On the new exciting journey that I started in public cloud, today I earned AWS Solutions Architect (Associate Level) certificate. It was a bit more challenging than what I expected but it was fun! For those who want to pass the exam, in my opinion despite what’s said about the focus of exam on VPC, RDS, high availability and scalability; the truth is that you should get familiar with almost all of the services and update yourself with new ones. For example, to my surprise I didn’t have any direct question about RDS but instead 5 or 6 questions about SQS and SWF and 1 question about Kinesis! I suppose questions are randomly selected and others may have different experiences but it’s a good idea to know basics of all the services. Of course, VPC, security, high availability and scalability are super important and you must be fluent in them but all I say is that they are not enough for passing the exam. Also, expect more scenario sort of questions which include different concepts rather than direct one sentence questions that you may find in internet.

So, if you are preparing for this exam, work harder and good luck!