Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.
If you have limited experience with AWS, I would highly recommend learning what AWS does at a "high level" before digging into the details needed to pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (CSAA) exam. I found in my initial attempt that trying to learn the terminology as well as the technical aspects of AWS simultaneously to be overwhelming.
When I signed up for a CSSA instructor-led course through work, I was mistakenly signed up for the online Cloud Practitioner course. Given I was being paid to attend an AWS class, I opted to run with it and learn the material for the Cloud Practitioner. This turned out the be serendipidous.
The online AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course through AWS's training website was a good introduction to the basics of the various AWS services, what they do, and how they work together.
Learning the material at a high level before digging into the more granular aspects of AWS was much easier for me. Unfortunately, I did not have the "bandwidth" to go beyond the Cloud Practitioner material over the summer, however I was able to pick up where I left off in mid-December. We'll get to that next.
There are a lot of opinions on where to start learning the CCSA material, but I would say the easiest introduction is on ACloudGuru. The course is frequently updated for new material and it has labs which are fantastic.
Doing the labs is critical to really getting the most out of the ACloudGuru if you've got limited experience with AWS. While some of the exercises you do in the labs will seem repetitive, the "muscle memory" and familiarity with the AWS console that come about through repetition were invaluable to me.
In hindsight, I wasted time taking notes on the individual lectures. At the end of each section of the ACloudGuru course, there's an overview which gives you the bullet points of what you should know and gaps you need to fill in.
I really wouldn't recommend attempting to take practice exams until you've completed the ACloudGuru course. Once you have completed the course, I would recommend you start taking practice exams. Be prepared to be humbled. I took a practice exam before doing any course material of any sort and I got 26% on my first test. Don't be discouraged when you get wrong answers. When you take a test and fail, learn why you missed a question and you'll learn from your mistakes.
Firstly, studying for this test is pretty daunting and a lot of it requires sitting down in front of your computer to study for it. I don't like to lug my laptop a round, so I sought a way to minimize the bandwidth required to study and make it more convenient. I found my solution in Quizlet.
There are a lot of AWS CSSA sets on Quizlet, but I found a lot of the information changes over time. As an example, maximum latency on Lambda functions changed from when the author of the set I found originally created the flash card. Upon that discovery, I made my own set.
Quizlet made it possible for me to fill in the knowledge gaps without sitting down on front of my computer all the time. I studied when I was waiting at the dentist, between sets at the gym, etc. Quizlet flashcards are fantastic because their algorithm tracks what you get right and what you get wrong so you spend the least amount of time learning what you alredy know.
Udemy has a course by John Bonso which was excellent for learning the exam format and prepping you for what you'll see on the actual exam. When you miss a question, make a flashcard out of it on Quizlet.
Udemy will show you what you got right and wrong. It will also break down by high level areas covered by the test.
WhizLabs is another excellent resource I found. Their CCSA course was $25, however I found a coupon code and got it for 50% off. It was an absolute bargain, given amount of material you get for $12.50. WhizLabs has 8 total practice tests and a final test they recommend you hold off on taking until the day before the exam.
In addition to practice tests which tell you what you got right and wrong, they have a section quizzes covering the latest topics as well as general topics like EFS, S3, VPCs, etc. You can also generate your own quizzes, which I found very helpful.
I'm coming back to labs because doing the labs proved extremely helpful when taking the exam. Specifically, the labs I found invaluable were...
- Create a VPC from Scratch
- Create a VPC with a bastion host
- Create a VPC with a NAT gateway
Knowing the mechanics of how those worked enabled me to rule out answers that wouldn't work when it came time to take the test.
These were the most detailed labs and you do everything "from scratch" and you get little "tidbits" of what to expect in terms of latency for some processes which you're probably not familiar with.
WhizLabs was super helpful in terms of the breadth of labs they have available. As I mentioned earlier, the bulleted list of labs above were the ones that had the greatest impact on my score.
I signed up for QwiklLabs because they're an AWS parner, but upon digging into them, I was not impressed. As an example, the lab they had for setting up a VPC used the VPC Wizard, which doesn't really do you any good if you're trying to learn the mechanics behind AWS.
I hope you've found this helpful in terms of guiding you through your journey to obtain the CCSA certification. If you're not already familiar with AWS, learn about AWS at a high level before attempting to get into the nitty gritty. Take the ACloudGuru course and DO ALL THE LABS AND DEMOS. When you're done, then you can start taking practice tests and doing practice labs. From start to finish, once I put my head down, it took me about 6 weeks all-in holding a full time job to learn this material sufficiently well to pass the test.