all right so i'm live with 52 weeks of aws and this is the final section of study for the
solutions architect exam i'm going to talk about bridging to certification so basically how do you
get certified what's the process you know what are some of the tips and tricks that you can do
and to get started i'm going to share my screen for those that are following along without
uh with with video i'm going to start there and i'm going to do a slideshow
all right so to to get started here uh really bridging to certification
is is an interesting topic and i guess what's interesting about it is that it it covers
a lot of different combined topics when you're when you're getting into this you know like
for example what are the exam resources that are necessary what are some additional things that you
you can care about um and so at the end you should be able to prepare for the aws solutions architect
exam and also find resources so first up where are the exam resources which you start with you
should start with the exam guide really that's the first place to look if you're
getting ready for the exam if you haven't gone through and looked at all the different domains
then you're you're going to be putting yourself at a disadvantage if we cover the first domain here
on the aws solutions architect certification it is designing resilient architectures and that's 30
of the exam so you know that's a huge section of the exam and a few of the things to be aware of
are you know basically being able to design a multi-tier architect solution uh would be one
two would be designing highly available or fault tolerant architectures three would be designing
decoupling mechanisms using aws services and four would be appropriate resilient storage
uh now in terms of domain two this is another uh big section of the exam about 28 so between these
two domains this is close to 60 of the exam it would be designing high performance architectures
and this includes identifying elastic and scalable compute solutions for a workload
designing high performance and scalable solutions for a workload and selecting high performance
network solutions for workload and also choosing high performance database solutions for a
workload in domain 3 it would be designing secure applications and architectures this is about 25
and you would want to cover secure access to aws resources one way to put this would be encryption
at rest and encryption in transit three two would be designing secure application tiers
three three would be selecting appropriate data security options
domain four is eighteen percent and this would be how to design cost optimized architectures
identify cost-effective storage solutions identify cost-effective compute and database
services and also design cost optimized network architectures so another thing that is a really
good idea is to look at the sample questions as well in addition to the domains uh and the
exam guide and these are all really helpful when you're going through a certification and in fact
why don't we just go ahead and do that so if i go to aws solutions architects uh exam guide
take a look at this uh this is a fairly straight forward thing to do which is you go to the website
for solutions architect material and you go through and find the exam review so we see this
exam guide aws solutions architect associate exam guide so if we pull it up it's a pdf
and we can go through here and read what it says it says the edible solutions architect
associate exam is intended for individuals who perform in a solutions architect role
this exam validates a candidate's ability to complete the following tasks design a solution
by using the appropriate aws service provide implementation guidance on best practices
and the target candidate would be someone who has experience with compute networking storage
management and database so really you need to do some hands-on work fortunately you can do
this with the aws free tier also the ability to identify and define technical requirements
for a solution that involves aws technology also the ability to identify which aws services
meet a given technical requirement and then an understanding of best practices for
building well architected solutions on aws and understanding of the aws global infrastructure
and an understanding of the aws security services and features in relation to traditional services
if you have listened to this live stream slash podcast we've definitely covered those things
and here are some things that are considered out of scope designing complex hybrid architecture
design identity federation with multiple accounts design architecture that meets
compliance requirements incorporates specialized services in a design develop deployment strategies
and create a migration strategy for complex multi-tier applications so they show you that
some of these more advanced and i would say fairly real world scenarios are covered in specialization
exams they're not going to cover on this exam and another thing to pay attention to would
be the exam content and and notice what are the kinds of questions on each exam because they vary
this one would cover multiple choice so there's one correct response and three
incorrect responses also multiple response so two or more correct responses out of five
and in terms of exam results we have aws certified solutions architect associate exam is pass or fail
the minimum passing score is 720. so really you need to have a c minus essentially on the exam
and then if we go into the domains we saw that already
uh that's a good thing to take a look at and then also the appendix i think this is
a good thing to look at as well look at the the resources that are mentioned and
write those down maybe on a notepad or something like this and say uh your own definition right
in this case it's compute cost management database disaster recovery high availability
management and governance microservices and component decoupling migration and data transfer
networking connectivity and content delivery security serverless design principles storage
so you should have in mind you know basically what services on aws would be associated
with those and maybe you could even draw some kind of a graph where they would be connected
and then also it's really important to look at the services that are covered and actually make
sure you know what they are because this is one of the easiest ways to to miss points on an exam
as you may even understand all the core concepts but there's a unique name that aws calls a service
and you don't know what the name is and when they ask you to compare one service to another if you
don't know what the service does how could you possibly get the question right unless you guess
and so this is critical to go through the different services and write down
what it is they are and you should know what all these services are so those are a couple
tips i think that many people really don't talk about that are very helpful
okay so that's again exam guide what about exam readiness training uh you can find classes for
free on the aws certified solutions architect uh you know course on aws that's a good place to go
there's also a practice practice exam so you can take a practice exam on the aws training
website also learning platforms also have a lot of sample exams the white paper as well i think is
is something that's easy to miss is it's easy to go yeah sure i don't need to know
what's on the white paper but i would say you do need to know what's on the white paper because
that is really the material that is going to be covered in the exam and so it's like you know not
reading the book for your english class and then there's an exam at the end of the year on the book
that you're supposed to read you must read the white paper and so if we go to the website there's
actually a white paper called aws will arch will architected framework and you should absolutely
have read this right and you can see here that there's a whole different selection of
items to review including the framework overview operational excellence pillar security pillar
reliability pillar performance efficiency pillar customs optimization pillar sustainability
sustainability pillar aws worked detected lens right all of these are are really important to
to be aware of i would say in particular for this exam aws well architected and the six
pillars are is the critical thing to to be aware of and you can see that the update to this
is actually december 2nd 2021 and it's not too bad to get through this whole thing
and i would say this is probably one of the best possible ways you could study
if you had to just study one thing i would probably study this uh in terms of a resource
okay let's move on here so aws were architected framework uh make sure you read the white paper
and pillar white papers they're really giving you a hint here that these are important for the exam
also this is a less talked about but there's aws frequently asked questions and so you could go to
the faqs and go and review the faqs for amazon ec2 amazon s3 amazon vpc amazon route 53 amazon rds
and amazon sqs so i would absolutely do that let's go ahead and take a look at this so if we just
go through and we look at amazon ec2 faq you can see here there's some really good questions about
you know what is elastic compute cloud what can i do with ec2 how can i get started with ec2
why am i asked to verify my phone number when setting up for amazon ec2 what can developers
now do that they couldn't do before right some really good q a questions here that
that drive home uh you know really how to use a service and and so this is a great resource as
well that is is actually not very commonly known uh and it's a it's just absolutely fantastic
okay what about additional resources that you can take a look at the documentation right you can't
go wrong with looking at aws documentation you know there's an acronym rtfm basically the nice
way to say it is read the manual and in a nutshell you're never going to go wrong with reading the
manual on services on aws it's a great place to start and there's really a lot of documentation
you can also go to the this is my architecture video series and this architecture video series
covers many of the different services and lets you go through how to build cloud architecture so this
would be a great resource as well for for people doing solutions architects solutions architecture
certification and then there's also the aws cloud adoption framework and this is a website and if
we go ahead and we take a look at this website here the aws cloud adoption framework or aws caf
allows you to go through and take a look at how you could actually use this cloud adoption
framework so again it's a white paper and it's available in multiple languages
it allows you to to build out your own um you know basically understanding of all the different
things digital transformation that's occurring with uh with cloud computing and you can also use
this in an organization so let's say you were getting solution architect certified and you
wanted to implement digital transformation in your organization this would be a great place to start
and and maybe even have like a study group in your company to talk about it and also there's uh
another slide here that says there's no substitute for hands-on experience and that really isn't
you you can read all you want and it is important to read but you need to do interactive uh you know
interactive exploration of the cloud platform and so a free tier account is critical so self-paced
labs are a good place to do that and you can actually take a look at this self-paced lab here
uh and these are available uh there's there's different links here for these self-placed
self-paced labs also quick starts these are automated gold standard deployments in the
cloud if we take a look at this these quick starts here there's a whole list of automated deployments
in the cloud landing zone accelerator quantum computing exploration automation for firewall
instance scheduler so here's a good example deploying architecture that helps you easily
configure custom start and stop for your amazon ec2 in amazon rds instances we go ahead and we
take a look at this and it goes through and it walks you through an entire architecture for aws
and actually lets you launch it into the aws console it even shows you an estimated
cost as well associated with the solution and it shows you how long it would take
so pretty cool concept here which is it really is like a guided tour of exactly
what you need to do to build something and these are all available here on the aws quick starts
getting started tutorials as well this is a good place to to go through and look at
the different best practices launch a website deploy a container run a serverless hello world
let's take a look at this deploy a container here so you can see here that you can write
code aws takes care of the infrastructure fully managed infrastructure simple deployment model
right if we take a look at one of these we can say there's amazon light sale or app amazon app runner
so i personally am a huge fan of app runner and i have a lot of content around ews rap app runner
and you can play around with it but basically you would just click on this deploy a web app using
app runner and you could actually take a look at how that works so there's a lot of really good
interactive tutorials here so in a nutshell we covered the exam i talked about the different
resources that are available and again mentioning that there is no substitute for hands-on practice
and if we go into aws console here real quick and i log in one of the things that i'll that
i'll point out here is that another really good resource to take a look at aws is to actually just
kick the tires on the different services inside of the console right so go into the console click
different buttons take a look at different things there's no substitute for just playing around
all right so that is it for today um so i covered the really from the beginning the
aws solutions architect material i think next here uh would i'll probably cover
another certification uh i think potentially the ews
machine learning certification could be a good one to cover uh starting next week and we could
kind of go through the same kind of a style walk through step by step how to prepare for the aws
machine learning certification all right well thank you everybody and we'll see you next week