Prep
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate 2020 from freeCodeCamp on Youtube (this was good passive listening early on)
- LinuxAcademy / aCloudGuru courses (including the interactive labs). The course now at https://cantrill.io was the most informative, but I got the official SAA-C02 course from aCloudGuru is good coverage if you have the background.
- Overview of Amazon Web Services – watch the size limits on DynamoDB and SQS… they’ve changed. Game and machine learning services can be scanned quickly.
- AWS Storage Options – note patterns and anti patterns
- EBS Volume Types – note IOPS and throughput
- DigitalCloud.Training’s practice exams on Udemy – some of these are a little heavy on the beta questions
- EC2 Network Features blog post – some good bullet points on network features
- Take all the practice exams and type/write out the explanations on any wrong answers and retake until >90% (preferably 100%)
Online Exam
- PearsonVue browserlock kept detecting itself on Catalina on my MacBook Air and exiting, so I ended up using a Windows laptop instead.
- OnVue app on Windows kept detecting “gamebar”, which I had to disable (and reboot Windows to fully take effect)
- Make sure the laptop that you’re using can be maneuvered to show all the workspace within reach.
- Have a phone handy for check-in, but a convenient place to stash out of sight/sound range.
- Make sure anything with any print or writing is out of view and out of reach of the workspace area before check-in.
Contents That I Could’ve Been More Prepared For
- SQS vs. Kinesis use cases
- Priority queueing – I think this requires either AmazonMQ or a separate SQS queues (depending on priority levels)
- ECS launch types. ECS vs. Fargate vs. EKS
- Amazon RDS Read Replicas vs Aurora Global Database