My AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Experience

[Music] hi this is neil davis from digital cloud training in this video i'm going to walk you through my experience of taking the aws certified solutions architect professional exam recently now i'm sure many of you would love to have this certification it's definitely a highly regarded certification and that's because a lot fewer people actually have this certification compared to the associate levels so it's better regarded by employers and gives you a bit of an edge when you're out there in the job market now i'm sure many of you also know that it is a very difficult and challenging exam so what i want to do today is give you some tips talk about my experience and help you better prepare for your exam so that you can also get the certification now i genuinely believe that anybody who puts in the right preparation with the right training resources and the right amount of hands-on experience can pass this exam now do you actually have to have had lots of work experience it would really help but it's not 100 necessary i know quite a few people who've passed this who don't have significant hands-on experience in a work context but you do need to get into your free tier account and actually build lots of resources and play around and actually learn hands-on the technology but you can do that in your own time in your own space you don't necessarily need to have had years of experience now i did write a blog article which you can find on my website the link will be under the video now the first thing about this exam is it's 75 questions long rather than the 65 you get in the associate level so you've got more questions you've got a bit more time you've got 180 minutes but that does only leave you about two and a half just over two and a half minutes per question now if you've actually seen some examples of the professional level questions you'll know they can be quite long they could be quite complicated and therefore that can be a bit intimidating now the first tip that i want to give you is that the length of the question does not equal the difficulty of the question sometimes you'll see a really long question with really long answers as well and it can be quite intimidating at first i want you to reframe that in your mind because often the longer questions and the long answers will give you some more clues you'll be able to use the extra information in there to actually work out whether an answer is correct whether a solution will work or whether it won't work so you still need to have the knowledge but as long as you've got the knowledge those extra bits of information can often help you now it's a 75 pass mark so it's a bit higher as well than the associate levels which are at 72 percent so you've really got to get lots of answers correct which means time management is super important now the good thing is though there are some really long and complex questions there's quite a few in there that i found i could get through quite quickly so every four or five questions i'd get a question that was quite challenging i'd probably spend a few minutes really thinking it over but in between that most questions i found i could answer fairly quickly now don't rush it too much because they can be quite devious so you've got to be careful that you've read every answer correctly in every detail of the question itself now in terms of the actual question types you've got multiple choice which is where you have one correct answer out of four options and then you have multiple response now for the most multiple response questions what i've seen mostly myself and what i know from other people who have taken the pro level exams is mostly you're going to get questions that have five answers and there's two answers that you've got to select correctly and then the other option is that there might be six answers and you've got to choose free now again don't let it intimidate you sometimes the multiple choice questions with just one answer can be the hardest and sometimes the ones with three options that you've got to choose can actually be the easier ones so again the difficulty does not necessarily correlate with either the question length or the number of answers now as i mentioned before time management is super important you know you really don't want to get down to the last 10 minutes and realize you've got several questions yet to answer because under time pressure you're going to make mistakes these questions are pretty difficult they can be devious as i said you've got to be really careful that you've read the question very well and had enough time to consider it so make sure you're moving through don't get stuck on one question for too long because that could cost you more points at the end give it your best guess and then move on but mark it and then hopefully you've got a better time at the end and you can come back and give it a double check now in terms of the actual content on the exam i got some tips in here but i'm not going to walk you through all of those but what i do want to tell you is the style of the exam is it's an architecture exam so what they want you to really understand is solution architectures now that means how do multiple services work together in a solution so you'll get questions which test your knowledge of how you connect different aws services together and how they would work together in a solution you'll also find that the professional level exam tests your knowledge of multiple accounts and multiple region architectures so you've really got to know your networking you've got to know about how to use databases across regions so for example you need to understand how you can have a multi-master database where you can write to multiple regions at a time and in which circumstances would you use that how would you do dr between different regions and you need to understand how to have multiple accounts aws organizations comes up quite a lot so you need to know how to secure them and how to get cross account access working between different accounts so lots of that kind of thing are coming up and you really need to know this stuff in depth also lots about migration from on-premises so you've got to really make sure you know your migration tools now in terms of preparing for this exam the first thing i want to say is it's not required but i highly recommend that you've done all of the associate certifications you'll find topics in the exam that are found more heavily in the developer exam than the solutions architect exam you might find some scenarios that come up which if you've done the sysops exam it will really help you to better answer those questions so unless you've got a load of industry experience working with the same technologies that are covered on the exam i would highly recommend doing all three associates first then what resources can you use to study the extra knowledge you need for this exam well there's some great articles on aws faqs as well as tutorials in terms of courses i used some of the major courses that are out there from the known providers i didn't find any of them really covered everything but there's quite a bit in there so there are some good resources out there but you've got to make sure that you cover all of your bases now i'm going to try and do that in the course which i'm releasing very soon i'm going to make sure that i cover everything which i've seen in the exam and gathering the feedback from our students as to what they've seen in the pro level exam as well to make sure that we've got a fully comprehensive course so you only have to go to one place now the practice tests were the challenge with practice tests i didn't find anything that came anywhere near the type of questions which you find on the exam i used a provider which had a set of 300 questions but they were nothing like the real exam so very quickly i realized i was wasting time there time is important guys you know it's going to take a long time to prepare for this exam you've got to put the effort in to really get your skills up to date so you don't want to put time into things which are wasting your time you've got to make sure you're using the right resources now i've released a set of practice questions recently so obviously i favor those um i think you should have a look they um they're a smaller set of questions but i'm concentrating on quality not quantity here it's all about making sure that the very scenarios you're going to see on the exam are covered in the course and so those are out now there's more questions being added every day i'm continuing to write questions so i'm sure that will cover all bases for you so in summary the solutions architect professional exam is definitely challenging but it's achievable for anyone who puts in the right amount of effort you've got to get the right courses the right practice tests you've got to make sure you do lots of hands-on labs practice practice practice you can't just do the theory for this particular exam guys you've really got to get hands-on so you must do all those things and just make sure you're ready before you sit this exam it's really tough so make sure that you have got yourself prepared your head's in the right space and go in there think about time management do your best and i'm sure you can get through this exam i look forward to hearing about your success [Music] you

Channel: Digital Cloud Training

Views: 13,260

Keywords: AWS, AWS Certification, Amazon Web Services, AWS Amazon, AWS Certified, AWS Training, AWS tutorial, Amazon AWS, What is AWS, Amazon AWS tutorials, free aws, free aws tutorials, AWS Cloud, AWS Exam, AWS Practice Tests, Cloud Computing, Cloud Technology, Cloud career, AWS Jobs, AWS career, AWS Services, aws solutions architect professional, aws solutions architect professional exam, aws professional solution architect, aws certified solutions architect - professional

Id: wCv-Nk3EWsw

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021