As some of you may know AWS certificates expire and when they do so you need to recertify. And that's why I will talk about my impression after passing the AWS Solutions Architect Associatee Exam in April 2019. Last time I went to pass the exam was in 2017.
I've heard that the exam has significantly changed after the changes AWS did in 2018. That was the perfect time for me to prepare for the exam as I was participating in a recruitment process and it was beneficial for me to brush up my AWS knowledge. Spoiler alert: I've got the job I wanted as a nice addition to the AWS certificate.
Last time my preparation to the AWS exam was very shallow. I mostly focused on the pillars of AWS: EC2, S3, VPC thus skipping a lot of "new" services that I had no prior experience with like Kinesis, Lambda etc. That was a mistake, but likely I got lot of VPC and networking related questions.
This time I reserved plenty of time to prepare for the exam. Here're the resources I was using to prepare myself
A Cloud Guru AWS Associate exam video course. This time I had a full access to the Cloud Guru website provided by my employer. I would say that it was much more convenient in comparison with the same video course that you can buy on Udemy though Udemy is cheaper. This course is intensively update by ACG to reflect the changes in exam as well as videos are updated when AWS changes something in the covered services. There're quizes plus the final exam simulator. In my opinion this course tries to cover too much of AWS and in some cases gets in too much detail thus distracting your attention from what's really important to pass the exam. As I said it before my employer paid for it thus considering its humongous annual price of $492 I save a lot of money. Will I pay the same amount myself? Definitely no. $10 for the Udemy course is ok, but I don't see why to pay more if the only thing why I need it is for passing one particular exam. I don't want to be a maven in AWS/AZURE/GCP simultaneously and that's the audience that cloud guru caters its courses and materials. My score for its Udemy course is 4 with minus due to lack of updates It's not worth the money to pay for the full-blown ACG access if you pay out of your own pocket. You can not prepare for the exam by just watching the ACG videos and doing the labs!
AWS solution architect official training I don't know what's the full name of it as it was also paid and organized by my employer. The training was really nice. Though it wasn't conducted by an AWS employee but by a contractor hired and schooled by AWS it was awesome. It had lots of well-organized labs where everything was automated and well documented. The trainer was a nice Potuguese guy who knew AWS from top to bottom and could answer almost every quirky question. I don't know what was the price of it but if such course was my AWS introductory I would definitely become and AWS fan boy. My score 5/5 This course is not sufficient to pass the exam
ALL-IN-ONE AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associatee Exam Guide. I've covered this book in my previous post. This book will give you 50% confidence of passing the exam. 100% worth of every penny spent
Whizlabs prep exam. Firstly, this is not a brain dump of the real exam. During the real exam I had some (less than 10%) of questions that were similar to Whizlabs but the wording was so different that I would consider it as a coincidence. Whizlabs has close to 1000 of questions related to AWS, every answer is usually explained with a reference to the documentation. If you finish the final Whizlabs aws exam with > 80% score you're ready for the real exam. This was the other 50% of my preparation for the exam that was worth every penny spent.
After all the preparation I did I've passed the exam with 91% score in less than one hour and had more than an hour time left as it's supposed to take 130 minutes to complete the exam.
In my opinion this certification is one of the most challenging across all the IT certifications
Good luck with passing it!