In this post we will discuss how to prepare for AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional certification.
Pre-requisite
Only pre-requisite to appear for the professional exam is that you clear AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification. You can check here about how to prepare for associate certification.
Once you have cleared the associate exam you can start preparation of AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional certification.
Many of the topics in the professional exam are same as that of the associate exam. So in professional exam you may actually see few questions are repeated from associate exam itself.
But still it has a lot of new topics also. Below are the topics on which you can expect most questions in exam.
Exam Topics
- VPC
- EC2
- S3
- Amazon Elasticache
- Redshift
- Cloudfront
- Elastic Transcoder
- AWS Data Pipeline
- RDS
- Cloudsearch
- EMR
- DynamoDB
- SQS
- CloudTrail
- KMS
- Kinesis
- Opsworks
- Auto Scaling
- ELB
- VPC peering
- Direct Connect
- Cross Account Access
As you can see the list above contains a wide range of topics and reading about them can be overwhelming. You can also see the official exam blueprint here . It is good if you have at least 1 year of experience with these AWS technologies.
You can start your preparation by attending AWS classroom training or you can go for online courses. I personally liked the contents of two online courses one was from acloudguru and other from linux academy .
Both the courses are good but I chose acloudguru course as the course allowed you lifetime access. While for linux academy you have to pay monthly fee. I knew that with full-time job it may take me more than a month to prepare for this exam so I decided to opt for the acloudguru course.
The acloudguru course is comprehensive and the trainer Ryan covers the topics in a decent way. The course alone is not enough to clear the exam but it will give you a good understanding of the exam topics.
Apart from the course you should also refer to the AWS FAQs which are very helpful during scenario based questions.
Also Linuxacademy gives you 7 days free trial so you can use that period to do their practice exams which also has lot of good questions.
Exam pattern
- Multiple choice and multiple answer questions.
- You will be given scenarios and questions will be based on that. Only few will be direct questions.
- Exam will be of 170 minutes
- And you can expect approx 80 questions
Exam cost is USD 300
You also have an option to appear for practice exam from Amazon. It costs you USD 40. Many people have told me that the actual exam is easier in comparison to the practice exam. So, if you score good in practice exam you can be sure about your preparation.
Sample Questions
You can refer to some sample exam questions here and on Udemy.
Hope the above info is helpful to you. Do let me know if you have any query.
Best of Luck for the exam!