It’s been a little over 1 month since my AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) exam. After finishing the Solutions Architect Associate exam, I immediately registered for the Developer Associate exam, which I took yesterday and passed.

Wasting Time

I took a practice exam (through Linux Academy) shortly after passing the SAA exam, having actually gone through most of a Developer Associate training course. DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU ARE READY TO DIVE DEEP INTO ANYTHING YOU MISSED. I managed to get about 72% on the practice exam, which is essentially a passing score so I let myself lose focus over the holidays.

Next mistake was going through a couple of versions of the course (30 hours each) instead of just using the practice test results to read the white papers, FAQs, and AWS service pages I needed to review. (Linux Academy/aCloudGuru courses provide links to associated AWS reference for this.)

Foundations in SAA

I highly recommend getting the Solutions Architect – Associate first. It covers a good breadth of topics that will give you a solid foundation. I recommend the Linux Academy courses that have labs that you can walk through via a transcript just to traverse all the areas you need to know.

Differences from SAA

All of the AWS Code* services factor into a significant chunk of the DVA exam. If you have solid experience with docker, k8s, and git, you’ll probably have a better than 50% chance on questions about services that you didn’t look into, but there are also things that are about the “AWS way” or the “way that AWS services push you to do things” that I shook my head at. (Physical team organization? Wat?)

Also…

• Learn how to set up X-Ray on the various compute environments.
• Create and deploy a Serverless Application Model project and dig into the configuration files for it.
• 0 bytes is the minimum object size, 100 MB is the recommended threshold to use multipart upload to S3, 5GB it is required, 5TB is the object size limit.
• cfn-init
• View Protocol Policy in CloudFront (https/http)
• Bucket policies for enforcing server side encryption
• Learn supported platforms for CodeDeploy
• Learn lifecycle hooks for CodeDeploy (just look at the diagrams a few times)
• Learn which services trigger Lambda asynchronously and synchronously
• Lambda requires dependency packaging, and CPU is controlled by RAM allocation.
• Dead letter queues
• Lambda, by definition, does not do in-place deploy (because in-place requires a tangible server)