AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

I passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam this morning with an acceptable 77%. That's the first non-Microsoft exam I have taken in almost 7 years.

I was getting bored of the 2 week Office 365 migration engagements I've been delivering and looking to branch off into another area. I was trying to decide between Lync, Azure, or something else when my company signed a partnership with Amazon Web Services a few months ago. That came with some training and certification vouchers with the requirement that we have certified individuals by the end of the year. I was pushing for training and we needed people to certify, and it all came together last month.

Resources used:
AWS Partner Technical Assessment courses
3-day Global Knowledge AWS Associate training course.
Slides and notes from the course
The free AWS tier for some general familiarity
AWS Whitepapers
AWS Official Documentation - free on Kindle
CloudAcademy Subscription for the practice exam.

The Getting Started guides, followed by the User/Admin/Developer Guides for a deeper dive, were great resources - and free! I took the class a couple of weeks ago, reviewed the slides and referenced the guide books last week, the reviewed with CloudAcademy yesterday. The test was the typical multiple choice exam. I had plenty of time to complete and review some questions, but there were a few that I flat did not know.

I'm excited about AWS now and looking forward to deploying and migrating customers to AWS. Especially after the 96 hour, 12 hour on/12 hour off schedule, disaster recovery test at my client last week. The whole time I was thinking "If they would only put this in the cloud..."

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Comments

srabiee

Thanks for letting us know. I'm still wholly engaged in Microsoft certs, and soon to be VMware certs, so I haven't really given any AWS stuff much thought. Definitely worth a look into.

SixtyCycle

The Getting Started guides and the User/Admin/Developer Guides, are these from the AWS website? I'm interested but my company is not a partner. What will be my best materials and how much study time do you suggest?

Claymoore

Search the Kindle store on Amazon for AWS and you will find all the documentation. The Fundamental level labs at QwikLabs look very close to the labs we ran in the class. Most of the labs cost tokens, however the Introductory labs are free. Everyone also gets access to a free tier of AWS for the first 12 months to build familiarity.

My total time from starting to certifying was 6 weeks. I read the Getting Started and User Guides for about a month, spent 3 days in class, and then reviewed for a week before the exam.

SixtyCycle

That was valuable information. Thanks for the help Claymoore.

Itrimble

To anyone interested in pursuing this track, EDx is currently getting ready for a new class: The minimum for the verified certificate is $50
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in Entrepreneurship 101 or Entrepreneurship 102 [/h]

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Am I Eligible?

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ENROLL IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP 101
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FAQ
If I already took 15.390.1x for a verified certificate, can I get $1,000 of credit on AWS?

We encourage you to enroll in 15.390.2x Entrepreneurship 102: What can you do for your customers? in the verified track to be eligible for the $1,000 credit. We are not retroactively allowing eligibility.

If we have a team account for AWS, how could we apply the $1,000 credit to a team account?

When you apply on AWS make sure to use your team’s Account #. Whatever Account # you provide to edX is the one that will be associated with the credit.

Can I transfer the $1,000 AWS to a teammate on a startup?

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AWS has set up AWS China (Beijing) Region to improve accessibility in China. If I get an edX certificate for 15.390.1x or 15.390.2x, can I apply it to AWS China (Beijing) Region?

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If I take the course on Edraak or Xuetang and get a verified certificate, can I get the $1,000 AWS credit?

The credit is only available to those who take the course on edx.org.