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What level was it?

dangus 6y ago
I got associate and then professional a couple months later. I studied for neither beyond maybe an hour of looking at what the question formats looked like. I figured that it was a better use of time to study only if I failed, and then re-take, since there’s no punishment for failure other than cost. I barely passed professional, but I passed. Associate felt easy for me. I have about 2-3 years experience working just about 100% within AWS for my job. I would think that both exams would be way harder and require study without so much practical experience. Maybe an AWS certification could help you if you lack experience in your resume and want to land a cloud engineering role. Also, if you’re paying yourself, as of a few months ago it seems like Amazon gives you a 50% discount code for your next exam every time you take an exam. In other words, only the first exam is full price. I couldn’t guarantee that this offer sticks around or anything.
- raffraffraff 6y ago
  Do you use Terraform? I'm just wondering because I interact with AWS 90% (possibly more) via Terraform. I rarely use the AWS Console and have never looked at Cloudformation or eksctl. I wonder if that's gonna make the certification more difficult for me...
  - dangus 6y ago
    Yes I do the same! Almost entirely through Terraform. In no way does that hurt your knowledge! By doing everything in code you probably understand a lot more to begin with, since you don’t rely on some of the UI crutches and defaults. Honestly I check the Terraform documentation before I even bother with AWS docs 99% of the time. The system architect questions are definitely more high level architecture questions that revolve around understanding the AWS products and what trade-offs you make by choosing one of the the other. Like any other multiple choice test, much of passing the test revolves around general test taking strategies (e.g. reading carefully and eliminating wrong answers) I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it from the example questions that are out there (Amazon also has a few for free). Understanding a few things about less commonly encountered products like Kinesis could help, too.

What level was it?

I got associate and then professional a couple months later. I studied for neither beyond maybe an hour of looking at what the question formats looked like. I figured that it was a better use of time to study only if I failed, and then re-take, since there’s no punishment for failure other than cost. I barely passed professional, but I passed. Associate felt easy for me. I have about 2-3 years experience working just about 100% within AWS for my job. I would think that both exams would be way harder and require study without so much practical experience. Maybe an AWS certification could help you if you lack experience in your resume and want to land a cloud engineering role. Also, if you’re paying yourself, as of a few months ago it seems like Amazon gives you a 50% discount code for your next exam every time you take an exam. In other words, only the first exam is full price. I couldn’t guarantee that this offer sticks around or anything.

raffraffraff 6y ago
Do you use Terraform? I'm just wondering because I interact with AWS 90% (possibly more) via Terraform. I rarely use the AWS Console and have never looked at Cloudformation or eksctl. I wonder if that's gonna make the certification more difficult for me...
- dangus 6y ago
  Yes I do the same! Almost entirely through Terraform. In no way does that hurt your knowledge! By doing everything in code you probably understand a lot more to begin with, since you don’t rely on some of the UI crutches and defaults. Honestly I check the Terraform documentation before I even bother with AWS docs 99% of the time. The system architect questions are definitely more high level architecture questions that revolve around understanding the AWS products and what trade-offs you make by choosing one of the the other. Like any other multiple choice test, much of passing the test revolves around general test taking strategies (e.g. reading carefully and eliminating wrong answers) I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it from the example questions that are out there (Amazon also has a few for free). Understanding a few things about less commonly encountered products like Kinesis could help, too.