This is the first chapter of this whole course, which will cover everything you need to know about being certified by the AWS official as a Solution Architect Associate aka SAA.
But in this specific & very chapter, you will be leaning what AWS is, why AWS, the AWS certification journey, how to get started with AWS, SAA exam itself together with its preparation etc.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the AWS, SAA to be specific.
Who
Who should take this exam actually ?
This exam is intended for anyone with one or more years of hands-on experience designing available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systemss on AWS. Before you take this exam, we recommend you have:
- 1 year experience with AWS technology, including using compute, networking, storage and database AWS services as well as AWS deployment and management services.
- Experience deploying, managing and operating workloads on AWS as well as implementing security controls and compliance requirements.
- Familiarity with using both AWS Management Console and AWS Command Line Interface namely CLI
- Understanding the AWS well-architected framework, AWS networking, security services and the AWS global infrastructure.
- Ability to identify which AWS services meet a given technical requirement and to define technical requirements for an AWS-based application.
How
How to prepare for the exam:
Gain confidence by following AWS Skill Builder’s 4-step exam prep plan(shown below). Enroll in the complete plan or choose specific courses tailored to your needs, ensuring you’re ready for exam day.
- Ability to identify which AWS services meet a given technical requirement and to define technical requirements for an AWS-based application.
Step 1: Get to know the exam with exam-style questions.
Follow the 4-step plan.
Review the exam guide here. Quite important, better read it through once or twice to understand what’s needed for passing the exam.
Take the AWS Certification Official Practice Question Set to understand exam-style questions.
Step 2: Refresh your AWS Knowledge and skills
Enroll in digital courses where you need to fill gaps in knowledge and skills, practice with AWS Builder Labs, AWS Cloud Quest, and AWS Jam.
Step 3: Review and practice for your exam
Enroll in an Exam Prep course. The Exam Prep Standard Course is available to anyone with an AWS Skill Builder account. The Exam Prep Enhanced courses include additional labs, exam-style questions, and flashcards.
Step 4: Assess your exam readiness
Take the AWS Certification Official Practice Exam.
Overview
Focus of SAA
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate is focused on the design of cost and performance optimized solutions. This is an ideal starting point for candidates with AWS Cloud or strong on-premises IT experience. This exam does not require deep hands-on coding experience, although familiarity with basic programming concepts would be an advantage.
Exam Structure
| Item | Intro |
|---|---|
| Category | Associate |
| Exam duration | 130 minutes |
| Exam format | 65 questions; either multiple choice or multiple response |
| Cost | $150 USD / ¥ 1,085 |
multiple choice: Choose One correct answer from all 4 choices.
multiple response: 2 or more correct responses amongst usually 5 or more options.
Domains & Weightings
| Domain | Currently | Previously |
|---|---|---|
| Design Secure Architectures | 30% | 24% |
| Design Resilient Architectures | 26% | 30% |
| Design High-Performing Architecture | 24% | 28% |
| Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 20% | 18% |
| Total | 100% | 100% |
| From the above table, it’s obviously that the four domains did not change over time, it’s just the breakdown of each domain and their weightages that changed. | ||
| For example, Security related information/architecture is becoming more & more important. |
Objectives of Exam
The actual objective of this exam can be divided into the four parts consisting of each domain-related objective described in the task statement in each domain of the exam guide.
For example, the objective of Secure Architectures can be :
Task Statement 1.1: Design secure access to AWS resources.
Task Statement 1.2: Design secure workloads and applications.
Task Statement 1.3: Determine appropriate data security controls
In a nutshell, designing security in relation to getting access to AWS resources, security in relation to how the workloads and applications run and security in relation to the data we store within AWS is the objective.
Under each task statement, there are some bullet points for knowledge needed and skills required.
Again, reading the guide is REALLY ESSENTIAL
A suggestion is to use the Technologies and concepts that might appear on the exam mentioned in the Appendix of exam Guide(namely the PDF file) as a checklist.
When you are confident that you understand a certain concept and knows its functionality, how it works, where it’s going to be applied and whether it’s dependent on any other concept/item etc, then you are good to check the one.
Similarly, you can do same to the rest and till you check all of them and confident to take the exam, then you are ready for the exam. Otherwise, do NOT register for the exam.
This course is all about designing, determining instead of implementing.
The role here is that of an architect, and an architect says how something should be formed or structured, and not necessarily the step-by-step procedure to make it happen.
So think of the architect who is building the designs for a high rise building, they will not be actually pouring the foundation, building the frame, laying the blocks & bricks, putting in the dry wall, etc. They are not going to do the actual tasks. They are just going to simply degign how it should be structured and that is also the goal here in this course.
So it’s not about a simulation of doing it. It’s about understanding which method of implementation of a certain given task should you be using.
Also remember this in the exam, you are often balancing security with high-performance, or high-performance with resiliency. So as a SA, you should also be able to integrate those together appropriately.
So this gives you a starting place for you to think about the objectives of the exam.
Best practice is to print a copy of them and use them as your guide along they way you are taking this E-learning, check off things that you grasped, via which a good tracker of what you’ve studied and what you’ve not can be easily kept.
Four Key Areas
I want to wrap up our discussion of the AWS Certified SAA-C03 exam specifically, by talking to you about what I define is the four areas to focus on. I know that we have the knowledge domains, and we’ve covered those.
But if you focus on these four primary areas, it’s going to cover 90% of what you see on the exam.
Compute, Networking, Storage, & Database.
Firstly, compute is the fancy term for, we are running virtual stuff in the cloud. So you might be running an entire virtual machine called as EC2 instance in the cloud, where it’s a linux or a Windows machine.
Or you could be using one of the services that AWS provides, like RDS, whcih really is kind of a crossover b/w Compute and one of the four: database, which will be introduced in a moment soon.
So point is know how you can do computing tasks within AWS, that’s really what you want to focus on here and understand all the various ways you can do it and which solutions are the best for particular scenarios.
Secondly, it’s networking. Networking is a little bit different.It’s all virtualized, but we have some of the same concepts we’re used to in our local networks. So you are going to be looking at subnets and virtual private clouds. So within your cloud, you can have multiple different virtual that are separated from each other and that you can interconnect if you desire to. You have security, so you have sort of firewall kinds of things called NACL(aka Network Access Control Lists) and then at teh network interface card of each instance in EC2, you have something like a personal firewall that you might have on an individual server, that’s called a security group.
Thirdly, Storage. There are primarily two kinds of storage. There’s what you might call Live Storage and Archive Storage. But there are different solutions for using this. When it comes to archive storage, you are dealing mostly with Amazon Glacier and that’s the one lets you store large amounts of data for low costs, and you can get it as you need it. But then we have our S3 buckets for live storage, and we also have volumes that are attached to EC2 instances for storage called EBS volumes.
The point is lot of different storage. These terms might all be new to you.But the time you are down with our full course, you will understand them all, I promise.
Lastly, Database, a specific storage, is the 4th of the key areas. So there are some crossover b/w these. Databases are the lifeblood of many organizations. Our users, our different products that we might be using daily or sell, our services that we offer, information about our employees, all of these stuff is put in databases.
Well, AWS provides a very rich database solution called RDS (AKA Relational Database Services), with which you can host MySQL Database, SQL Server, Oracle database & Custom Proprietary Databases that Amazon has built themselves.
So, remember all four key areas as you think about it, always ask how do i do it in a secure way. As long as you have that in mind, you are going to cover 90+ percent of what’s on the exam.