Amazon holds the most significant public cloud share market. This makes Amazon Web Services (AWS) the most sought-after certification in the cloud space. The AWS Certified Solutions Architects are highly paid in the IT industry. Having an AWS certification will help you to increase your employability to employers. This exam is challenging, and it requires having a correct roadmap. The AWS Solutions Architect exam is considered challenging because the questions are very scenario-oriented. You can correctly answer those exams only if you have good hands-on experience. Simply solving the practice sets will not be sufficient to help you score well in this certification exam.
Role of a Solutions Architect
A Solutions Architect designs and deploys scalable, reliable, and robust business solutions based on the requirements of the clients using the knowledge and expertise of cloud technology. AWS offers two certifications for Solutions Architects:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
The AWS Solutions Architect certification allows you to demonstrate your skills and expertise and allows you to learn. Before understanding the tips to pass this exam, we must understand the exam.
AWS Architect Solutions Exam
Some new changes were made to the exam pattern and structure in February 2018. The candidates appearing for the AWS Architect Solutions exam must have the following:
- An ability to define the best solution based on the architectural design principles to fulfill the customer requirements and maintain the qualities of reliability and scalability.
- The Solutions architect also provides guidelines for the best implementation of the best practices to the customers during the project’s lifecycle.
Different domains in the exam
The different domains of the exam and the respective weightage are given below:
- Designing resilient architecture: 34%
- Specifying secure architectures and applications: 26%
- Designing performant architecture: 24%
- Designing cost-optimized architectures: 10%
- Defining architectures that are operationally excellent: 6%
It would be best to have different plans based on whether you are a beginner with no knowledge of AWS Solutions or a practitioner and have experience working with AWS cloud services. With a proper plan and sound strategy, you can ace this exam. You must evaluate yourself and make a plan accordingly. Here are some of the tips that will help you in your journey towards becoming a certified AWS Solutions Architect:
1. Resources: There are many books available in the market that will help you to crack this exam. But it is recommended to refer to a limited number of resources to avoid confusion and save time. One of the most highly recommended books is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study guide. You can study at your own pace using books. To make your preparation strategic and fast, you can check the AWS Cloud Architect course. This course is designed by industry experts and provides the best study materials with sufficient hands-on experience to pass the AWS Solutions Architect exam. You will get the advantage of exemplary educators and mentors who will guide you and evaluate your learning and performance.
2. Deep understanding of specific AWS Services: Questions from few AWS services are commonly asked in the exam. You must have a deep knowledge of those services, and the best way to learn is through hands-on experience. These specific AWS services are as follows:
- Amazon Lambda and serverless components
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon S3
- Amazon VPC
You can refer to some of the notable books to understand these services. The course will cover all the information from the basic level to clearly understand the AWS services.
3. Read whitepapers: AWS recommends a list of whitepapers. They are accommodating to prepare for the AWS Solutions Architect exam. It will help to understand the technical aspects of the services in a broader way. As a Solutions Architect, you are required to provide not just solutions, but you must ensure certain qualities in your design to meet the customers’ demands. To understand the various aspects of a good strategy, you must refer to the whitepapers. The different whitepapers are recommended for the following:
- Operational excellence: This includes processes and procedures for improving the business value of the solutions. It includes automating and managing changes, responding to events and issues, and defining standards for managing daily operations.
- Framework: AWS recommends a whitepaper that covers the principles and basic concepts of a suitable framework design.
- Security: The whitepaper on security focuses on managing privileges, detecting and identifying security events, identifying any breach of security, protecting systems, and maintaining the guidelines and security terms of the customers.
- Reliability: The whitepaper on reliability includes topics like handling changes, cross-project requirements, recovery planning, and foundational elements around setup.
- Cost-optimization: The whitepaper on cost optimization discusses how to cut costs and detect unnecessary requirements. It discusses how to understand the right resources and the number of resources required to deploy the design and offer the best possible solution to the customers.
- Internet of things: This whitepaper covers topics like firmware updates, device provisioning, and device telemetry. This aims at designing in a way to manage the IoT workloads effectively.
4. Practice tests: Mock tests help you to learn the exam-taking strategies. The format of these tests is the same as the AWS certification exam, and you get an exam-like experience. It boosts your confidence. Practice tests will help you to assess yourself. Evaluate your performance and detect the areas you need to revise or work on. There are many mock tests available for practice. Invest in the right practice tests that cover all the essential topics and also provide solutions.
AWS Solutions Architect certificate is very helpful in getting a job in highly-reputed companies. Top tech giants use AWS for their cloud services. Companies like LinkedIn, Twitch, Netflix, BBC, Facebook, ESPN, etc., hire AWS Solutions Architects. Having a certification will help you pass the screening round as certified candidates are valued over non-certified candidates. Even if you are a beginner and planning to start a career in the cloud, this certification is beneficial. It gives you an excellent opportunity to earn and develop the required skills.
