Finally, done with AWS SAA certification! 🎉
Why AWS SAA?
Couple of weeks back, I gave AWS SAA (Solutions Architect Associate)-C003 certification exam. I managed to clear the exam in first attempt. It took me almost 9 months of persistence to clear the exam. It took me so long partially due to vastness of syllabus and also balancing the personal and professional commitments.
AWS Certifications give a structure and discipline to study and prepare vast area of cloud computing. From last few years, I got curious about internals of systems working at scale. I started studying research papers to dive deep into them such as LightHouse, DynamoDB, BigTable, Kubernetes etc. However, I felt somehow disconnected from the bigger picture of how these systems playing out in real-world applications. This lead to the urge of knowing about Cloud computing. When it comes to Cloud computing, AWS came first in mind. Now to dive into the ocean of Cloud computing, I needed a structure. That’s where preparation for certification started.
Preparation
Many times it feels intimidating by shear breadth of AWS services and theory to feed into mind. Setting regular time for preparation is key for certification.
I mainly dependent on AWS SAA book by Ben Piper and David Clinton. Apart from this as supplementary I took help of
Udemy’s Stephen Marek course
FreeCodeCamp’s VPC deep dive
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) (Pearson Practice Test) on O’reilly Learning Platform
What’s Next?
Now, to reinforce the concepts learned during preparation doing a few hands-on AWS projects.