Michele Martone

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Where it started

I was working closely with a group of excellent engineers and we were all excited about continuous learning. We decided to start a study group, and after an initial meeting, chose AWS-SAA as our study topic. It was relevant to what we use at work, seemed like an achievable goal, and we wanted to work on it together. Weekly study groups were formed.

No more group study

The study group was disbanded about 25% of the way into our study plan. Due to external circumstances, we had to part ways, and each of us were on our own. I was newly unemployed, and felt like the certification could give me a boost, but also keeping myself busy in other ways.

Schedule the exam

After too much time had passed with still making incremental progress, I decided to just schedule the exam. Nothing like a deadline to motivate me to finish up. I scheduled it for 1 month in the future and got to work.

Pass!

I had to reschedule to push it back 5 days because I wasn’t going to be fully prepared. Finally, I sat for it and passed!

The nitty-gritty details

• I have more years of AWS experience than I can count, but this exam still requires prep.
• I used Adrian Cantrill’s excellent SAA course to get foundational knowledge. His labs were great for making that knowledge concrete.
• Due to my self-hosting journey, I was also deploying my own services to AWS. The things I learned here turned out to be essential for my understanding. I deployed a VPN, several wiki builders, a mail server, a game server, and in the process used essential AWS services like EC2, EC2 user data, EIP, VPC, security groups, Route 53, ECS, S3, launch templates, etc. etc.
• Once I scheduled the exam, I got practice exams from tutorials dojo. This was such a great level up. I felt like their practice exams built upon each other so that it quizzed on known topics and then introduced new ones. I did these exams in review mode and scored in the low 70s on the initial pass of the exams. When I re-took them I scored in the upper 80s and felt good going into the actual exam.
• I created Anki flashcards for the review topics I needed to brush up on. This was especially useful to remember the differences between different gateways, or the multitude of AI/Machine Learning services that AWS provides.
• I used ChatGPT to round out my understanding. Looking back, here are some of my prompts:
  • Explain when to use an NLB and when to use an ALB in just a few sentences.
  • What is the difference between iam policy and service control policy?
  • Could you have a invoke lambda resource policy, a lambda execution role that allows S3 access, but a conflicting S3 resource policy that denies access?
  • Is an interface endpoint a part of PrivateLink?
  • Can you discuss when you would use compliance and governance in combination with retention and legal holds? In particular what use cases?
• I found a wonderful Anki shared deck that provided questions that I hadn’t seen, and went through that deck too.

Closing thoughts

Even though I have used AWS for most of my tech career, this exam was tough. AWS provides so many services, and most of them are in scope for the exam. That is because a Solutions Architect needs to be able to use the right tool for the job, and AWS has most of those tools. I feel like I have more of an awareness of when to use all of AWS’s offerings after this preparation.