Hey there 👋,

I’ve recently got my AWS Solution Architect Certification, I thought it would be useful to share my experience and list the resources that I’ve used for studying and exam prep.

To add some context, I’ve been working with a relatively small subset of AWS services on and off for the last couple of years, mainly gravitating around object storage, NoSQL databases, serverless stacks, decoupled software systems using Kinesis, SQS, and SNS.

For me, this certification was an engaging way to deepen and expand my knowledge of the AWS Cloud and its ever-growing list of high-level and low-level building blocks.

📚 Study resources:

To start, I’ve purchased this study guide and read it on my Kindle:

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA-C02 Exam by Ben Piper, David Clinton

It is a comprehensive guide although some services are not covered in detail, the book is almost 500 pages long, divided into 14 chapters.
The first nine chapters are dedicated to the most useful AWS services grouped by category.
The last 4 chapters focus on the AWS well-architected framework and the best practices according to the five pillars:

• Reliability
• Performance
• Security
• Cost efficiency
• Operational efficiency

Overall this guide will give you a complete overview of all the most important AWS services.
Another plus is that every chapter comes with test questions at the end of it to help you validate your knowledge and get accustomed to the format and types of the questions found in the actual exam.

📖 Official AWS Frequently Asked Questions

The online documentation for each AWS service and particularly the FAQ sections have been an incredible source of knowledge and I consider it crucial for thorough exam preparation.

The FAQs are a long read! I’ve decided to focus on a subset of services that are either fundamental for the exam or that I personally wasn’t too familiar with.
Here is my list:

• Amazon EC2
• Amazon S3
• Amazon ECS
• Amazon VPC
• Amazon Route 53
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon SQS
• AWS Global Accelerator
• Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
• Amazon FSx for Lustre
• Amazon Fargate

🧐 Practice exams
To simulate the exam experience with realistic questions and a cumulative test score there are a few popular options online.

After reading many of reviews I’ve decided to purchase the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Tests by Jon Bonso on Udemy.
The price is currently 29.99$ for 6 practice exams (390 questions in total).

The questions are of similar complexity to the ones found in the actual exam.
Each exam is 60 questions long and there is a timer ⏱ just like in the real exam. It’s useful to keep an eye on your pace even if in this mock exams you are allowed to go over time.
What I especially liked about these practice tests were the answer’s explanations. You get a detailed write-up on why the correct answer works and why the incorrect answers are not fitting in that specific use case or context.
It takes time to read them all but reading the explanations for both correct and incorrect answers really helped me clarify some edge cases.

That’s about it, these are the three resources that helped me, if you found this post useful, please give a clap and follow me here or on Github 👍🏼

Good luck with your AWS SAA-C02 exam 🍀!