How I studied for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam

I recently took (and passed) the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam and figured I would share how I studied for this test. When I took the associate level of this exam I only had 3 days to study and very little existing experience with AWS before hand and that is definitely not how I would recommend taking these exams. For the professional level exam I had around 3 months of time from the time I started studying to when I had to pass the exam or my associate level exam would have expired.

If you are studying for the associate exam I think the study guide below would probably still work (Although it might be a bit of overkill), just skip the professional level white papers and courses on Linux Academy and Cloud Academy.

Full disclosure, I work for Amazon Web Services as of a couple of months, but the opinions expressed in here are my own.

Prerequisites

Here are the things you should already have done and know before you start thinking about this exam.

• You will need a broad general knowledge in IT. If you don't have it you can probably pass the associate level exam which is more focused on only AWS specific technology. For the professional level one you will need to have a broad general IT knowledge because they will assume you have a general understanding of how WAN routing, non AWS enterprise software (For instance do you know that Oracle RAC requires multicast and EC2 does not support that).
• You need to have passed the associate level exam within 2 years.
• I would highly recommend that you have been using AWS for a while. This will help you wrapping your head around some of the AWS specific concepts that other services are based on easier.

Study Outline

In short here are the things I did to study this.

1. Start by reading all the recommended white papers listed at the official certification guide site. I would recommend reading both the professional and associate level ones, because everything you knew when you took the associate level exam you will still need for the pro level one.
2. Sign up for Linux Academy and start taking the classes for first the associate level course and then the professional level course. Don't forget to take the labs as well. Don't take the final quizzes yet (The ones per section are fine though).
3. Sign up for Cloud Academy and take their classes for associate level and professional level courses. Same thing here, wait with the final quizzes.
4. Once I finished all the courses I read recommended the white papers again.
5. Do all the final quizzes from both Cloud and Linux Academy and make sure you get a passing grade. If there are sections that you are weak in then go back and study deeper in those areas, both Linux Academy and Cloud Academy have a lot of content aside from the lectures they recommend for the CSA certification so you don't have to just listen to the same lectures over and over.
6. Try the sample questions from Amazon, you should be able to answer these by now. If you feel like shelling out some money for trying the sample exam go ahead. I skipped this step myself.
7. Sign up for the exam.
8. Read all the recommended white papers again the day before the exam.
9. Take the exam.

Additional things you might want to consider.

• Amazon recommends you taking the Advanced Architecting on AWS class. I took this class about 8 months before I took the exam and even though it is a good class I don't think it is that useful for passing the exam.
• Amazon sometimes have AWS CSA Professional Readiness Workshops and if you have the ability to go to one of these I would highly recommend it. I am not sure if these are held outside of AWS re:Invent conferences though. For the associate level exam I know these workshops are held quite often and they are great too.
• Qwiklabs is a great resource for practicing your AWS skills. That said if you have your Linux Academy and or Cloud Academy accounts they have labs too that are included in your subscription. These labs are better though if you can afford them.

If you can I would also recommend to start a study group and get together once a week or so and do sample questions and discuss the answers from one of the sources listed above. I did this with some of my work colleagues and I found that very helpful.

Schedule

I would recommend that you plan that studying for this will take at least 2 months. I did it in roughly 3 months, but I only studied actively for about 4 to 6 of those weeks. When I studied I spent roughly two to four hours every evening. Unless you are already a whizz at AWS I doubt you can crank this into a few days, which is very doable for the associate level exam. Roughly I divided my time like this.

10%	Initial studying of the white papers.
50%	Watching the training videos on Linux Academy and Cloud Academy.
15%	Taking labs.
10%	Doing quizzes.
10%	Additional revisions based on discovered deficiencies from the quizzes.
5%	Re-reading the white papers (The second and third time I skimmed through them a lot faster than the initial deep read).

Taking the exam

Don't go until you feel you are ready, so don't schedule the exam until you feel done. At least where I live I could schedule the exam just one day out so you don't need to plan ahead for this.

I am usually a very fast test taker (I took the associate level exam in less than half the time. However time management is going to be important when you take this exam. When I took the test I finished all the questions with around 25 minutes to spare and at that point I had roughly 30% of them marked to be revisited. After going through them all again I had less than two minutes left of my time. It says that the test is 80 questions on the description, but I only had 77 questions in mine. I'm guessing number of questions vary slightly depending on how they are selected randomly.

Cloud Academy vs Linux Academy

Cloud Academy and Linux Academy have a lot of overlap and I recommend that you would subscribe to both of them for this. That said here are the advantages to each of them as far as I experienced it.

• Linux Academy have more questions in the final quiz and vastly longer study material for the professional exam than Cloud Academy. The entire course in Linux Academy is around 30 hours long and the corresponding course in Cloud Academy is only around 3 hours. And this is not something that can be covered in 3 hours. Their associate level courses are much more on par.
• Cloud Academy has a much better interface for doing quizzes and revisioning where after each question it tells you the answer and short extract of information about the answer with links to the AWS documentation.
• Cloud Academy allows you to set the playback speed of the training videos which I like (I feel I can still assimilate information when playing these at around 1.5x speed and it saves time). Linux Academy also had occasional streaming issues in general for me requiring me to sometimes have to restart videos.
• If you are a student or have an edu address Cloud Academy is a lot cheaper than Linux Academy with $9 per month. If you don't on the other side Linux Academy is cheaper than Cloud Academy with a factor of 2.
• Both services are very easy to cancel once you are done with your studying in case you don't feel you need them anymore.

When all is said and done though I could probably have passed this with only Linux Academy, but Cloud Academy would not have been sufficient for me (Especially since the training material for the professional level CSA is so short). That said, I still think that the Cloud Academy course provides a valuable alternative to Linux Academy and especially if you can sign up as a student it is so cheap that there is pretty much no reason not to.

Multiplying 6 to 10 on your fingers

It is not rocket science to handle the multiplication tables of 6 to 10 in your head but I just thought this trick for doing it on your fingers was so neat that I had to share it.

Finally someone is looking at the high price of a college degree

You might already know about Kahn Academy which provides an interesting and fun way of learning for children up to around a high school level. But what do you do if you are an adult and want to learn a more advanced topic. If you are not the person that is able to get comfortable with a new field by just picking up a book. There is another site aiming for revolutionizing higher level education in the same vein as Kahn Academy is trying to do for lower degrees called Udacity.

Currently the site is free as they are building up their course catalog, but the goal is to eventually offer the equivalent of graduate degrees for as little as $100. A slight difference to what is currently available from universities in the US.

They are also disputing the notion that learning that happens early in your life before you go off and start your career. Instead it thinks that you should keep educating yourself throughout your entire life. Something that I totally agree with.

I completed a couple of classes myself and so far I really like it and can completely recommend it to everybody who has an interest in learning new things. And as I said earlier... It's free!

How do you fix education when 70% of 4:th graders are failing writing?

How do you fix your education when 70% of your 4:th graders are failing their writing tests? In Florida they decided to make the test easier to pass instead of actually teaching kids how to read and write properly. Even though I am not a parent reading things like this just makes me sad. I'm pretty sure kids today aren't more stupid than previous so something else must have changed, but this is not the way to fix it.

If you're a parent you should know about Kahn Academy

If I had kids I would give them some kind of indestructible table (For instance a Kindle Fire in a sturdy case) and lock it down to only be able to access Kahn Academy. If you have never heard of this website you should check it out right now as long as you are still interested in learning new things and if you have children I would say it is practically mandatory.

Originally the site started out as with mostly math and science courses and this is still the most developed subjects but it also contains courses in economics and history and tons of other stuff (There are currently over 3000 lectures available on the site). Each individual lecture is never longer than 10 minutes long so it's easy to sneak one in when you have a few minutes left over. There are also practice courses that help you apply what you have learned that are using all the latest "gamification" methods making it really fun to do them (I like doing it myself when bored). The courses start from the very basics and then build on each other onto increasingly advanced topics.

Kahn Academy started out with Salman Kahn realizing that he was spending a lot of time helping to tutor his relatives and friends and started putting short courses on YouTube. It grew into a very popular channel and in the end led to quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management and work on it full time. The Bill and Melissa Gates foundation is an enthusiastic backer of the project and Bill at one time was quoted saying "I'd say we've moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job".

Cool video explaining the concept of different magnitudes of infinity

This video goes through and explains the concept of different magnitudes of infinity in a way that is easy to follow, something that can generally be really tricky to grasp intuitively.

If you are interested in what I think is the fascinating world of numbers I can absolutely recommend this very easy to follow Teaching Company course on the subject called Zero to Infinity: A history of Numbers. I listened to it a few months ago and found it fascinating.

Upgrade your memory with this instructional video

This video shows a really cool example about how you can improve your memory by visualizing what you need to remember in an interesting way.