Passing the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam
I recently gained the AWS Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C02) certification, here are my thoughts
1. Difficulty
I have passed a few other AWS certifications including the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (DOP-C02). The SAP-C02 certification was by far the hardest certfication exam that I have taken, the questions are long and nuanced and the breadth of the subject area is huge
2. Required study time
I estimate that I spent around 60 hours studying for this exam over the course of one month. I scored 861/1000
3. My studying strategy
My strategy was simple; consume as much AWS knowledge as I could via courses, books, podcasts and practice exams. When I encountered an aspect of a service that I was not familiar with I would read the documentation and make notes on the key points which resulted in 40 pages of notes
4. Resources that I used
By far the most important resource that I used to gain this certification was my job. At the time I was working on a primarily serverless event-driven content management platform which gave me a solid grounding in many of the topics that came up in the exam. That said I have zero experience with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and the exam contained two questions on this service!
Other resources that I used were
Udemy courses
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Stephane Maarek - Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional I have used Stephane's courses when studying for all of my certfications, I only watched about 40% of this course as I found the audio to be mainly a reading of the slides. I would recommend this course even if only to read the slides
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Neal Davis - AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02
I found the slides on this course to be of a much higher quality, with great diagrams and animations -
Stephane Maarek & Abhishek Singh - Practice Exam AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
These practice questions were OK, I found the constant repetition of "As an AWS Solution Architect Professional" incredibly annoying, the questions are long enough as it is! -
Neal Davis - AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Practice Exam
These practice questions were well written -
Jon Bonso - AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Practice Exam
These practice questions were the best written and the closest to those in the exam
Books
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Exam Guide
by Patrick Sard & Yohan Wadia.
This book is written by a Solutions Architect at AWS and contains a huge amount of interesting and useful information. It was a pleasure to read and great to give my eyes a rest from the computer screen. Be warned that the online practice questions, riddled with typos and ambiguities were the worst I have ever read so don't waste your time on them. Despite that this is an exceptional book
Podcasts
AWS Developers Podcast
Presented by an AWS Developer Advocate this contains lots of interesting interviews with people who create the AWS services featured in the exam
AWS bites
At times listening to this podcast felt like I was listening to the documentation so I dropped it in favour of the AWS Developers Podcast
Email newsletters
- Yan Cui is the serverless boss, his emails only take 5 minutes to read and he excels at highlighting the trade-offs when using a particular AWS service
My notes
All of this studying resulted in the creation of 40 pages of notes which can be found on my GitHub