How To Score 900+ on AWS Solutions Architect Pro

g'day everybody patrick here today i'm going to be talking about the aws solutions architect professional exam and how you can get a 900 plus on the first try that's out of a thousand so basically 90 so this video is going to be split into four parts number one direct preparation number two indirect preparation number three mindset number four exam strategy so for the first part in direct preparation i'm going to talk about the different resources i use to prepare which ones i'd recommend and how you can prepare for the exam effectively so first one number one i would thoroughly recommend this to everyone you may even just be able to pass this with pretty much this alone adrian cantrell's solutions architect professional course on cantrill.io i cannot recommend this more it is seriously an amazing course it goes so much beyond the actual requirements for the exam and goes into other topics that are useful as a solutions architect and i felt very prepared coming out of this course to tackle the exam and to also tackle real life projects in aws so it has been a very very high quality course if you're also at the associate level or if you just want to refresh your knowledge a bit for if you've recently done the associate exam but you feel like you only just passed or you want to practice it more um he's also got an associate course and it is excellent the only thing with these two courses is they are a little bit on the pricey side um so i'm in australia if you can't tell from my accent and the solutions architect professional course set me back a bit under 120 australian dollars i think if you compare this to the price of the exams themselves though which was uh 440 australian dollars i think it really basically doesn't compare and the quality of material you get from this is amazing i don't know how many hours the course is but it's easily over 40 hours and seriously you i kind of recommend it more the second course that i also really liked if you're uh on a bit of a budget or if you just want a shorter course i wouldn't recommend tackling this exam if you are trying to do it as quickly as possible it is not that kind of exam you really do need to have a really good understanding to get anywhere with it anyway stephane marek on udemy he's an amazing instructor and he gives a very good sort of theory heavy course on solutions architect concepts not as many labs but the theory is notch other ones just always the usual culprits a cloud guru and linux academy are good for starting points often their courses will give you enough to pass the exam i'd say for their associate level um when i did the associate solutions architect i didn't know about stefan and adrian camptell haven't created his course yet and i passed just fine with 910 out of a thousand on the solutions architect associate last year the linux academy and a cloud guru courses are great for the associate level courses i'd say once you get to the specialty and professional level you either need to do those courses plus a lot of extra study or you can follow one of the more in-depth courses that's outside of those platforms the other thing to note with linux academy and a-cloud guru is that recently they've had a merger so a cloud guru has acquired linux academy and what that means is that a lot of their courses are now being combined into one so i believe there's i may be wrong about this so if there's someone from a cloud group or the next academy please let me know in the comments but as far as i'm aware the solutions architect professional course is now the same between those two platforms so in terms of courses that i actually followed and this video is not going to all be about courses but it's good to start off with that i followed the icloud group course first i actually did this quite a while ago far before i was planning to actually do the exam just mostly out of interest when i was studying for the associate exam um and i achieved the associate certification in april last year so 2019 and then i achieved the professional certification uh basically this week so i went through the a car guru course a while ago and then i went through stephane marek's course about a month ago and then recently i just finished up the adrian cantoral course which is a very long course it took almost a month there is a bit of overlap between these courses obviously because they're training towards the same exam um but i liked having a sort of a broad introduction with a club guru and then a more in-depth introduction with um stefan marek and then a really really thorough overview of the content plus all of the labs with um with adrian cantrell okay so that's it for direct preparation i'd say if you can do all those resources understand everything that's going on follow along with the labs you probably would pass however this video is for people who are trying to do a really really really good exam score um so i'll talk a little bit about that um now i have seen people on linkedin posting about you know getting 96 97 and that is amazing i really really um look up to people who can achieve those kinds of scores um personally i got 915 out of a thousand on this um which i'm very happy with but yes obviously there's room for improvement so so don't listen to me as your only source listen to everybody in their own and their own opinions their own advice that being said i think i have a bit to say here because i did a lot of extra preparation outside of these courses uh in terms of indirect preparation the absolute best thing you can do if you can manage it is to get some kind of work that involves aws in some capacity whether that's a junior operations job or something related to devops or um if you're just at a company and you're a developer this is how it started for me i was a developer at a company and then i started getting a bit involved with the cloud side between uh the first company and the second company i was involved with some startups um some consulting for those and and helping them set up their own platform so that was a really great crash course in setting up databases servers etc um on aws and then finally uh recently i've been interning with one of the banks in australia and we're working on a really interesting set of technology that is all based around uh deployments on aws and there's been data pipelines and lots of machine learning so i'll talk about machine learning in another video that has been really helpful so if that's all something that's possible for you i mean it almost sounds like an uh a truism that's not even helpful to say because it's so obvious but but um maybe some people weren't so aware that having that on job experience is incredibly valuable and i would recommend it i think i would have not had done anywhere near as well um had i not had that experience the other thing is just play around in your own time open up aws get your own account don't be afraid to spend a bit of money on it i know that can sound uh a bit crude to say that sometimes if people are on a tight budget but i think the people who are going for these types of exams especially at the professional level generally will have a bit of um money that they're willing to spend on this and if you don't you should be prioritizing this if this is the uh the sort of work you want to go into um so i sort of set aside okay i'm spending 400 on the exam realistically 200 because you do get a um 50 off discount when you complete a previous exam and i've just been carrying those discounts along the whole way so i've had pretty much all my exams half price um and then on top of that i'm full spend whatever i need to on the courses to make sure i'm getting the best uh coverage and then i've probably spent another maybe fifty dollars or maybe a hundred dollars of aws just you know setting up different services and playing around with different networking capabilities and all of the very broad things that come into that solutions architect professional exam so in terms of the exam itself you have a very broad range of things that are assessed you should definitely look at the exam guide on amazon.com uh i would highly recommend you do that because it tells you exactly what you need to cover there's also exam readiness and preparation from amazon not exam readiness for the solutions architect professional unfortunately i was looking for that and they didn't seem to have it they do have for the associate level but you do have sort of some some courses you can go through however in my experience i haven't really looked into these too much because the reports i've heard from other people is that the um the third party courses like the ones i was mentioning previously are of a much higher quality and uh much easier to just kind of follow anyway so that's indirect preparation uh it sounds obvious but you need to get some hands-on experience with this there's no way around it this is not really an exam that can be crammed for easily it is a difficult exam for sure the questions are phrased in a way that often you have multiple paragraphs per question it's not always the case but often you will and for the answers you have this couple of options but the most common type of answers is you have four options you have to pick one the one that is correct and they're often really really similar and none of them are perfect this is the thing right these courses will tell you about um let's let's think of an example i try to think of an example that didn't actually come up on the exam because i don't want to you know give away the exam questions um let's say something with a vpc for example by the way if this makes no sense to you that that's fine um you probably just need to go uh save the content um let's say we have an example with the vpc and then we have a network access control list certain apple and then we have security groups on the instances and then the question might be like how can we block an ip so there'd be a couple answers that are obviously wrong for example it might say block the ip from the security group and it's like well okay we can't do that so then you can rule that one out but then you might get another answer where it's like the exact thing that you wanted to do there's like a service that is built exactly for that and it's not an option so you have to choose between other options that will accomplish this goal but but maybe they cost more or maybe they just require more maintenance a really common thing that happens is quite often you'll have a question where it's asking you to do like setting up an alarm or something like this and then having it notify people and there's a bunch of services that will allow you to do this really idiomatically without too much hassle but often they won't include that as an answer and then you have to choose the answer that fits around you know setting up a custom lambda function to handle this for you so um essentially the point i'm trying to get across here i'm not trying to educate you on the exact content of the exam it's it's more around the the mindset i suppose which is sort of the next topic i want to talk about about how does this exam work and and what might you find frustrating about it so that is what makes this exam so difficult you're not going to get uh three answers that are clearly wrong and one answer that's clearly correct that usually is what happens with the solutions architect associate would be like probably two answers are clearly incorrect and then one answer is like slightly incorrect and one answer is correct with professional it's more along the lines of maybe one answer is pretty obviously incorrect but maybe could be correct in a stretch and then there'll be a couple other answers that are almost right but i'm missing one tiny piece of information and then there'll be the answer that's actually correct it's like correct but also not how you would maybe do it because because it's um it's really testing your ability to not just not just memorize the information not just memorize okay here's how we do this fan out architecture for example it's actually testing your ability to reason about these concepts and to sort of think creatively about it yeah that's a hard exam i'm still kind of from when i did the other day even the specialty exams i haven't done networking specialty which is apparently the hardest but i've done security and machine learning which by no means easy and they were quite a bit easier than the solutions architect professional exam i think the thing that makes it hard is it's a three-hour exam you have to just keep going the whole time my brain felt like it was fried probably two hours in i could barely process some of the questions i needed to just take a breath take a break and come back to it but you're also under time pressure and you're not allowed to have a water bottle or anything so i felt like that would have helped it was a bit of a hot day talking now about exam mindset there's something else i wanted to bring up this is kind of a small point this has happened for me with all of the specialty exams and the solutions i can take professional exam i haven't done the devops professional yet but that's my the next one on my list i don't know if they do this on purpose but something i have noticed is the first maybe five maybe 10 questions are all really hard this has tripped me up every time because i i try and go through the exam in order unless there's a reason to to sort of shuffle it up a bit which i'll talk about in the exam strategy and so i start off at the start and i was freaking out a little bit when i when i did this exam because i felt like i was flagging i think the first seven questions i all flagged and i thought this is going to be a long ride it turned out a bit better i think from questions maybe 20 to 50 onwards i was pretty confident in most of those i probably flagged five of them out of those 30 questions so i felt a lot better about that but the first few questions are really hard and i noticed the same thing with machine learning and the same thing with security so i think it may be something they do on purpose there's a couple reasons they might do it number one is it could just be like a psychological manipulation thing i feel like maybe i'm being a bit of a conspiracy theorist about that i can't see why they would want to do that what i do think is possible though is they do have a thing where they will test out new exam questions and they don't contribute to your score and i would assume these would have been spread out randomly throughout the exam however it's possible they could just put them at the start and that's why they might be harder because they might be around you know newer concepts that people are less familiar with or things that aren't explicitly taught in these courses etc and that's why i felt like they were really tricky so if anyone's from aws and knows about this or anyone who's contributed to the exams knows sort of how that structure works i'd be really keen to know potentially it's confidential information that we can't know about but that is a comment i'd like to make if you're feeling like you're freaking out in the first 10 questions don't worry so much it probably will get a bit easier but it's not going to get easy this is not an easy exam but it will probably get easier that was the main thing i want to say with the mindset the other thing is you got to go into the exam you got to feel well prepared i'd always suggest you definitely have to do the aws practice exam that they provide you'll get a free voucher to do this if you do any of the other exams so you get basically they like to to keep people sort of in the exam train um where you do one exam they give you all these benefits to do the next ones so you get a free practice exam voucher which is quite nice because these otherwise cost like fifty dollars and you'll also get a half price of next exam plus a bunch of other benefits like get access to this store you can buy like shirts and water bottles and stuff but that's not the main thing the main thing is the uh the practice exam vouchers so and the and the half exams so do this practice exam it's usually 20 questions uh they give you 60 minutes to do it but you can normally smash it out in half an hour to 40 minutes and for some reason i always seem to do worse on the practice exam than the actual exams i think i got 80 on the solutions i could take professional practices exam and then i got 91 915 out of a thousand on the actual exam so it may or may not be an accurate indicator i'd say if you fail the practice exam though it may make you want to uh question whether you should whether you should do a bit more study before you book the actual exam i've had a bit of a bad habit of doing the practice exams like on the day of the professional of the actual exam and this is a bad habit because you cannot you can only cancel um before 24 hours before your actual exam so if i hadn't found out from this practice exam i was going to do really badly then i would have done really badly oh a bit more information actually something for a direct preparation resource tutorials dojo has excellent prep to practice exams i'll recommend them to anyone i think combination of the adrian cantor of course plus tutorials dojo maybe stephan murray if you want a bit of extra theory stuff you probably would pass um if you're just looking for a pass that's probably all you need um but the thing is right why do people get these certifications because they want to um it's like a professional challenge and they want to do better in their career and they want to actually have an understanding of this so that they can go into those roles right so you're still going to get gonna need to do a job interview at some point for these for this particular type of work and if you just cram for the exam um it's highly likely that you won't have the skills required to actually do the job so you shouldn't be aiming for a pass that's my opinion you should yes you need a 75 750 out of a thousand to pass um however i think if you're really aiming for anything less than about an 85 you're probably just focusing on the exam and not on the um the actual uh skills that it tests so when they say don't mistake the forest for the trees or something along those lines that's basically what i'm trying to say so last part exam strategy um this is in terms of how you would look at the questions how you arrange things how you'd flag things and so on i mean this is individual to everybody so you're all going to have your own strategies here but this is how i do it and it's worked out quite well um what i would normally do is i'll start off i'll go left to right do questions one two three four five blah blah blah up to 75 or up to 65 or however many questions are in the exam um just in order because it just makes things simple you're not jumping around etc however if i come across a question that i'm spending too long on um and what i tried to do for the solutions i could take professionals so you have 180 or 190 i think it's 190 minutes uh and there's 75 questions so if you do the numbers there it's slightly over two minutes a question i tried to aim for two minutes a question so that i had about half an hour at the end to go over things which you will absolutely 100 use um this was the only exam where i ran out of time um although not by a lot like i i was pretty much at the point where i was ready to submit but i did get that the uh you've run out of time screen so i go through an order and if i'm spending more than probably a minute and a half or even just a minute on a question and i know i'm not gonna get it and i know i'm not gonna make a good choice about it i'll just flag it i won't answer it if i do have a choice where i think okay this is maybe i'm 60 70 sure it's correct but i still want to return to it then i'll still off i'll answer and then i'll flag then i move on to the next question and i keep going through that until i get to the end of the exam try and keep up a steady pace try and try and watch the clock make sure you're sticking to about two minutes of question i ended up doing slightly under two minutes somewhere between you know a mirror and 45 a question so i had about 40 minutes at the end to go over things which was really really helpful um i ended up so that once i got to the end um what i did is i i left all the questions i hadn't flagged that i'd answered because i was reasonably confident about them i'll say maybe 80 to 90 confident about each of these questions probably 90 confident about my answers to them so then i went over the flagged questions first i started at the start again play a question for a question flight question and i would choose what i thought was the best answer if i still couldn't think of the best answer i would just do my best and then i'd most likely still just unflagged that question and i would say i'm done with this one i'm not going to look at it again unless i'm doing a full pass over the whole thing and then i keep going through so what i did from that i think by the end of the exam to give you an idea of numbers so 75 questions i have probably flagged 25 questions maybe so about a third of them and then i came back after that next pass i unplugged all of them because i had looked at all of them and i probably changed my answers to five of them maybe yeah someone between five and eight questions so so essentially if you think of this what happened there was i answered two-thirds of the questions i was confident about and then i flagged and i and i answered and flagged another one-third so that was all the questions in total and out of that one third i changed my answers to a third of those so what that means is i'd say probably i was sitting over the first past the exam where i hadn't checked over those flag questions the first time i was probably sitting on about 80 maybe maybe somewhere between 80 and 83.84 and then after that next pass that got me probably up to a 90 and then i did a slight look over or so i had a couple more that i that i ended up changing and the way i did that was i went over basically every question trying to aim for the ones i hadn't flagged although at that point i had unflagged the ones i had flags so i didn't know which ones i hadn't flagged originally really i just remembered sort of number ranges and i went over say 20 from compression 20 to question 50 i remembered i hadn't flagged many and i just kind of skipped through looked at the question okay does that seem reasonable next one i've tried to spend maybe 10 20 seconds on each one that was all the time i had left and i think i changed maybe two at that point and then i got to basically the end i probably got to question 68 have 75 and then my time ran up um and so that was my strategy for tackling the exam i don't think it was perfect but i don't think it can be materially improved in any great way uh different exams have different strategies if we're going beyond anavrs and just talking about exam strategy in general if you've got an exam where there's multiple choice questions and there's questions that you have to answer as you know a short answer or an extended response i would always do those first and leave the multiple choice till last uh the reason for that is you can you can guess a multiple choice you can't guess a short answer so so there's plenty of exam strategies out there but for this exam where most of the questions are the same type then i would suggest uh just following something simple like what i did it worked out fine for me i've done that on all the other exams um i think the key takeaway there is pick an amount of time you want to spend on each question and um do your best to stick to that amount of time if you go under that amount of time that's great you have extra time to revise at the end and if you're ever unsure about a question flagger just use the flagging feature uh there's also the commenting feature i didn't use that i felt like it would have been a bit of a waste of time you can comment on a question and keep notes on it there were a few questions where it would have been nice to have those notes for example um you know you do a lot of mental computation here you look at the answers and you go okay this answer versus this answer there's only one difference and it's this word and that rules out this question this this answer because it uh is actually incorrect for whatever reason it would be nice to note that um but i didn't really want to do that i felt like it was going to be a bit of a time suck um if you do the exam at a testing center um you get a white it depends on the testing center obviously but you get sort of like a whiteboard marker and a and a laminated sheet of paper that you can use for notes and i have used those in the past i did this exam at home just because i'm in lockdown at the moment so you can't really go to the testing center uh doing at home has been fine aside from i'm not gonna name the testing provider but the the application they use for the testing is not very good it was crashing on my main computer which was a mac and then i had to use an older computer that was a pc and it's been working all right look you know who you are and i would suggest that you need to look into getting shorter response times for your candidates when they're having technical difficulties i have spent probably a cumulative four hours on the phone with you guys so yes working doing it from home can be frustrating i'm just going to put that out there they also say that they're going to get to you within 15 minutes of your exam start time and i have probably averaged at about half an hour and you just sit there and you're not really meant to be on your phone or anything because you're about to start this exam you're on camera and you just got to sit there it can be frustrating i have had less frustrating experience at the testing centers but you have to get to the testing centers and and for me that's you know probably 40 minutes um into the city so it takes a bit of time anyway so it probably evens out overall okay um thanks for listening i know this was a long video but i kind of just wanted to sort of brain dump everything that i had been thinking about for the past few weeks something else to note i have um been working full time through this so if anyone is here saying i don't have time to study for this i'm working full time obviously depends on your job some people are working you know 70 hour weeks whereas i'd be more around the 40 mark but it is completely possible to do this while having a job especially if that job relates to this because then you just get to practice during your work hours on on the projects your company's working on to everybody listening to this um good luck please follow the resources i'll link them all in the description and please let me know if you use this advice and you end up passing the exam let me know how you went let me know if you have any other suggestions as to resources and yeah thanks for listening catch you guys later

Channel: Patrick Brett

Views: 14,913

Keywords: solutions architect professional

Id: 23DodP-gaG8

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/acantril]

nice work /u/pbrett1 - this is super helpful to the community. Really glad my course helped you ... thats 2 x 900+ scores students have obtained today which is epic :)

*happy dance*

[u/GreatslyferX]

Does anyone have experience with ACloudGuru and how they compare to Cantrill?

I've just started on ACG, any experiences are really appreciated!

[u/rob_stewart_1]

I just passed the SA Pro exam last Friday.

The advice shared on this video is top notch!

[u/carlo-tutorialsdojo]

Thanks u/pbrett1 for recommending our practice tests. Impressive score, congratulations! :)

[u/Juic3B0xx]

I used u/acantril course as well I went through 3 times. Niece at 1.5x no labs. Second time 1.25x through lectures and 1x during labs. Third time I went through bottom up while taking tutorials dojo tests.

[u/herrsergio]

Congratulations and thank you for sharing!

[u/[deleted]]

Cheers for the video, really interesting.

I just failed the AWS 20 question practice exam (65%) even though I was comfortably passing the tutorial dojo practice exams.

Not feeling confident at all now and I can not postpone the exam this week as I have already postponed twice :(

[u/cphang]

How long did you spend for the preparation? How many hours per day on average?