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How to pass AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate

Last week I  passed the AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate certification exam with 88% score and I would like to share my experience with you regarding the preparation and the exam.
This blog would cover the topics in a nutshell and I am planning to create further posts soon to cover related topics.

First you will be very anxious to know the main areas covered in my exam. I would like to give a quick list of topics below and some details as well. This would help you understand the areas need to focused on. Please note that AWS certification exams are dynamically generated and one exam would definitely be different from another.

AWS is vast and very dynamic, it is getting changed every day. New features are added and updated are being made very frequently. Always it is better to rely on AWS documentation for accurate details.

Main topics I would like to mention are below.
  • VPC ( Virtual Private Cloud )
    • This is one of the building blocks of any corporate cloud infrastructure and as many of you might know VPC is a logically isolated network within AWS. There are many topics need to be familiarized and practiced within VPC. Main topics to be covered in detail are
      • Create a VPC in your own AWS account using AWS console
      • Understand CIDR address notation, understand what a subnet is.
      • How to create Private and Public subnet including use cases where if we have a webs erver and database server in our application then what is the best practice.
      • NAT instance - This is a definite exam question. Expect atleast 2 questions from this topic.
      • NAT Gateway - This is a definite exam question and expect one or two questions from this.
      • Understand Network ACL vs Security groups and when to use what. I had couple of questions from this topic. For example if I need to prevent an IP from coming inside my network which method you are going to use.
  • API Gateway and AWS Lambda
    • I was not expecting much questions from these topics and I was wrong! There were many questions from API gateway and AWS Lambda. So make sure that they are covered including:
      • What are the best practices and use cases for both services to use.
      • How this is different and effective compared to an EC2 hosted website if you need a high scalable solution without any infrastructure overhead is required.
  • Databases
    •  There were many questions related to different AWS databases in the exam. Below are the main topics.
      • RDS - There were couple of  questions related to RDS including Multi-AZ and read replica.
      • Dynamo DB - Couple of questions from Dynamo DB. Some questions were simple use cases asking in a particular scenario what DB should be used. There are questions about efficient Dynamo DB indexing, how the index key should be created so that low latency read is achieved.
      • Redshift - Need to know that is is used for Data warehousing
      • Aurora 
      • Elastic Cache - how this helps to improve application performance
  • AWS S3 ( Simple Storage Services)
    • There are many questions from S3
      • Standard S3 - use cases like static websites
      • S3- IA when to use this 
      • S3 - RRS when to use it.
      • Glacier - for life cycle management, Encryption in Glacier
      • Encyption and Versioning in general
      • Cross Region Replication
      • Storage Gateway - Which storage gateway option is used for a scenario
  • AWS EC2
    • The questions were mostly on availability and scalability including
      • The order in which scale-in happens when we have multiple Availability Zones and all has many EC2 instances
      • What is the efficient number of EC2 instances to be deployed in each Availabilty Zones if a desired number of EC2 instances are need to be up any time even after failure of one AZ.
      • How AMIs can be copied across  regions.
      •  EBS Vs Instance Store. 
      • Which EBS storage type need to be used in each scenarios. This can be related to imcreased IOPS or increased throughput.
  • Route 53 
    • Couple of questions from Route 53
      • Different routing policies and when to use what example Geo Location policy
      • Some questions related to availability of site at different Geo locations
  • SQS, SNS
    • Couple of questions and their use cases
      • FIFO Vs Standard SQS queue use cases
      • How SQS can be used to decouple application into modules using SQS.
      • SNS notification service 
  • IAM
    • There are some questions about IAM roles, MFA, IAM Groups etc
  • Cloudwatch and CloudTrail
    • Use cases when to use what
  • CloudFront
    • Couple of questions from CloudFront combining with S3.
  • Kinesis
    • Use cases. Need to know what is the use case for each of these
      • Kinesis Streams
      • Kinesis Firehose
      • Kinesis Analytics
  • ECS
    • Expect at least a question from ECS.
  • Elastic BeanStalk 
    • Use cases. When do you go for Elastic BeanStalk approach for your application.
  • Direct Connect, VPC Peering, VPC Links
    • Expect atleast one question from each of these services

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