I became AWS Certified Solutions Architect earlier this year. Here is my journey and what I learned.

October: Starting out

The company I work at hosted a guided study group to become AWS Certified Solutions Architect. I had been using the AWS PaaS platform Elastic Beanstalk to host my hobby project and fiddled with Lambda but honestly, I was pretty lost with AWS. So I figured it would be a great time to give my AWS knowledge a boost!

We formed a study group that met once a week to comment on progress and discuss questions. At the first session, we all signed up for the certification exam, which would be a multiple-choice exam. Mine was scheduled for December. 2-3 months should be enough, right?

Protip: I chose “English as a second language” from exam accommodations which gave me +30 minutes to complete the exam. This doesn’t affect the received certificate in any way.

For study materials we chose A Cloud Guru’s course AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C02) (note: updated SAA-C03 is available). Different sections were clearly split into chapters with videos, quizzes, and interactive labs. At the end of the section, there was a summary of everything covered. The interactive labs were pretty neat: a new AWS Console login is generated for you and you can easily play around with a real environment within the lab’s boundaries. A practice exam was also included.

All good, ready to start learning!

November: Steady progress …?

Four weeks passed. I had squeezed a solid 3-4h a week into studying. Cloud Guru’s materials were great and since the videos were 5-15min long it was easy to watch one whenever there was some free time.

I was doing steady progress… until I looked at the course overview and noticed I had completed 20% of the course. I checked the course details again: 45.9 hours of content! With my pace of 3-4h a week it would take me 11-15 weeks. And I would require some more time for practice exams and rehearsal. The obvious conclusion was that I had to increase the weekly hours. At the end of November, I was at a solid 50%, not even close to being on schedule.

December: Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit

Exam date and Christmas holidays were closing by. I squeezed in more weekly hours, I wanted to finish this in time! I studied 8-10 hours a week which started to take a toll with work and family. Stress was slowly building up and I just wanted this to be over. Other study group members were celebrating their passed exams and I didn’t want to be the one to quit.

The exam date came closer and I was at 85% of my study materials, without any rehearsal or practice exams. Okay, I was not going to complete this in time. With great hesitation, I rescheduled the exam to January. Now off to the Christmas holidays!

January: Finishing line!

New year, I had almost completed the study materials. Just a little crunch time during the last days of the Christmas holidays and I had a full 100% completed!

Now that I had completed everything, I was ready for my first practice exam! Turns out, you can squeeze quite many details into 45.9 hours of content. Also, it turns out there are gotchas like “all these options are technically correct, but this is correct because it’s most cost-effective”. After the first practice exam, it was obvious I still had much rehearsing to do.

I returned to watch the summaries of each chapter and rewatched details here and there. I did 4-5 more practice exams and things started to make sense. My new exam date came closer but I was starting to feel confident!

On Jan 13th I went to the certification location and after nervously waiting in the lobby, was directed to a classroom with a computer. The exam had started for real.

I started to go over the questions and what the hell, many of them were completely different from the practice exams! Not only that, the questions and answer options were much longer and more detailed. I couldn’t use the routine gathered from the practice exams and had to read everything extra carefully so I wouldn’t miss any technical details.

After three hours, I had answered all the questions. I submitted my answers and with a beating heart and cold hands, I watched the final score load… PASSED! I had quite a few wrong answers, but not enough to fail.

Finally, this whole journey would be at an end!

Conclusion

So I’m an AWS Certified Solutions Architect now. I studied different services, infrastructures, and terminologies for hours. What did I end up with?

Towards the end, I realized that studying for a certification exam did not feel like learning new tech. Usually, I’m learning new stuff hands-on; I have a problem to solve. Studying for the certification exam felt like studying for a high school exam. Cramming loads of stuff into my head, without any real use.

So, was the certification study a waste of time? Absolutely not! I learned a ton of different high-level concepts and terminology I will see in my daily work. Now I have a better grasp of what everything means and how different things interconnect. Just adjust your expectations.

I still don’t know how to really use any of the AWS services I learned or how to build solutions with them.

But I know where to start.