AWS cloud practitioner study guide
AWS cloud practitioner — A study guide
Two weeks ago, I sat for the AWS cloud practitioner exam. I had decided that I prepared enough to at least pass the exam. Sure enough, I walked out of that exam room newly certified with a score of 717/1000.
I had not spent a single cent on any courses online nor did I pay for any practice papers. I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to pay for anything other than the price of the exam.
Don't get me wrong, I’ve heard plenty of great reviews of the courses offered on ‘UDEMY’ and other platforms, but I felt confident and wanted to see if I could do it on my own.
In this post, I’ll share my process with those looking to get certified, but don't know where to start.
Firstly, let me share a bit about myself. I work at an engineering company supporting their IT applications. This involves mostly playing around with PL/SQL scripts and communicating with non-technical staff. Before that, I had worked at a startup company maintaining proprietary sorting machines and helped develop some of their applications (they were written in c# and ran on Linux machines). That's about all the technical exposure I have.
My goal is to move into the realm of cloud computing because I think it will be more relevant in the future. I have never had any hands-on experience working with cloud technology, but I have a general idea of what it is.
In total, I spent about 3 months studying with plenty of breaks in between. I studied only when I had the time or was feeling up to it. In my opinion, if someone with the same technical knowledge as me were to really commit, they could easily complete the studying in about 2 weeks.
My method:
1. Watch the entire 7-hour youtube video course uploaded by tech2net (take notes along the way) — Edit: This video was made private by the uploader, check out the new link below
There are many complete video courses available on youtube but I chose the longest one to get the most information from it. This was comprehensive and it gave me a broad view of the services provided by AWS.
I structured my learning notes based on how the video was paced.
If you are like me and don't know where to start, I highly recommend watching this video course because it is pretty detailed and is a great baseline to start.
2. Look up the (free) cheat notes created by the lovely people at ‘digital cloud’
Once I completed the video course, I wanted to get all the content in text format to read through at my own pace. I struck a goldmine when I stumbled upon ‘digitalcloud.training’.
Honestly, I don't think I could've passed the exam without their very well-summarized notes.
If tech2net provided the baseline knowledge, digital cloud gave the information more dimension. I looked through every single one of their notes.
Side note: If I hadn't had gone through the 7-hour video uploaded by tech2net, I probably would not have understood half the things in those notes, so it is important to go through the video course first.
3. Practise exams are a must (find the free ones)
Next, I found and completed as many free exam questions online that I could find. Be sure to do the one provided by digital cloud first. Read ALL the explanations for the solutions and do the same for any other free exam you find. Here are some of the ones I did:
There is also a practice exam uploaded on youtube so I suggest you go through that one too.
The point is to get a feel of the kind of questions that will come up and fill in the gaps of what was not covered by the tech2net video and the digital cloud notes.
Not all AWS services will be covered by any course, so it is important to fill in the gaps yourself.
4. Complete the free course and exam provided by AWS.training
Last but not least, and the most essential thing for me, is it go through the ENTIRE free course provided by AWS for this exam AND complete the practice paper provided. It is a no-brainer that since this is an exam by AWS, some of the questions will be based on the modules they cover.
I made sure to top-of whatever knowledge I already had with the information from the course. There are in total, 10 modules which take approximately 6 hours to complete.
Since I already knew 90% of what was covered (from all the free materials), I only had to take note of the services that I didn't already know.
Once you got that covered, run a couple more exams and you are ready to book your exam!
Here are some of the topics that came out
Their billing and pricing model is essential.
Be sure to fully understand the ‘well architect framework’, trusted adviser service, and cloud adoption framework (I suggest going all out and memorizing all the non-technical information as they are probably the easiest to take advantage of).
Understand their global architecture, EC2, S3, relational and non-relational database, serverless computing, automation, cloud migration, basically get a broad view of their services.
Use the knowledge that you have to practice scenario-based questions. Be sure to remember which service is best for a given scenario.
Exam structure
The exam structure is as follows:
Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses.
Multiple responses: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more options.
It is a ‘pass or fail’ exam and you require at least 70% correct response to pass. I was given 65 questions.
* You will not be penalized for answering a question incorrectly, so if you really do not know the answers to a question, it is better to guess than to leave it blank.*
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