AWS Solution Architecture Certification Postscript

So I sat the exam today and past ok yippee. Guess there's no need to continue blogging about AWS certification stuff!?

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for individuals with experience designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform.

Some general observations.

The real exam is somewhat harder than the practice tests and practice exam (about 10% harder?)

NONE of the practice test questions appear in the real exam.

The focus is only what I would call the legacy IaaS Amazon services. Almost no questions on managed services, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Lambda, etc.

Lots of questions on what I would call systems and networks admin stuff.  I spent a few months trying to learn this stuff but actually I don't think it helped, I'm not sure I got any of these questions right. E.g. the sort of qns were if you have this sort of set up (VPCs, subnets, ACLs, groups, EC2, etc) and this doesn't work then what could be wrong?)

Multiple questions on "Bastion Servers" no idea why they are fixated on them.

Also wasn't sure if SQS has support for different priority messages? Doesn't look like it (hence the "Simple"), docs say:

• Priority: Use separate queues to provide prioritization of work.

However, there are ways to do it with just 1 queue. E.g. for Java (using message attributes).

So what's the correct answer? Depends I guess.

Some questions on specific EC2 instance types, maybe tricks questions as I didn't think you needed to know anything about specific types?

Some questions on what I would consider legacy services such as SWF.

Questions on how to do relational DB backups from EC2 and EBS, a bit odd.

Questions on EBS encryption.

One question on something to do with S3 backed AMIs, didn't know anything about this.

Here's the docs:

All AMIs are categorized as either backed by Amazon EBS or backed by instance store. 

And performance aspects:

Amazon EBS-backed AMIs launch faster than Amazon EC2 instance store-backed AMIs. 

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance store-backed AMI, all the parts have to be retrieved from Amazon S3 before the instance is available. With an Amazon EBS-backed AMI, only the parts required to boot the instance need to be retrieved from the snapshot before the instance is available. However, the performance of an instance that uses an Amazon EBS volume for its root device is slower for a short time while the remaining parts are retrieved from the snapshot and loaded into the volume. When you stop and restart the instance, it launches quickly, because the state is stored in an Amazon EBS volume.

Overall I think the focus of the exam was too much on legacy services, and systems admin and networks admin tasks. Insufficient focus on software architecture, distributed systems, and the newer managed services. I could probably have past the test with 1/2 the effort (1.5 months not 3 months), and feel that I know a more more about AWS that was not covered in the exam.   Not sure spending weeks on the practice tests was worthwhile in the long run as I assumed at least some of them would appear in the exam.

PS
And finally a word from Einstein "Never memorize what you can look up (in books - I guess online to)". Actually what he said was:

[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

So I think my approach of trying to understand the Amazon Web Services material (and background) for the Certification would have probably got the tick from Einstein as I didn't focus on memorization rather understanding. Anything I did memorise was accidental and I can now forget it (as long as I can look it up!). And naturally I've got more questions now that I did (and some of the same) at the start.