The best way to get certified
Before we get to the best way to get certified, let’s look at the worst way. Amazon offers extremely comprehensive documentation. You can find this documentation here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/.
AWS docs are a great place to help you troubleshoot issues you may encounter when you are directly working with AWS services or perhaps to size the services you will be using correctly. However, they are not a good place to study for exams. It will get overwhelming quickly, and much of the material you will learn about will not be covered in the exams.
The better way to get certified is to use the training materials that AWS specifically provides for certification, starting with the roadmaps of what will be covered in each certification. These roadmaps are a good first step toward understanding the scope of each exam.
You can begin to learn about all these roadmaps, or learning paths, as AWS likes to call them, here: https://aws.amazon.com/training/learning-paths/.
You will find free online courses and paid intensive training sessions for these learning paths. While the paid classes may be helpful, they are not mandatory for you to pass the exam.
Before you look at the learning paths, the first place to find out the scope of each certification is the study guides available for each certification. In these study guides, you will learn at a high level what will and what won’t be covered for each exam. For example, the study guide for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification can be found here: https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-cloud-practitioner/AWS-Certified-Cloud-Practitioner_Exam-Guide.pdf.
Now, while the training provided by AWS may be sufficient to pass the exams, and I know plenty of folks that have passed the certifications using only those resources, there are plenty of third-party companies that specialize in training people with a special focus on the certifications. The choices are almost endless. Let’s look at a few more resources here.
Getting started in AWS
AWS launched the Skill Builder portal (https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/), which enhances AWS’s training portal.
AWS Skill Builder has thousands of self-paced digital training sessions and learning paths, as shown below.
Figure 2.11: AWS Skill Builder learning paths
You can pick any learning path you need and explore related digital courses. If you want classroom training, that is available in the AWS training portal; however, it may come with a price. AWS provides free cloud practitioner training in its Skills Center, where you can register and get instructor-led training for free. AWS has also opened its first free training center located in Seattle and is planning to expand in the coming months. If you have Skills Centers where you are, you can benefit by registering on the AWS website directly: https://aws.amazon.com/training/skills-centers/.
Online courses
In addition to the courses provided by AWS, other training organizations and independent content creators provide excellent courses for obtaining AWS certifications.
A Cloud Guru
A Cloud Guru has been around since 2015, which is a long time in cloud years. A Cloud Guru has courses for most of the AWS certifications. They have a few other courses unrelated to certifications that are also quite good. Linux Academy used to be another good resource to use to prepare for a certification exam, but that got acquired by A Cloud Guru, which means now you can access the best of these in one place.
They used to charge by the course, but a few years back, they changed their model to a monthly subscription, and signing up for it gives you access to the whole site. The training can be accessed here: https://acloud.guru/.
Udemy courses
Several independent content creators on Udemy, such as Stephane Maarek and Jon Bonso, have excellent content and are passionate about AWS, with a growing following. For example, as of April 2022, Stephane Maarek’s Solution Architect Associate course has over half a million students with over 120,000 ratings and a satisfaction rating of 4.7 stars out of 5.
The pricing model used is also similar to Whizlabs. The practice exams are sold separately from the online courses. You can choose the pricing, from a monthly subscription to a course fee, depending on your strategy, such as if you want to get an individual certification or target multiple/all AWS certifications.
You can also explore other training providers such as Cloud Academy and Coursera. However, you don’t need to sign up for multiple course providers.
YouTube videos
As always, YouTube is an excellent source of free learning. AWS has its own YouTube channel with nearly 600,000 subscribers and 14,000 videos. These videos cover AWS services by AWS product managers and solutions architects. AWS uploads all re:Invent and summit videos on the YouTube channel, the best resources to dive deep into any services. You can find several playlists people have created to prepare for certifications.
Books
If you are a book reader, there are multiple AWS certification-related books available on Amazon, which you can refer to prepare for the exam. If you are preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect – Professional exam and are solidifying concepts, refer to Solution Architect’s Handbook (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1801816611). It explains multiple architectural patterns using the AWS platform and goes deep into using each of the Well-Architected pillars to apply architectural best practices.
Practice exam websites
It doesn’t matter how much you are reading or how many courses you watch, there are always knowledge gaps, and practice exams are the best sources to identify and focus on weak areas. Let’s look at some practice exam resources.
AWS practice question sets
AWS recently launched practice question sets for all the certifications in their Skill Builder portal. These are the AWS certification official practice question sets featuring 20 questions developed by AWS to demonstrate the style of AWS certification exams. These exam-style questions include detailed feedback and recommended resources to help you prepare for your exam. It is an excellent source to understand exam patterns and difficulty levels.
The following is a sample list, which you can access using the link https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/learn and select the filter Exam Preparation under Training Category.
Figure 2.12: AWS certification practice question sets
There are free practice exams available for almost all available certifications. Let’s look at more third-party resources for more practice exam choices.
Whizlabs
Whizlabs (https://www.whizlabs.com/) is suitable for Associate-level certification and testing your knowledge in multiple areas to find weak points. Whizlabs also provides answers with detailed explanations and associated resources that can help you fill any knowledge gaps by exploring related content against questions you got wrong.
Whizlabs divides the charges for their training between their online courses and their practice tests. One disadvantage of Whizlabs is that, unlike the exam simulator with A Cloud Guru, where they have a bank of questions and randomly combine them, the Whizlabs exam questions are fixed and cannot be shuffled to create a different exam.
They also have a free version of their practice exams for most certifications, with 20 free questions.
BrainCert
Like Whizlabs, you can use BrainCert for AWS Professional and Specialty level certification (https://www.braincert.com). They have a perfect set of questions that are similar to the exam’s difficulty level with detailed explanations for each answer. While Whizlabs practice exams have lifetime validity, BrainCert provides only one-year validity.
Tutorials Dojo
Tutorials Dojo is another good practice exam website you can access by visiting https://tutorialsdojo.com/. It has recently received great reviews from the cert community and has good-quality questions for AWS Specialty certification exams.
The same strategy as mentioned before can be used with Whizlabs or BrainCert. You don’t need to sign up for multiple vendors for the more straightforward exams, but you can combine a couple for the harder exams.
Certification preparation approach
Video courses such as Udemy and A Cloud Guru are used the most to prepare for certifications. The following is the recommendation for tackling the training:
- Unless you have previous experience with the covered topics, watch all the training videos at least once. If it’s a topic you feel comfortable with, you can play the videos at a higher speed, and then you will be able to watch the full video faster.
- For video lessons that you find difficult, watch them again. You don’t have to watch all the videos again – only the ones that you found difficult.
- Make notes of topics that seem to be pretty new to you. Writing notes always clears your thoughts.
- Make sure to take any end-of-section quizzes, wherever available.
- Once you finish watching the videos, the next step is to attempt some practice exams.
The above recommendation remains true if you are choosing books for your exam preparation, where you want to take notes and re-visit chapters where the topic is new to you.
Finally, keep taking practice exams until you feel confident and consistently correctly answer a high percentage of the questions (anywhere between 80% and 85%, depending on the certification).
The questions provided in the exam simulator will not be the same as the ones from the exam, but they will be of a similar difficulty level, and they will all be in the same domains and often about similar concepts and topics.
By using the exam simulator, you will achieve a couple of things. First, you will be able to gauge your progress and determine whether you are ready for the exam. I suggest you keep taking the exam simulator tests until you consistently score at least 85% or above. Most real certifications require you to answer 75% of the questions correctly, so consistently scoring a little higher should ensure that you pass the exam.
Some of the exams, such as the Security – Specialty exam, require a higher percentage of correct answers, so you should adjust accordingly. Using the exam simulator will also enable you to figure out which domains you are weak in. After taking a whole exam in the simulator, you will get a list detailing exactly which questions you got right and which were wrong, and they will all be classified by domain.
So, if you get a low score in a certain domain, you know that’s the domain that you need to focus on when you go back and review the videos again. Lastly, you will be able to learn new concepts by simply taking the tests in the exam simulator.
Now, let’s address some of the questions that frequently arise while preparing to take these certifications.