How I passed AWS Solutions Architect Professional in 2020

This article would be interesting for everyone who is going to pass any AWS exams soon and CSAP particularly.

Preparation

The peculiarity of this type of exam is that knowing superficially some main services (as it would be for CSA Associate) is not enough. You should:

• understand more services and much better and ideally have experience with each of them. For example you can be tested for knowing exact UI flows for some certain cases. Considering that far not so many customers utilise services like Organisations, Migration Hub, VPC Transit Gateway or DX, and you very unlikely will have experience with all of them, you must nevertheless know them quite well.
• be able quickly estimate requirements and tasks. Most of the questions are verbose and include many details, each of them might be a key for a proper option.
• be able to calculate in mind. There can be questions with iops, throughput, bandwidth or CIDR blocks, where you have to calculate something, based on giving numbers. Also it was not allowed to use paper and pen for my kind of exam.

One thing that shows what this exam actually is, is that amount of question, which I was really 100% sure about and answered immediately , was around 10–20%. Everything else I just had to really think through and analyse, sometimes almost guess between 2 very similar options. Number of questions, where I was not sure at all, was also around 10%.

As about resources for preparation. More — better. I used both courses from Linux Academy and CloudGuru. Now they are merged and the one from Linux Academy is considered as legacy, since it doesn’t include all 2020 topics, but regarding material and approach I find it much better.

Otherwise I read white papers and answered question from Whizlabs. They have a really nice bank of questions, but none of them matched any of the questions on the real exam. It just trains you to think as you would during the exam. It’s also a nice choice to observe all the topics at once and see where you have whitespaces. Since I had to work during the preparation, I took daily 30–60m after work to listen to a course, read docs or answer questions. It’s important to keep tracking, otherwise you’ll start to forget things and your progress can be lost.

Some topics that I would highlight:

• Migration from on-premise to the cloud (SMS, DMS, AMS, Migration Hub)
• RDS and Aurora particularly. Especially multi region usage.
• Of course Organisations
• Cross VPC communication and VPC Endpoints

Exam

This year is special. And AWS made it possible to take the exam remotely. While it seems to be easier and better there are some precautions if you decide to take it remotely.

• You should have a dedicated room, where nobody should come during the exam. You will have to show it to your proctor with your webcam before the start.
• You are not allowed to leave the room during the exam, including for toilet.
• Of course stable and reliable internet connection

Don’t forget that for those for whom English is the second language, there is an option to take additional 30m time (so 210m in total). It’s very sufficient and helped in my case to answer questions without rush and have some time at the end to review flagged questions. There are 75 questions in total.

So that was my story. I hope it was helpful and wish your good luck for you upcoming exams!

If your company needs support with AWS Cloud, we at Thinkport are always ready to help. We also order many workshops including different AWS related topics with a deeper approach and hands-on experience.