AWS Certification Progress Thread

DoubleNNs

Just signed up for an AWS free tier personal account. (Honestly my 2nd free tier account -- I had one that I rarely used but it expired.) Finally getting serious about my next round of certifications and hopefully this progress thread will keep me dedicated. Hoping to eventually land a Cloud Automation or DevOps role.

Planning on starting w/ a casual blitz thru CBT Nuggets Material, then segue into Qwiklabs. I'll decide on the rest of my resources as the time comes. Might be interesting since I don't see many books on the subject, other than the free AWS eBooks available for kindle, and even tho seem to be on somewhat random topics.

The end goal is to start with the AWS CSA and get at minimum 2 AWS certs by the end of the year. The stretch goal is to pass all 3 associate-level certifications and the DevOps professional exam. Not going to set hard time-line limits on the certs, but instead going for consistency in studying.

Let the studying begin!

techfiend

Good luck! I started studying yesterday with free kwiklabs to see if it's interesting enough to study to prepare myself for cloud DR in my current position. The kwiklabs aren't bad but I won't be purchasing, not explained well enough.

Let us know how CBT is. I'm using udemy/acloudguru which is really good so far, it's the first video training that's been as effective as text for me. 11 hours of video including well explained labs and a few tests. If the solution architect remains as easy as it's been I should be ready to test next week.

The developer cert is apparently easier and doesn't involve much coding like I feared. SysOps is a bit more difficult and the pro certs are supposedly very difficult. The bell grading is definitely unique.

jack84ie

techfiend wrote: »

Good luck! I started studying yesterday with free kwiklabs to see if it's interesting enough to study to prepare myself for cloud DR in my current position. The kwiklabs aren't bad but I won't be purchasing, not explained well enough.

Let us know how CBT is. I'm using udemy/acloudguru which is really good so far, it's the first video training that's been as effective as text for me. 11 hours of video including well explained labs and a few tests. If the solution architect remains as easy as it's been I should be ready to test next week.

The developer cert is apparently easier and doesn't involve much coding like I feared. SysOps is a bit more difficult and the pro certs are supposedly very difficult. The bell grading is definitely unique.

Is the AWS Solution Architect - Associate level exam easy ? i see you have a VCP6 are the questions as hard the as the VCP meant to be ? taken my VCP in 2weeks time and then aiming to take the AWS assoicate in March or April

wahrheit

I took the exam, and passed, before Christmas 2015. It's not an 'easy' exam per say, but if you have been setting up applications in the AWS environment (namely IaaS wih Spot instances and autoscaling) you can pass. I was surprised, most vendors have 'gotcha' style questions (even Comptia to an extent), AWS does no such thing...they ask exact questions of what the best approach would be in situation X; The practice exams you can get for $20 follow the actual exam difficulty fairly well (and I'm assuming use the same question bank as I got one of the practice questions on the actual exam).

Be warned though, I ran through the practice tests twice, and it seemed that the questions were the same both times. We do however have people at work complaining about the difficulty of this exam...so take my statements with a grain of salt.

DoubleNNs

Been roughly 2 weeks since I started this thread.

Finished "CBT Nuggets - AWS Foundations", which is an old series from 2012 that actually predates the certifications. Although it most likely won't be the most helpful series for the exam, there were some great tips littered in regarding best practices, tips for improving performance, and a small look into a case study of when CBT Nuggets migrated their own website into AWS. I started out enjoying of the series, but for some reason I felt it really dragged on. It became hard for me during the 2nd half to push through and complete it from start to finish.
Additionally, not only is the AWS Console UI completely different now than what it was in the series during 2012, AWS has made over 1500 updates to services in the time since the series, with just under 600 of the updates from last year alone. It was cool to have a time portal into the past to get a better idea on how AWS has grown overtime, but even though the core services have remained mostly the same, it made it evident that w/ AWS, the more up-to-date the material is, the better.
In fact, moving forward, while exercising my Google-fu I've made a point to look at the dates of all tutorials and blogs pertaining specifically to AWS materials and avoid using anything too old -- I try my best to have everything dated in 2014-2016, and ignore everything older than 2013.

My plan was originally to go through at least 2 of the 3 CBT Nuggets series, but after realizing how out of date they were (because of the velocity in which AWS is updated) I decided to end there. I bought the ACloudGuru videos on Udemy for $10 bucks and am slowly going through them now. Completed the intro to the CSA course and the "10,000 ft overview" of all the services. Next up is IAM and then object storage services. I'm excited to dig in!

DoubleNNs

Just finished the A Cloud Guru videos and scheduled the CSA exam for the morning of Tuesday, Feb 23. Going to spend the rest of today going over the A Cloud Guru quizzes, summary videos, and scanning thru the suggested white papers. Tomorrow I plan to find a few other practice quizzes to go thru and go over all the notes I've taken up until now.

Claymoore

Reading through the storage options whitepaper right now as a review for my CSA Pro exam tomorrow. Be sure to pay attention to the anti patterns so you know when not to use a particular service. Good luck!
http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Storage_Options.pdf

DoubleNNs

Hope I'm not too late -- Good Luck on the CSA Pro today Claymoore!
Also, thanks for the tip on reading through the Storage Options whitepaper. Honestly, I have a bunch of the white papers downloaded but haven't read more than maybe 5 pages in them haha. I'll try to give a few of them a quick read through with a highlighter later tonight, putting more emphasis on the Storage Options paper you suggested.

DoubleNNs

Found a great write up to the AWS sample questions: https://markosrendell.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/aws-certified-solutions-architect-sample-questions-answered-and-discussed/

Great because not only does the blog author label which answers are correct (the original sample questions don't give correct answers) but the author also describes why each correct answer is correct and each incorrect answer is wrong and then gives context around each question. I found it an invaluable resource in my last minute review prior to the exam.

Now, back at it

DoubleNNs

Passed the AWS CSA this morning
Didn't do nearly as much last minute studying with this one as I do w/ most other certs. Actually, in general my studying for this one wast as thorough and complete as has been for most of my other exams -- I didm't even look at the objectives for the exam.

Breakdown:
Overall Score: 87%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Designing highly available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, scalable systems : 87%
2.0 Implementation/Deployment: 100%
3.0 Security: 81%
[FONT=arial, sans-serif]4.0 Troubleshooting: 80%[/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]The exam isn't necessarily easy - the material itself isn't too difficult, especially if you've used a few of the services, but the test questions involve a bit of reading comprehension and correct interpretation. There were also bunch of questions that had multiple "correct" answers, but one of the correct answers was the best option - which would have tripped me up if I hadn't read all the answers.

Starting a new job soon, which unfortunately doesn't involve AWS, so I'll be putting my AWS studying in the back burner for now. [/FONT]My last job heavily involved AWS, but for now I'll only be using AWS for my personal projects for the time being.[FONT=arial, sans-serif] However, since the Developer exam is supposed to be easier, I'll try to knock that out by mid April (maybe sooner if the first few weeks at the new job are slow) and maybe look towards the SysOps and/or DevOps certs in Q4 2016.[/FONT]

hiddenknight821

Congrats on the pass! I have no experience with the AWS other than just running their EC2 free-tier instances. After seeing your post, I looked a little more into it. I see it's knowledge-based exam. $150 per associate exam is pretty fair IMO. I might look into this eventually. The SysOps and the Developer exams are quite appealing.

techfiend

Grats! Thanks for the insight, I think I may take it soon then, maybe as early as next week. Was it more about setting up the services or knowing which services you should use if you want to be most efficient?

hiddenknight821

I was under the impression that the AWS CSA is the equivalent of VMware's VCA-DCV exam in term of difficulty, but with slightly more information. Double, can you confirm this?

thulasi39

Nope. We can compare CSA with VCP-DCV, I will say it's bit more difficult.

I hold both certs VCP and AWS CSA.

DoubleNNs

I don't have a VCP, but I did complete the VCA-DCV. The VCA-DCV is kind of a joke of a certification, for technical professionals. I think it's more for sales or management to be able to speak the technical lingo. The CSA is much harder. But I'd say the difficulty of the exam probably matches that of a CompTIA exam -- just as I said above, the CSA material isn't very hard in itself, it's just that the questions are wordy and involve some reading comprehension and the ability to distinguish between similar services and which is the better choice in specific circumstances.

@techfiend - I def think you should take the exam soon, while you still have the momentum. That's essentially what I did. I decided just last Thursday that I'd take the exam in the beginning of the week and simply registered before I could think up reasons to delay. 5 days later I passed (tho close to 2 months after starting this thread). It seemed to work for me. And considering you have a larger amount and larger variety of certifications behind you than I do, I think you'd fare just as well as I did, or better.
The exam involved both setting up services as well as knowing which service to use to be more efficient. It was very scenario based -- if your org wants to do x and y, and has constraint z, should you implement a, b, c, or d? Answer a is outlandish, b can be eliminated just from knowing the different services, but you might have think hard between c and d.

Any other questions I'd be glad to answer, while the exam is still fresh.

DoubleNNs

Last night I bought the AWS DevOps Pro and AWS CSA Pro bundle from ACloudGuru.
Today I started studying for the AWS Certified Developer exam.

There's supposed to be a ton of overlap between the AWS CSA Associate and AWS Certified Developer exams, and I did pretty well on the CSA last month. Therefore I think I might be able to pass the Developer exam in roughly 2 weeks if I devote my off-hours time to it. I'm through w/ 30% of the content already (although a large amount of that was just the intro sections haha)

I don't use AWS, or any cloud offering/architecture, at the moment in my job but I did in my last role. I'm now dedicated to the goal of getting a CloudOps/DevOps role this year and start to specialize in Cloud and Automation moving forward.

Mitechniq

I think a lot of people have started taking all 3 exams fairly back to back learning all 3 at once. After I passed the CSA I did get some calls for Cloud Engineer positions but most wanted Chef/Puppet exposure.

Good Luck!

DoubleNNs

Thanks for Mitechniq! I think I'm going tossup the SysOps exam for now -- not because it'd be hard or time consuming to pass it, but simply for the money saving factor. Plus if I get it later while working on a role that is more AWS centric, it'd be a great opportunity to review.

I have some non-production Chef experience, played around w/ Puppet for a day before proclaiming I simply didn't like it, and have used SaltStack extensively in the past. I'm also thinking about introducing my current team to Ansible soon. The only thing is my scripting skills isn't as strong as I wish (possible imposter syndrome). I think I'll be all set w/ the AWS Certified Developer cert, stronger Python skills, and possibly a project in a public GitHub repo interacting w/ some type of API.

DoubleNNs

Didn't do any studying this weekend. But just finished my studying for the day. 50% of the way through w/ the A Cloud Guru course. Tomorrow plan on finishing S3 and DynamoDB, which seem to both be the huge chunks of the exam.

DoubleNNs

Last night booked the AWS Certified Developer exam for next Saturday. Have roughly 75% of the material completed. I'll probably finish that last 25% this weekend and then slowly review and take practice exams during the week after work.

DoubleNNs

Think I'm going to get bold and go for both the AWS Certified Developer exam and the AWS Certified SysOps exam this Saturday -- back-to-back on the same day. I'm 100% done w/ the Developer material but haven't gone through any practice exams. I'm 40% through w/ the SysOps material and plowing through.

The main thing I'm worried about is the mental drain of sitting though 3 hours worth of tests, especially since the SysOps exam seems harder. I don't know whether to schedule the SysOps (harder) exam 1st or 2nd. I'm also not too sure how I'd handle going into the 2nd exam if I fail the first one.

Oh well. Don't have much time to dwell on the doubts. Back to studying.

DoubleNNs

Finished all the ACloudGuru material for both the SysOps and Deveoper exams. Getting mid 80s on the ACloudGuru practice exams. I have a subscription to LinuxAcademy so I'll go through their practice exams tomorrow, go through AWS' example questions, and read through my notes.

Hopefully will be able to pass both on Saturday, and have a good chunk of my year's certification goals behind me so that I can focus more on programming and personal projects.

JoJoCal19

Good luck on the exams DoubleNNs. I signed up for the free tier of AWS this week and have been messing around with it. Remoted into my cloud Windows Server 2012 box on my iPad and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I may utilize that setup for labbing. It's pretty awesome stuff and I wish I could go deep into it but for now InfoSec is sucking up my studytime.

DoubleNNs

@JoJoCal19 - That sounds pretty cool. What app did you use on the iPad to RDP into the Win 2012 server?

Just came back from the testing center. Passed both exams.

The Certified Developer exam was a lot easier than I expected. Done in under 30 minutes (you're allotted 80) and didn't even bother to check answers -- I had flagged 3 answers to go back to, but evens till I was sure I passed. I took this exam first.

The Certified SysOps Administrator exam was night and day. A lot harder than I anticipated. Was much more up-to-date than the Developer exam, and even included certain AWS features that came out around Dec 2015 (whereas the Developer exam had an answer that has been incorrect since about late 2014). And the questions were extremely wordy, some requiring scrolling down the page. Just reading the questions alone introduced a lot of mental fatigue. I'd feel sorry for any non-native English speakers taking the exam. Took me almost 70 of the 80 minutes, and I didn't check my answers because I was too tired to care.

Topic Breakdown of both:

Developer
Overall Score: 85%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 AWS Fundamentals: 83%
2.0 Designing and Developing: 86%
3.0 Deployment and Security: 81%
4.0 Debugging: 90%


SysOps Administrator
Overall Score: 85%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Monitoring and Metrics: 75%
2.0 High Availability: 100%
3.0 Analysis: 77%
4.0 Deployment and Provisioning: 87%
5.0 Data Management: 85%
6.0 Security: 87%
7.0 Networking: 85%

devilbones

Congrats. I am thinking about doing some AWS certs soon. I went to the SysOps class last year but never followed up.

JoJoCal19

Congrats on the pass DoubleNNs! I'm using Microsoft Remote Desktop on the iPad. The experience is close to native.

hiddenknight821

I just noticed this now. Congrats, Double! Looks like you completed all the associate-level certs for AWS. Going for the pro level next?

I'll be honest, your progress in this thread really inspired me. Thanks for succeeding, proving that we can do the same.

JoJoCal19

It's inspired me too. I'm signing up for the CSA course at A Cloud Guru. After signing up for the free tier of AWS and playing around with it, I'm in love.

chanakyajupudi

Congrats on the pass. The SysOps is a tricky one. The pro ones are really cool ones to crack. I have done all of them in a 14 months.

DoubleNNs

Thanks for the congrats guys!

@JoJoCal19 - Yeah, AWS is crazy fun. And convenient - at the enterprise, startup, and individual layer. As you study for the cert and/or play around w/ it, keep me updated. I'm definitely itching to read about other TechExamers experiences w/ Cloud and DevOps.

@hiddenknight821 - I think I'm going to take a break from the AWS certs again. I want to get the DevOps cert before the year is over. However, I'm not currently in a role where I'm using AWS at all. I think I'll try to make a job switch during the summer and use studying for the cert as a refresher. Maybe by Q4 I'll get my next AWS cert.

Instead of AWS certs I'm setting a goal to get my RHCSA before July. In the meantime I'm working on getting up to speed with some other DevOps-related applications; currently In the middle of the LinuxAcademy Jenkins course now. Plan to finish it by Sunday and immediately start on the Nginx course after. I have 2 Docker courses I want to go through as well -- I've been going to a few Docker meetups in my area and the technology seems amazing, both as a test-bed and for provisioning resources in the cloud. I also want to start a few Python projects and increase activity on my GitHub.

Then I plan to maybe make a serverless online resume and/or blog site using AWS S3, Lambda, and Route53 this Summer.

Got a lot of exciting stuff to jump into, so I'm trying to put down the certifications for a bit so I have time to get through them. It's difficult tho. I'm tempted to jump right into my next cert! haha

itangel

So I am looking into being a AWS DevOps and notice AWS CSA is a good place to start. What tools and study materials you guys recommend for me? I came across a Udemy course two of them that I may buy to take. Is there anything else I need like book, lab study etc...? My background has been IT/Desktop Support/Network Tech and Communication. Current working as a .Net Developer with SQL, PLSQL, primary and secondary C# and ASP.NET. Already studying while working at work. So I plan to do AWS study at home after work and weekends.

Is this a great buy?
https://acloud.guru/bundle/aws-all-5-certifications