Passed exam on 9 October 2022
Background
Basic knowledge of EC2, S3, and Load balancer - which I use for side projects.
Developer Associate or Solution Architect
Quick overview:
Developer Associate:
focus on best practices for developing on AWS
how to build using AWS
Solution Architect:
the exam will test your ability to design architectures
I am a developer, so my focus here was initially on development.
Preparation
- Labs, lectures - Cloud Academy
- Question quizz
I planned to prepare as efficiently as possible for the exam in 1 month. The first day of preparation was September 08, 2022. I immediately set the exam date for October 9, 2022.
The goal was not so much to pass the exam but to understand the concept. So I emphasized practical exercises. I went through the theory for about 5 minutes and immediately proceeded to do laboratory work at Cloud Academy.
This is not an advertisement. The company where I work provides free access to this service.
I wrote more about my study and training plan website.
In total, I explored 35 Amazon services. Each day I devoted about 1-2 hours to it.
Somewhere in the "middle of the road" I tried to take a test exam at Cloud Academy. I had 45% correct answers, which was not enough to pass the exam.
About a week before the exam, I went through all the lab work and became more confident in the services. The confidence that I was ready to take the exam was not coming.
So I set about answering questions and parsing individual cases. On the first night I realized that if you sit for 2 hours every day, solving questions, and then find out the result only after the whole test, there is no energy left to analyze mistakes.
I solved this problem in the following way (in my opinion this was the key to success in preparing for the exam): there are many different services with thematic variants of questions for the exam on the Internet that are publicly available. Note: _I didn't look for dumps or anything like that, only questions and discussions that anyone can freely and legally find. _
I parsed some questions and comments, saved them to JSON, and randomly started solving them as if I were using cards. I posted the first version of the idea and variants of the questions with commentary on the website.
Impostor Syndrome
There was no confidence that I was ready for the exam. And a small change in the learning process allowed me to solve the problem. I wrote an app that counted my correct answers.
This is what my progress looked like the day before:
Benefits
In preparation, I have discovered some useful services that I can use for my personal projects, as well as to keep up to date with new products.
Below are free or nearly free services that you can use for your projects:
- Amazon CodeWhisperer - free. Current status: preview. Use for free after registration. Copilot analog from Github. Helps you when writing code.
- AWS Amplify - frontend free or $1-2 per project.
- AWS Lambda - Free Tier or minimum for small projects. One million requests each month for free.
- Amazon DynamoDB - 25Gb free.
- Amazon Cognito - 50,000 users free. Authorization, Authentication.
- AWS CodeCommit - 5 users + 50Gb free. Private repositories.
- AWS Data Exchange - free datasets, tables, APIs. For example, Covid-19 data.
- Amazon Chime - free zoom counterpart on the basic rate.
Instead of Conclusion
I prepared an app that I used to prepare for the exam. There are over 500 questions in it now. It is free to use. The app is in progress, I would be happy to get any comments on how to improve it.
And this is what my badge looks like AWS Certified Developer - Associate
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