It was an unforgettable Christmas as I finally cleared the AWS SAP exam at almost the last minute of Year 2022.
It was also a fantastic year for me. I achieved all my goals which I planned at the beginning of the year.
I may just stop here for now and next year, I will spend more time on my Youtube Channel and this Medium Blog on sharing my experience and knowledge on Cloud and IT. I hope I can help more people to start their journey to the Cloud World.
Let’s get back to the exam preparation.
Firstly, I would like to say this is not a short article. It covers all the aspects for the exam at least based on my preparation. Secondly, you cannot pass the exam via just reading this article. Instead, you need to spend lots of time to do document reading and hands-on practise.
Learning Materials
I know you might be interested in the materials that I use. I did two training sessions on Udemy but honestly, I haven’t finished all of them.
If you are beginner who is preparing Solution Architect Associate Exam, you can also use this course from DolfinED for a broader and deeper knowledge. But unfortunately, it is not allowed to enrol on Udemy. I just found this website which has the same content. This course has more than 40 hours videos and it covers everything. But for the experienced AWS engineer, I would not suggest this as it takes too long time to go through the videos and lots of concepts which are a bit boring.
Another course I use is from Neal Davis SAP-02 course on Udemy. It has only 20-hour video and the knowledge is explained quite clearly. Compare with the exam guide, the knowledge which is covered in this course is not 100% but you can definitely pass the exam with high score. Also, I would like to emphasise that this exam is not just testing if you remember the knowledge, instead, it test if you know how to use the knowledge to build a proper solution. Remember, there is no best solution in the world. A better one is always the one you should select.
Other than the training course, you should do some practice exam. I used Jon Bonso’s practice exam on Udemy which cost me just $9.99 when it is in discount. I did three of them but only passed one. But don’t worry, this will not impact your final result in the real exam as the more mistakes you make, the more knowledge you know you misses. The explanations are very in details and I would suggest you to go through the explanation for the correct and incorrect answers no matter you make the right choice or not. If you still don’t understand it, go to AWS official document and do some hands-on as well.
Most importantly, for my last 5-year learning and working on AWS, I read lots of AWS architecture blogs and AWS re:Invent videos on Youtube. These help a lot and I found some of the questions are coming from them which are real customer use case. Also, AWS white-papers are highly recommended! Below two are must-read which I recommended many times in my previous blogs:
Learning Plan
Not like DevOps Engineer Pro exam, I just spend less than a month to prepare this course as I have already got quite a lot of experience on the scope of the exam requirements.
For the first two weeks, I spend 2–3 hours a day to watch the Neal’s training video and do some hands-on at the same time. I ignored some sessions such as S3, EC2, RDS… which I believe I have mastered so it saved me quite a lot of time. But for the knowledge that I was not so familiar with such as Direct Service, Direct Connect, I watched them for multiple times.
For the last 2 weeks, I started to do practice exams. Most of the time, I cannot have a full-3-hour time to do the exam but I tried to do it within a day. And after that, I will spend 2–3 days to go through all the questions and answers. Then go back to the knowledge and do hands-on if I am still not so sure. I use Microsoft OneNote as my notebook to record all the knowledge I know and I missed based on different services.
And before the exam, I will just go through my notes multiple times to remember them. Because in the real exam, you will make the wrong choice just because you don’t know or you forget an unimportant knowledge point. If this happens multiple times in the exam, you might lose your patience and focus.
As I mentioned in below video, you should first know the key concepts of Cloud Compute and the corresponding services on AWS.
Before I walk you through the knowledge and key points, I would suggest you to learn multi-tier/3-tier architecture.
There are four domains for SAP-02 exam based on the exam guide.
- Design for organisational complexity
- Design for new solutions
- Continuously improve existing solutions
- Accelerate workload migration and modernisation
But I will not follow this. I will show you the knowledge structure based on my own priorization.
I broke the services into three levels based on the importance and popularities and also point out the key info related to each service. Don’t take this as you knowledge checklist as it does not cover all. But you can go through them and see if you have covered them.
Level 1 (Most Important — Need deep understanding and familiar with hands-on operations)
- AWS Organization — For SA Pro, this is a the most critical service which can be connected to different aspects of the Cloud services. More than 1/3 of the questions are related to AWS Organization. You need to know how it works with SCP, SSO, Billing, CloudTrail
- Control Tower — on top of AWS organization but I did not see questions related to it in my exam.
- Config — Whenever you want to assess, audit or evaluate the configuration of AWS resources.
- EC2 — You should know everything about it!!!
- Auto Scaling — Well-architected Framework will help you understand more deeply.
- ELB — ALB/NLB…what are difference and what are their limitations.
- ECS — Know how container works and understand the benefit that Fargate has. Understand how network mode awsvpc works.
- Lambda— You should know everything about it!!!
- RDS — You should know everything about it!!!
- Aurora — You should know everything about it!!!
- DynamoDB — You should know everything about it!!!
- ElasticCache — Memcached or Redis? Cluster mode enabled or disable? How to scale?
- CloudFormation — What is template, stack, stackset, change set? when should you use nested stack? What is the deletion policy for different types of resources?
- CloudWatch — Logs, Metrics, Events(EventBridge)…How it is integrated with other services for your monitoring system?
- CloudTrail — API events… How to include global services such as CloudFront, Route53?
- Systems Manager — Multiple Components included (Automation, Run Command, Inventory, Patch Manager, Session Manager, Parameter Store…). Understand how Maintenance windows works; Understand difference between parameter store and secrets manager; How to enable EC2 access with session manager.
- Secrets Manager — Key Rotation!!!
- CloudFront — Global Service!!! How to use Lambda@Edge to customize the content that CF delivers? Difference between signed URL and signed cookies? How to set origin and origin group? How geo restriction works?
- API Gateway — Most of the time, it works with Lambda functions…
- Route53 — Public or Private Hosted Zone? Health Check? Routing Policies? Route53 Resolver…difference between inbound and outbound Endpoint?
- VPC — Everything related to Cloud Networks!!!
- ACM — Public or Private? Used on EC2? Any limitation for using it on CloudFront distribution?
- KMS — How it is integrated with other AWS services such as S3
- Cognito — User Pool vs Identity Pool? Very confusing name but totally different concepts.
- IAM — You should know everything about it!!!
- S3 — You should know everything about it!!!
- EBS — How it is different from S3 and EFS
- EFS — How it is different from S3 and EBS
- Storage Gateway — One diagram help you understand everything.
- Kinesis — Data stream, Data analytics, Firehose… Video Stream?
- STS — AssumeRole Process.
- SNS — Fanout pattern
- SQS — How to Decouple you system. Standard vs FIFO? Long vs Short Polling?
Level 2 (Important — Need deep understanding with less hands-on experience)
- Cost Explorer — Understand how to get cost information.
- Budget
- Batch — How batch job works? Where it can be run on? What types of instances are most suitable?
- Elastic Beanstalk — Deployment modes
- Redshift — Only use it when you need data warehouse.
- Developer Tools (CodeCommit/CodeBuild/CodeDeployCodePipeline)
- IoT — Understand how AWS IoT Manage the Core, devices, edgeCompute, Analytics as well as security
- Service Catalog — Understand the different types of the constraints such as launch constraints, notification constraint, template constraint? How to manage the permissions via IAM?
- Global Accelerator — what is the benefit? Compare with CloudFront? Compare with S3 Accelerator?
- Transit gateway — Full Mesh
- VPN — Differnce vs Direct Connect? Customer gateway vs Virtual private Gateway?
- Direct Connect — Private vs Public VIF? Multi-Region Case? Site-2-Site VPN for redundant connection?
- Directory Service — How it works with Microsoft AD or Azure AD? What is AD connector?
- WAF/Shield — Difference? Shield is for DDoS only but very expensive. Think about alternative and cheaper ways?
- SES — Send customized email
- Resource Access Manager — Share resources…what resources can be shared?
- Migration Services (Application Discovery Service, Application Migration service, Database Migration Service, Server Migration Service, DataSync, Migration Hub) — 7 Rs of Migration: Refactor/Replatform/Repurchase/Rehost/Relocate/Retain/Retire
- SCT — Used with database migration process
- Snow — Difference among Snowball, Snowball Edge and Snowmobile?
- Glue — ETL
- Athena — Serverless SQL
- EMR — managed cluster for big data framework (Apache Hadoop and Spark). What are the node types…master, core, task nodes? For one-off run task, how to choose instance purchasing options?
Level 3 (Less Important — Just need to understand the concept and use cases)
- EKS
- Data Pipeline
- Data Exchange
- Lake Formation
- OpenSearch
- QuickSight
- AppFlow
- AppSync
- Step Function
- SWF
- Lightsail
- Outpost
- PrivateLink
- CloudHSM
- DocumentDB
- Timestream
- X-Ray
- AppStream 2.0
- Workspaces
- Amplify
- Device Farm
- Machine Learning Services (Rekognition, Transcribe, Translate, SageMaker, Comprehend, Lex, Polly, Textract, Kendra)
- Health Dashboard
- Trusted Advisor
- Well-Architected Tool
- Network Firewall
- GuardDuty
- Inspector
- Macie
Finally
Hope this is helpful for your preparation and wish you good luck on your exam. Please follow me if you want to get yourself notified.
Feel free to comment and your questions are always welcomed.
Also, my new Youtube Channel — StartQuick Tech is in preparation. This channel is used to share all my experience on tech and I may start from Cloud Knowledge. I would appreciate it if you can subscribe. I believe you can get lots of value from it.
Thanks.
Harry Z @ NZ
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