How I passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam in 1 month 2021

nice to meet you i'm victor i'm currently a full-time software engineer and today i'm going to go over how i acquired the aws certified solutions architect associate certification within one month and i ended up scoring 897 points out of a thousand so without further ado let's jump right into it let's start off with some quick viral logistics the exam itself cost 150 us dollars to take in addition to that i spent money on some preparation materials in particular one month of a cloud guru personal basic subscription plan and that ended up costing me 49 for one month i did take advantage of the one week free trial aside from that um i also paid for two sets of practice exams one from udemy and one from wizlabs i'll be linking all these resources in the description below the reason why i paid for an aclu subscription instead of just paying for the course the standalone course on udemy was because i wanted to access the hands-on labs and also the practice exam at the end of the course aside from that there was also another course on a cloud guru that i took which is the cloud practitioner course for coverage i didn't complete any of the quizzes but i took it for coverage so that's why i ended up paying for the subscription in fact the pricing per month for the personal basic plan got reduced from 49 to 39 dollars in the time of my recording in addition to the resources i just mentioned i also fought along with the instructor when he was covering a certain service or topic in aws and as a result i racked up an aws bill of 17 dollars and 16 cents i did go above the aws free tier and i did this because i wanted the full experience i wanted more hands-on practice because i actually do plan on using aws in my personal projects and that work moving on to the next topic we have time how much time did i spend preparing for this examination i officially started studying for this on december 18th of 2020 and i took my exam on january 20th of 2021. i took some days off during this time period in iceland and i had some days off also that i decided to spend extra time studying for them so on average i would say i spent five hours studying for a total of 135 hours keep in mind i did over study for this exam given that i scored way above 720 so i didn't really need to score that high but yeah that's how much time i spent preparing for this exam i would say if you want to spread it out a little bit that's probably a good idea i just wanted to get through this as soon as possible because at this current point in my life i'm trying to work on one thing at a time next up we have exam scheduling chances are if you're like me you're gonna be scheduling a remote proctored exam if you're doing so schedule it with comparison view this is gonna save you a lot of headache it turns out that psi has a lot of negative reviews so do that and if you're going for a popular time slot like a weekend in the morning i would suggest you schedule this exam out weeks in advance because those time stops run off often you might be lucky and you'll be able to catch someone's cancelled exam but don't count on that what i ended up doing was scheduling for a wednesday morning and generally the weekdays are pretty free in terms of like time slots a lot of time slots are available on the day of your exam make sure to run your system check before you check in you're generally allowed to check in 30 minutes before the actual exam and the reason you want to do this is to make sure that the exam software runs fine before you start your checking process for me i ended up having to restart my computer during the check-in process because i did not disable screen time for my mac so you want to avoid that hassle when you're taking your exam make sure you find an environment that's quiet the reason you want to do this because you might get disqualified if they hear any noise or another person in the room so keep that in mind all right so now let's jump into the meet up how i actually studied for this exam i started off with the a cloud guru course for the certification and that course was 36 hours long i ended up spending a little bit over 50 hours to complete it and the reason for that was i follow along with my own aws account and also i took a bunch of notes in the form of copying lecture slides until they stuck into my head that's just how i study now commenting on different aspects of the acl guru subscription first off the quizzes were great the video was great the practice exam was splendid um the ui was actually a lot better than the actual exam so that's one thing to keep in mind the explanation for everything was awesome good for studying material one thing i didn't like about the a cloud guru subscription were the hands-on labs essentially i felt like they were delivered in a poor fashion first off the instructions were in video format so you have to go back and forth on the video to reread some instructions secondly when you launch your lab environment you have to open a new tab copy and paste credentials over and that could have been implemented with one click and that's actually how wizlab does it thirdly there wasn't any validation for your labs so essentially you just tick which items that you completed at the bottom and yeah that's it there's not really any validation on whether or not you actually completed the task in the lab so i didn't really like that too much so yeah in addition to the in addition to the certified solutions architect course i also took the cloud practitioner course on a cloud guru for more coverage i just watched the video at 2x speed all right so let's talk about wiz labs for the package that i purchased it came with eight full-length practice exams 14 section quizzes for specific services and 50 labs i don't know if the labs are going to be offered when you do your purchase but they were really helpful for me first of all i only completed four of the full-length practice exams and i scored 81 83 86 and 90 respectively every time i took an exam i went through the solutions in a very detailed manner i covered everything and i thought this this tactic was superior in terms of just blindly studying for everything it helped me identify areas that i was weak in and also like the exam solutions were sufficient enough for me to review these topics for the most part when it came to the section quizzes i didn't touch any one of them but you could probably do that if you feel weak in a certain service or area if you want to improve your understanding of that service now for the labs um like i mentioned earlier i do prefer these labs a lot better than the a cloud guru hands-on labs and the reason because first of all the instructions were in text format the system the labs were overall more turnkey so they were a lot more convenient and intuitive and also they had a validation system built in so you were actually doing the lab and you're actually being tested on whether or not you completed the lab one thing i would say about the labs one drawback is you are actually limited to how many times you could take these laps because you are on a credit system but overall i still think it's worth it and i can't recommend wiz labs enough in addition to the aforementioned paid resources i also use the following free resources i went to the certification page and i went through some practice questions the exam rubric and the exam guide i went to aws training for the aws well architectured training course i don't know how helpful that was but i completed it for the sake of it now time for some external resources i first use jayco morrison's article on vpc he basically creates an analogy for vpc in terms of a city and this helps you understand this concept a lot this is one of the more difficult concepts to wrap around to wrap your head around so i definitely recommend this article and the final resource i'm going to mention today is jaendra's blog and this is basically like a giant list of cheat sheets for aws exams and i basically went here whenever i needed to dive deep into a topic yeah that's basically all the resources that i used so that basically sums up how i prepared for this exam and i'm going to end this video with a bonus tip chances are if you're watching this you're interested in getting this certification maybe you've been thinking about this for several months up to a year and maybe you even have some resources on hand that you haven't really gone through yet well the number one reason why i was able to get the certification within one month was because i had consequences and deadlines in place to ensure that i made progress and the concept that i really want to drill into your head is the deadline is the ultimate inspiration and a deadline without a consequence is meaningless so here's how i incorporated deadlines and consequences into my studying basically i have an accountability partner and i told them that i wanted to complete the a cloud guru course in 10 days and like i mentioned earlier that actually was 50 hours worth of work and i wouldn't have been able to complete it in 10 days if i didn't have a deadline and consequence in place my consequence was 200 us dollars and boy i'm gonna tell you 200 us dollars is a whole lot of motivation and that got me through that this was pretty hard this was extremely rough for me too because i was holding a full-time job and also was during holidays another example of how you can incorporate a deadline and a consequence is scheduling your exam before you're even ready and that forces you to study really hard for that to get ready i did this two days before i took the exam on martin luther king day i had that day off and personally i've already been going into a slump of like not really taking studying too hard and just really lagging out so basically that morning the morning of i scheduled my exam for two days from then and that basically forced me to study optimally for the next two days to finish strong because if i didn't i'd have to take this exam again and the worst part is i would have to pay another 150 us dollars to schedule that exam so that was enough motivation for me to finish strong and i did but yeah those are two examples on how you can incorporate consequence deadlines to ensure that you've acquired this exam in a timely fashion don't drag it out you don't want to do that you could do this in a short time do one thing at a time yeah thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content and you found that it was valuable please like subscribe and comment down below any of your thoughts and opinions and if you're interested in an opportunity of working me personally please join the mailing list down below and i will notify you as soon as i have that ready towards the end of this year but yeah until next time

Channel: Victor He

Views: 116,786

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Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021