After working almost two years with AWS i decided that it’s finally time to do the Solution Architect exam. To be honest, i wanted to clear it way earlier but i guess the everyday laziness and my dislike for exams in general kicked in.

So what is the exam about?

It covers a wide range of AWS Services. You have to know how they work together and what service to use in which situation. The questions always have multiple choice style answers bringing you into a scenario where customers come to you as a Solutions Architect with a question or problem in their current cloud or on premise setup.

The trick is to look out for common keywords like ‘most cost efficient solution’, ‘highly available’, ’near real time’. Acknowledging these you can always rule out most answers. But in the end you still have to do the hard work and understand a bunch of specific AWS services.

How did i prepare?

Usually it is just not enough working with AWS for some time. Your everyday work probably does not cover all exam topics like for example hybrid cloud setups with Storage Gateway.

While my work place gave me a free subscription for A Cloud Guru i still decided to buy the SAA-C02 course from Adrian Cantrill. Beyond just knowing AWS stuff you do have to be good at actually clearing the exam. The exam questions are usually worded pretty weird so for getting used to this stuff i bought the practice exams from Jon Bonso at Tutorials Dojo.

All in all once you are getting comfortable doing the practice exams with a score greater than 80 percent you should be ready to take the real exam.

Cheers Timur