Skip to main content

AWS Developer Associate certification

Almost a month since i completed my AWS DA certification. Got 94% overall score. This post is about my preparation time and resources.

I spent almost 4-5 hours  on weekdays for 1 calendar month to learn about AWS. I did not have any background of AWS before this. I researched on which resources to use to learn and prepare for the certification. Undoubtedly, acloudguru comes up as the most popular study guide followed by whizlabs for the timed exam preparation.

I bought the course on acloudguru and whizlabs. I setup my AWS free tier account. And at the end of each lesson i did the labs on my aws account and read the FAQ about that lesson from the AWS website. My approach to preparation was as much hands-on as possible.

I found the course material for developer associate on acloudguru an OK resource. Something that will help you focus on what topics to cover rather than something that helps you understand the AWS ocean. The quizzes are nowhere close to the exam. Real exam has many scenario questions. So, if i had to do it all over again, I would purchase the discounted 10$ course on udemy.

Whizlabs quizzes for the certification is something you must take. But don't trust the answers provided. You need to understand the question and find the answer yourself and probably if it doesn't match the answer, mail the support guys. I had many such mails with them.

Decide and book the exam date at the right time. In my case, unfortunately, I waited to complete all course material. Problem was when i actually went to book the exam, the closest available exam date was 2 weeks away. Too long a wait.  It gets boring (nerve-wrecking for some) after a point to revise esp. if you are not working in the domain yet.

Lastly, some very important topics on which to concentrate for the exam:
  1. IAM roles and federated users. Many scenario questions need real understanding of how this works. Esp. enabling federation to AWS using Windows Active directory / SAML
  2. Default limits of different AWS products. Eg, Max SNS message length, max object size in S3 etc
  3. DyanmoDB read/write capactiy calculations.
  4. Understand best practices for designing table. Very useful resource
  5. Elastic Load balancing - how exactly it works when you have resource in multiple AZs and how DNS plays role in the load balancing
  6. Cloudformation and elastic beanstalk capabilities
  7. S3 bucket and object naming conventions. (Rules for Bucket naming and object naming for improved throughput)
  8. S3 storage classes which to use when and supported encryption. 
  9. S3 object security (policy, permission, pre-signed URL)
  10. ElasticCache - when to use, how to use
  11.  SWF - when to use, how to use, what are the components (workers, deciders, domains etc)
If you go through the quizzes on whizlabs, you will get a very good idea about the kind of questions you can expect in the real exam.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

Popular posts from this blog

why not to sysout from inside a loop!!

After 2 year of being an out of touch coder, I committed the sin and the penalty -- "a code that is 5 times slower." try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in))) { while (...) { ...                 System.out.println(..myresult..); ... } } v/s try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in)); PrintWriter printWriter = new PrintWriter(System.out)) { while (...) {             ... printWriter.write(..myresult..+"\n"); ... } printWriter.flush(); } the improvised code can by written in multiple ways.. use StringBuilder/buffer and append the result inside the loop and sysout at the end of the loop OR like the code above spool it to writer and flush it.
Read more

Java 8 Tutorial for Lambda

For those of you who are searching internet for good resource on Lambda, you must read the oracle tutorial.  Java 8 Lambda Quickstart I think this is one of the best tutorial with some simple examples that help you understand when and how to use Lambdas.
Read more