinking and problem-solving skills. You are expected to apply your knowledge of networking concepts and AWS networking services to real-world scenarios and make appropriate design decisions.
In my opinion, the AWS Certified Advanced Networking—Specialty certification has relatively limited study resources compared to other popular certifications, especially in hybrid environments and Direct Connect.
The questions in this exam are very complex and challenging to understand. Although they initially seem straightforward, you may completely misunderstand them by the end of the question. The questions are formulated in a way that might trick you and make you fall into a “trap,” so stay alert.
Tips:
As this exam is the hardest one out there, you must be careful when reading the questions and ensure you understand what they are asking. Remember, a single word can make a difference.
In my experience, at least half of this exam concerns a hybrid environment and connecting on-premises to AWS. Therefore, it would be helpful to practice using as many hands-on labs as possible on this topic.
Again, you must understand the question clearly and know networking topics at an intense level, such as connectivity options, routing, network security, network performance optimization, hybrid networking, network monitoring, and troubleshooting.
Exam details:
Format: 65 questions, either multiple-choice or multiple responses
Length: 170 minutes to complete the exam
Level: Specialty
Passing score: 750
Unscored content: 15 questions
Learning resources:
One very well-documented course: here
Practice real-life exam scenario questions: here
Official AWS exam guide: here
Official AWS page: here
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
GENERAL TIPS & TRICKS FOR EVERY AWS DEVELOPER CERTIFICATION EXAM
A wise man once said: “If you think you can, then you’re right! If you think you can’t, then you’re right!” It’s all about mindset! Try to set up clear and realistic goals and keep them measured.
- Tracking your progress is always the best way to keep you going.
- Try grouping the options into two sections. Grouping is beneficial for professional-level exams. The options you will see are very similar, with the only difference being ONE word. Be overly cautious with these because they tend to be very tricky. Once you group the options into two sections, you can remove a section (a set of possibilities) just because it is unrelated to the use case and then focus more on the remaining ones.
- Read the answers first: That sounds wild, but if you read the answers first, you may already observe a wrong answer or an option that has nothing to do with the other options presented. You can exclude it from the start and focus only on the remaining options.
- My advice? Try reading the questions from end to start; you may not need to read the entire text to select the correct answer. In my experience, often, the questions contain technically irrelevant content that we do not need to formulate our answer, and the specific question-related information is at the end. This way, you can save some time and understand the context of the questions quickly.
- Always make sure that you understand the question along with the scenario. From my experience - in some cases - the scenario can be presented just as an add-on (but you will consume time reading it) to a question about a specific service that is only mentioned by name in that scenario. For example, we have a scenario about a company with many servers and different regions with many specifications, and the question is: “What’s the cheapest tier from S3 for long-term storage?”. This question will be at the very end of the text.
- Avoid rushing through the exam and double-check your answers before submitting. Rushing is never a good strategy, especially for AWS exams, so… take your time.
- Hands-on experience with AWS services is crucial for understanding how different services work and interact. You can always shorten the learning time by going hands-on. For example, if a video shows you how to create an S3 bucket and what options you have there, you can jump right into the AWS management console and try it yourself. I guarantee you will see more details than just watching the video.
- To simulate real-life exam experience (especially on the Professional and Specialty levels), try taking Whizlabs exams and act like you are in a real exam (avoid getting up from the examination desk, do not take breaks, or be interrupted in any manner). This will be very helpful in determining whether you can make it to the end. It will also help you evaluate your weak points during time pressure, especially on the professional level.
- Practice good time management during your preparation and the exam. If you encounter a tricky question, flag it and move on to the next one. You can come back to the flagged questions later.
- Celebrate small successes to keep you going, like finishing a section from a course, celebrating the completion of a lab from a course, and so on. Remember that progress takes time, so don’t rush.
In conclusion, I hope you will find the advice, tips, tricks, and resources I shared here helpful in your AWS journey. I wish you the best of luck in achieving as many AWS certifications as you want (get them all 😊).
*AUTHOR: GEORGE DOBRIȘAN | SOFTSERVE SENIOR AWS DEVOPS ENGINEER
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