You want me to get AWS certified, sure why not!

Mitechniq

My company is currently pushing for it's employees to get AWS SA Associate certified. They are offering a bonus to anyone that passes the exam by Feb 29, 2015. I certainly cannot let that type of incentive go to waste, so I am taking a break from my VCP training and hitting this cert hard for the next 5 weeks.

I thought this document sa-associate-cert-prep.pdf we received was a great start to my studies.

chanakyajupudi

That is a good starting place! Best of luck with your exam.

Mike-Mike

someone posted some free training on here the other day I think

Claymoore

Are they paying for training? If so, look at the AWS Architecting course from Global Knowledge. It's the official course from AWS, costs about $2100 for 3 days, and can be either remote or on-site. I attended that course and passed the SA exam afterward.

If you are paying for training, Udemy is offering Ryan Kroonenburg's (ACloudGuru) SA course for $10 as part of a sale thru the 11th. I am using a beta version of his AWS Pro course to prepare for the AWS Pro exam and I am happy with the content. I picked up his other courses in an earlier sale for the AWS SysOps cert after I pass the Professional Architect cert.

https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?q=aws+certified+solutions+architect&src=sac&lang=en

jack84ie

Hi All,

My Company want me to do the AWS Solution Associate Exam,
but i don't know where to start any study Guides out there unofficial study guides from bloggers etc ?

what have Amazon have a Prep Book for the Exam ? was looking at either Linux Academy or cloud academy

techfiend

I'm starting to work on the CSA exam tonight. I've done some of the qwiklabs but they became kind of boring. I couldn't find any good reading material but most recommend cloudguru. If you hurry you can get it for $10 at the link posted by Claymoore above.

jack84ie

techfiend wrote: »

I'm starting to work on the CSA exam tonight. I've done some of the qwiklabs but they became kind of boring. I couldn't find any good reading material but most recommend cloudguru. If you hurry you can get it for $10 at the link posted by Claymoore above.

Thanks for the reply in the end i opened an Account with Linux Academy, they seem to be well up there, people from Reddit on the AWS fourm were saying they learned more with Linux Academy AWS then the Official 3day course

DoubleNNs

I wish someone could compare ACloudGuru w/ Linux Academy and say which one is better. I'm most likely going to go w/ one of the two, but haven't decided on which yet.

Linux Academy's videos are much longer. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing yet.

jack84ie

Any one use the CBT Nuggets ? are they any good there 3 courses on the AWS Essentials, Real Word and the Associate i know they are 3+ years old just wondering are they still relevant

Mitechniq

So I have 3 APN courses I have to take before I start my studies, it's part of the requirement from Amazon to my company.

• AWS TCO and Cloud Economics
• AWS Business Professional
• AWS Technical Professional

I have 2 of the 3 done. The first 2 are business heavy but the next one should start diving into some technical aspects of AWS.

DoubleNNs

jack84ie wrote: »

Any one use the CBT Nuggets ? are they any good there 3 courses on the AWS Essentials, Real Word and the Associate i know they are 3+ years old just wondering are they still relevant

I'm watching the CBT Nugget videos now. They still seem relevant - especially if you're new to Cloud and want to learn a lot about the concepts that have made AWS and other cloud solutions so popular. However, if your goal is just to pass the exam, might be much faster to skip the CBT Nuggets videos.

jack84ie

DoubleNNs wrote: »

I'm watching the CBT Nugget videos now. They still seem relevant - especially if you're new to Cloud and want to learn a lot about the concepts that have made AWS and other cloud solutions so popular. However, if your goal is just to pass the exam, might be much faster to skip the CBT Nuggets videos.

Thanks i Might skip and CBT and just use Linux Academy..

Claymoore

jack84ie wrote: »

Any one use the CBT Nuggets ? are they any good there 3 courses on the AWS Essentials, Real Word and the Associate i know they are 3+ years old just wondering are they still relevant

AWS has released about 1500 new or updated services and features in those 3+ years, so no. I read that it takes about a year for new features to make it into the exam, though.

Mitechniq

So I am done with my APN training, I am following that up with some Skillport(SkillSoft). Now I will say in the past I have absolutely hated Skillport for its mundane approach. I will admit I have been pleasantly surprised by the training and the instructor (Dan Lachance) teaching it. He is actually going through AWS and I am following along with him with my AWS Free Tier account. I know many of the bigger companies have purchased Skillport training and if you are in the military you have access to. It's not CBTNuggets but for a free offering, it is a good start.

Mitechniq

Alright, so I am done with my mandatory training, on to the fun stuff. I will start my acloud.guru course, which I paid initially through Udemy today.

First topic IAM.

Mitechniq

So I had enough time last night to go over IAM and S3 with acloud.guru. I won't break down his training simply because it is so inexpensive. I did use the following resources to further deep dive into these two topics.

Access Management - AWS Identity and Access Management

• Overview of AWS IAM Permissions
• Overview of IAM Policies

If you are unfamiliar with JSON and would like a nice intro, these two sections are great. There are is 6 more sections on this doc but I believe they are more geared to the professional level.

What Is Amazon S3? - Amazon Simple Storage Service

Another great read if you need further information on the subject.

One thing I thought was key that acloud.guru did not mention during the Lifecycle lecture is
Amazon S3 does not transition objects less than 128 Kilobytes in size to the STANDARD_IA storage class.
I can see that throwing me off if they happen to mention file size in a question involving Lifecycle Management.

On to EC2..

techfiend

I finished acloudguru a few days ago and now doing practice tests before testing next week. I found http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Pros--AWS-Certified-Arch/dp/B017CE1IMK/ref=sr_1_9?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF to be a really good test and it's highly recommended by others. It has Cloudformation included I don't remember Ryan ever going over that but they're relatively easy questions.

Mitechniq

I will take a look at it , thanks.

Mitechniq

So I didn't have much going on this weekend and thought maybe I would hit acloud.guru pretty hard.

I managed to finish all modules except 'additional exam tips' and built my first fault-tolerant auto-scaling website with WordPress. I own several domain names (a weird I hobby I have) and pointed one of them to the Route53 name servers. The setup worked like a champ. I deleted everything last night and this morning I rebuilt it from scratch with my own VPC. I scripted all of the installation, and in a matter of 7 minutes, my site was back up and running. I was feeling real good basically on CLOUD nine!

I took it a step further and paid for the AWS Kryterion practice exam, it kicked my butt, and I failed with a 60. I will say I was disappointed that it did not explain or go into any details on which questions you got wrong. It was like the real exam, only giving you percentages on the four domains. What a waste of 20 dollars, if I would have known this before I would of copy and pasted the questions to research the answer afterwards.

DoubleNNs

I think ACloudGuru has a mobile app (for 20 dollars) that has a large test bank of questions, for all 3 associate tests, and tells you the right/wrong answers afterwards.

techfiend

Acloudguru has an app for the solutions architect associate only and it's $20 at Exam Guru - AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate it doesn't get very good reviews and is basically the udemy tests. The app I posted is free through amazon underground, $4 through google play, but I don't know if it's very accurate to the real test. There's a lot of questions on defaults and maximums such as what is the default visibility of SQS messages and what is the max. This wasn't really explained in acloudguru from what I remember and isn't in their udemy tests. The udemy tests had a lot more technical questions. It would be nice to hear from someone who's taking it if it's more technical or more about defaults, maximums and charges.

Nice to see the wordpress lab is working, I couldn't get it to work after 2 tries and gave up. I also couldn't get the custom VPC to work after 3 tries and gave up. There was no errors I just couldn't connect to the website or ssh through NAT. I wonder if it had to do with being defaulted to us-west-2, what region did you use?

I feel like I'm not picking this up like I did with all other tests I've taken. It's my first exposure to AWS, first time relying solely on video and I'm off nootropics. They all three probably contribute but it's kind of disappointing. I do decently on the tests, mostly >70% but I'm kind of concerned getting thrown into a production AWS next month with what I know now. If there was only a good resource on paper that I could read, it would help immensely. I can understand why there isn't with how fast AWS is moving there'd have to be monthly reprints but still anything printed in the last year would help me at this point.

DoubleNNs

@techfiend: I've never read either of these, but they both have good ratings. (Not tailored to the test but instead to AWS overall, but might be even more beneficial to you if you're looking for resources to help you out in production situations.)

The book isn't out in print yet, but the book seems mostly finished and all material is available as a PDF
edit: the link doesn't work but look up "AWS System Administration" on the O'Reilly online bookstore

This book was released back in October in print:
edit: This link doesn't work either. Maybe something wrong with the link shortening on this site? Look up "Amazon Web Services in Action" on Amazon bookstore

Then of course, you already know of the whitepapers, AWS official blogs, AWS official podcasts, and then there are always 3rd party blogs and podcasts too.

techfiend

Thanks, my search skills failed me last time. All I came across was the for dummies book. I've ordered the Amazon Web Services in Action to read before testing. I haven't had good luck with O'reilly but I'll keep it in mind. Both links worked for me.

Mitechniq

@DoubleNNs: So to add insult to injury I just realized the exact same questions are under acloud.guru's scenario exam. Anyone taking the exam please do not waste 20 dollars on the practice exam, simply not worth it.

techfiend: Not quite sure where the problem might lie but on a quick config of an EC2 Amazon AMI, you can see if this setup works for you. I just did this a couple of minutes ago and verified by pulling the WordPress splash page. These are the configuration changes I made:

- add the S3 Admin Access to your IAM role
- Under Advanced Details - I ran a script (which is not allowing me to post it so I added it as a PDF)
- the Security Group should include port 22 and port 80
- and don't forget to download your .pem key

I am going to spend the rest of the night reading the suggested white papers. I am going to include the VPC one as well, there seemed to be a lot of questions on VPC configuration.

Cyberscum

@mite: Nice script!

@techfiend:Things to check:
IG is attached to the VPC and a route created that has the public subnet associated
NAT has an IP (elastic, LB or assigned)
NAT has auto source/dest check disabled
Edited default VPC route table to include NAT with correct inbound/outbound IP’s
Security group has HTTP/S/SSH enabled
HTTPD service is started in the webserver
Using correct .pem/.ppk creds

Mitechniq

So I passed yesterday with not the greatest score, but a pass is a pass. I was more nervous about this exam than any other; I had my whole team eyeing my results and requesting feedback. I usually do exams based on my own training needs, so this was a first. I had no AWS experience before my studies, and I used acloud, Linux academy and cloud academy. I might have overdone the CBT's, but I wasn't too sure on how the exam would go. Plus I saw a lot of feedback in their respective forums which were hit or miss on the pass results. Especially the ones that said they were sure they had accidently signed up for the wrong exam because some of the questions were simply too difficult.

I believe you can probably pass the exam just with ACloud and the whitepapers, I liked his style of teaching and his process on pointing out keynotes on the exam.

LinuxAcademy has a little more information but some of it leans more in the SYSops exam, and the questions are very SQS, SWF heavy.

CloudAcadmy was my least like study material but does have a better question pool, than the other two.