Flash around your AWS badge of honor.
This blog will go to detail into:
- Why one should or should not certify.
- My experience with AWS.
- Practical tips to study for the exam.
- The result I achieved.
Why certify?
The title might sound like I am immediately going to advocate getting certified on AWS but the first question to ask is always why?
Why would someone need a certification/badge? How does a standardized test make you as a developer more knowledgeable?
The short answer is that you probably don’t need to get certified in order to get the knowledge that you need to do your job right.
To me, the main benefit is that someone else (e.g. employer) can quickly validate that you have a certain level of knowledge required to handle their systems in AWS. Other than that, it’s a nice validation to yourself that you have the skills required to work with AWS.
This does not mean that it’s entirely useless to pursue a certification, it is the exact opposite. Regardless of the current amount of knowledge that you currently possess, the journey of getting AWS certified will give you a lot more information and some experience. By having to answer most of the questions correctly you will learn about topics you might not have touched before your journey of getting certified. I experienced it as a moment of “Ultra Learning” where I learn so much that I can apply it in my daily work immediately after.
My journey into AWS
In October 2019 I started working at Luminis as my first full-time job. The project I started with required the use of AWS IoT. This is a specialized service for building internet of things services.
As a front-end engineer, I was tasked to build an Angular application directly on top of the HTTP API that Amazon Web Services provides. In order to access the AWS services, we needed temporary credentials, which let met to using Cognito through AWS Amplify. To host the website we used CloudFront as a CDN and S3 as the storage.
This project got me interested in AWS and to learn more about it in a theoretical manner and it was also a huge help in studying for the first exam. I chose to take the developer exam before doing the cloud practitioner exam because I was already experienced.
How do you get more knowledge and experience for the AWS exam?
First of all, it is great to review the official AWS page: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certification-prep/
If you like to read more about AWS to get a broad overview first, I suggest you look at some of these cheat sheets to get some more information about all the services and concepts related to AWS:
https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-sheets/
To get more knowledge for the AWS developer associate exam that I took, I followed the Udemy course AWS developer associate. Although this was a great way to get a guided tour through several AWS services, this would not have been enough for me to pass the exam.
For that I have a few more tips listed below.
1. Look at some of the product (services) FAQs
Studying for the exam, you mainly have to learn about AWS services. A good way to learn about them is by reading their FAQs. This will list all the common questions others have asked about the services.
This is not something I did for ALL of the services that AWS is offering. However, I found it really useful to get an idea of what these services are for. Examples I looked at are:
More advanced products:
2. Take practice exams.
Practice exams will get you familiar with the way AWS asks you questions and what kind of knowledge you need to possess in order to pass the exam. They can also tell you whether or not you are ready to schedule a real exam.
The practice exam service that I used is called Whizlabs for which you can buy exams through a one-time purchase. They also give one free exam for you to try them out first. That one has less questions, so it is not representative of the other practice exams. You could also purchase an official AWS practice exam, but that one is more expensive.
When you already completed an exam successfully you will get a free official practice exam for your next certification and you will also get a 50% discount towards your next exam. These can be found on https://www.certmetrics.com/amazon/candidate/benefit_summary.aspx
There are five practice exams that you can make:
This is what the results look like:
The added benefit of learning through the practice exams is that you can check out extra information and even buy labs to get hands-on experience based on a question you got wrong or right:
3. Saving links as resources that you didn’t know about when making practice exams.
For me one of the links I saved was:
This is something I wanted to do more before taking the exam, but I didn’t get around to it because I had already planned my exam in advance. Although it is very helpful to do in the beginning while studying.
I also made notes from the Udemy course that I took, so I only saved one link from my Whizlabs journey. For my next exam, I will save more links to resources based on Whizlabs and I will not be taking a Udemy course. This because a video-based course makes me learn slower than being confronted with exam questions and further references after making a mistake.
4. Doing the exam preparation training created by AWS themselves.
Just a few days before taking your exam you have to follow the following course: https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/learn/course/internal/view/elearning/42/exam-readiness-aws-certified-developer-associate-digital
This course will go into detail on how AWS will ask questions and it will give an interactive way of stressing the important details that exist in the question.
For example, you will notice that usually the first sentence of a question is not informative for answering the question.
The course is free to do and takes a few hours to complete. For me this brought my practice exam score from 67% up to 84%.
5. Schedule your exam before you think you are completely finished studying.
In order to actually go through with your plans of getting certified, I recommend planning the exam before you think you are fully ready for it. This will make sure that you put some more effort into getting your practice exam score above the required 80% to be ready for the real exam. My experience was that I put in 3x more studying efforts in the last two weeks leading up to the exam.
What you will get in return for the effort you put in
In the end, this is what you gave all that effort for:
On the 1000 point scale, I got an 880 grade. The minimum to pass the exam is 720. Click here to get more information on the scoring system.
For the cost of $150 (~€135) I wouldn’t personally spend this amount of money on the exam, especially since there is a tax portion included which would be more beneficial to pay through your own company or an employer for write-off benefits.
Ending notes
At the company I am working for, we are continuously working to develop our cloud knowledge. In the year 2021 we started participating in “cloud the game”, a game to learn cloud technologies made by colleagues to be used by other colleagues.
If this seems like something fun for you to partake in, you can always have a look at the careers page and be sure to mention my name once you decide to apply.
My professional goals for 2021 are to learn more about security in AWS. I will be doing this by getting the AWS Certified Security – Specialty certification.
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