AWS Cloud Architect Associate

2018

I believe that cloud is the way to go - all the data in the world is being stored in the cloud and AWS has been at the forefront of reimagining how compute power can be utilized by everyone to create wonderful applications with very little investment. I wanted to start my journey by getting an AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Certification. Here, I entail my journey of getting AWS Certified.

During my second year at Xyntek (2016), I developed a mobile application that authenticates drugs and lets you know if the medication you purchased was actually manufactured by the said pharmaceutical company and not a counterfeit. I used AngularJS front-end and a SQL database residing in AWS. This was the first time I used AWS. The app didn't end up becoming viral and our company had other plans for it. We had to stop the project because our automation engineering business division expanded and we were growing rat a rapid rate that we had double the size of the employees within a year.

Eventhough I was not able to proceed further with the mobile app, I took a fascination to AWS due to the ease of its use and the amount of services it provides to develop any kind of application. I started preparing for the AWS CSA exam in July 2018, approximately a month before I sat for my exam. There are plenty of excellent resources available online that helped me during my preparation. I would like to give back to the community by sharing these resources and spreading the word.

I would highly recommend the following resources:

AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate Exam Online Course - This course by Linux academy provides a lot of lab demonstrations where they walk you through how to use many AWS services.
AWS Architecture Overview - The Orion Papers provides a high level architectural diagram of all AWS services and how each service is connected to one another which makes it very easy to understand all the concepts.
Practice Exams - Braincert has a very good collection of AWS exam questions and provide detailed explanations for all the answers. I recommend you complete all the 12 practice exams as they are similar to the actual AWS exam questions.
AWS Exam Learning Path - Jayendra has a full website with detailed preparation process for all certifications. He breaks down all the AWS whitepapers and provides concised and important information from these. There are also cheatsheets which are useful to review just before the exam.
Create an AWS account for the Free Tier usage where you can learn to deploy instances, VPCs and play around with a lot of free AWS services.

Everybody can get AWS certified. All the best!

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