Code, Strings, and Keys

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02) Experience

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