Trifecta!
Last week, I passed the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam. This is my third AWS associate level certification, and I am excited to finish the associate tier. This was the toughest associate level exam by far.
Preparation
Like the other exams I took, I used LinuxAcademy and ACloudGuru content (purchased through Udemy). I also bought a Quiklabs subscription again; I canceled my previous one after a month, because it's a little pricy if you aren't using it actively. I basically did all the same stuff I did to prepare for my first AWS certification. Here's some things I did a little differently:
- I spent significantly more time studying Udemy/LinuxAcademy content
- I spent a lot more time doing labs and reading faqs and whitepapers
- I did a lot more practice exams from Udemy/LinuxAcademy
- I took the AWS offical practice exam twice; both times I was close, but I failed
- I basically started at the top of this list and repeated until I knew the content very, very well
- I bought a reserved instance to keep cost down and get more practical experience building things in AWS under my own account
- I set up everything I could think of related to CloudWatch, then I investigated and set up things I hadn't thought about, because monitoring is huge on this test. Here's a good video about using CloudWatch, keyed to a fun exercise about using CloudWatch to stream VPC Flow logs to ELK
- Here's a great playlist of AWS related videos
What's Next?
I'm looking forward to tackling the professional tier of AWS certifications, but I'm also planning on working on some other things before focusing on AWS certification again. AWS is a terrific platform, and it will be fun to just use it for a while.
