When I decided to go for AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam I was confused about how to start with preparation. Syllabus of the exam is vast and covers a lot of topics. I needed someone to guide me for this exam.
After going through many forums I came to the conclusion that I’ve two options.
- To attend the course at one of the training institutes. The official training cost range from $800 to $1500. Even the institutes offering non-official training quoted $400 to $900. This was huge money considering that my last company was not sponsoring this course and I have to pay for it myself.
- Second option was to look for online courses. These course are cheap ranging from $10 to $100 but I was not sure about the quality of content and how much I can learn with just online training.
Linux Academy has good material and people have written some good feedback for them. But the problem with them is that you have to buy their monthly subscription with plans starting from $29. I knew that with a full-time job I won’t be able to complete the course properly in 1 month.
So I checked on acloudguru course. Many people have given good feedback for this course too. The course was listed on acloud.guru website for $29. But I found the same course on Udemy for $10 in a special offer at that time. Udemy also provides you free lifetime access to the course. I found this was most suitable for me so purchased it. Also once you buy the course from Udemy you can get free access to the same course on acloud.guru website also.
Now coming to the acloudguru AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
As of Apr-2018 course has around 22 hours of on-demand video.
The course is very comprehensive and it gives you a good understanding of topics. Instructor(Ryan) is very energetic and he tries to teach you the topic in a very simple way. So even if you don’t have background in AWS then also you will understand the topics with not much effort.
It covers a lot of practical labs which you can follow by creating your own AWS free tier account. It covers almost all topics of the exam. So you don’t have to worry about the syllabus.
It also has quizzes in between the course for knowledge check and also full length mock exams to test your understanding.
One of the recommendation for the exam preparation is to go through the white papers. Each of the white paper is a big pdf of 50 to 200 pages. And for the associate level you are supposed to read around 6 to 7 of them. This can be overwhelming but Ryan cover the gist of these whitepapers in his course.
The course is very useful to get you started on the AWS journey. But the course alone is not enough to clear the exam. You need to have good practical knowledge of AWS for clearing the exam and this course give you the correct direction.
You can get good sample exam questions for practice from another course of acloudguru on Udemy Exam Questions – AWS Solution Architect Associate or from Jon AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams for which most students have written great feedback.