AWS Solution Architect SAA-C02 Passed: Resources Used & Thoughts.

I passed the AWS SAA-C02 exam on second trial and today I have the badge to prove it.

In this post I’ll go over my motivations for taking the exam and the resources I used/recommend for it.

I have no interest taking this exam at first, i was hoping to jump right into AWS Advanced Networking Specialty since i am a Network Engineer but i was convinced by great men on LinkedIn who suggested going for the Solution Architect, I am glad i listen to those advise because i get to learn more about AWS services and have a deep understanding of about 80% of all services on AWS with lab practice.

Resources:

AWS Overview
AWS Well Architected Framework
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide
AWS or Trusted Partners Practice test

Also check out:
Mike Gibbs — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keoNi7MmAUY
Andrew Brown — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia-UEYYR44s
Mukhtar — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3F_GLbU0tgo9WUas0tN5DD9h5aQjFJ_p

and others on YouTube. Trust me, There a lot of videos about different services.

Hands-On Practice:

There are a lot of services aws offers. You just have to understand them and know how it works based on the exam and job.

Kindly read more on this and understand each and everyone of them with hands-on.

Amazon EC2
Amazon ECS
Amazon EKS
Amazon S3
Amazon Snowball
Amazon VPC Endpoints
Amazon VPC Flow Logs
Amazon NACL
Amazon Security Groups
Amazon NAT
Amazon IAM
Amazon Cognito
Amazon CLI & SDK
Amazon DNS
Amazon Route 53
Autoscaling Groups
Amazon ELB
Amazon EFS & FSX
Amazon EBS
Amazon CloudFront & Global Accelerator
Amazon RDS
Amazon Aurora
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon CloudFormation
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudTrail
Amazon Lambda
Amazon SQS
Amazon SNS
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Storage Gateway
AWS Organization
AMI
Placement Groups

Conclusion:

Note: For the exam and I also think in production environment. You must be conscious of these:

The Five Pillars of the the Framework

· Operational Excellence

· Security

· Reliability

· Performance Efficiency

· Cost Optimization

The question indirectly ask about this:

· Cost-efficiency

· High Availability

· Security

· Fault Tolerant

Example:

A company runs a production application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances. The application reads the data from an Amazon SQS queue and processes the messages in parallel. The message volume is unpredictable and often has intermittent traffic. This application should continually process messages without any downtime. Which solution meets these requirements most cost-effectively?

You must also understand:

· when to use On-demand or scheduled reserve instances or spot instances.

· When to use instance volumes or EBS

· When to use NAT instances or NAT Gateway

· When and where to apply EFS or FSX

· And others. SNS vs SQS, Elastic Beanstalk vs CloudFormation, EC2 vs ECS, Global Accelerator vs CloudFront, Redshift vs DynmoDB, RDS and Aurora, CloudWatch vs CloudTrails, Direct Connect vs VPC Endpoint…..

Overall, it was a positive and beautiful experience, and I’m excited to jump into the CCNP then ANS-C00 exam. The blueprint is large, so it may be a while until you hear from me about taking it. I’ll continue with lab and will be posting more as i will be working with S3, Route53 and VPC again now that this exam is over.

Thanks for reading, and I hope the resource is useful to you!