Welcome back.
In the previous lesson,
I talked about exam technique,
something I hope will buy you additional time overall
in the exam.
In this lesson, I want to focus on how you use that time
by talking through my technique
for answering individual exam questions.
So let's jump in as we have a lot to cover,
and this is probably one of the most important lessons
of the whole course
in terms of its effectiveness.
Before we work through some examples,
let's break down what makes an exam question
at the associate level.
At the associate level, questions in the AWS exams
have a pretty common format.
They generally start with one or two lines of preamble,
which represents a scenario.
Now, this part often doesn't matter.
It might talk about a photo sharing website.
It might even give it a name.
Step one is to learn to skip past things which don't matter
and focus on the key words and concepts
which do influence the question.
And I'll talk more about this preamble
when we look through some examples.
So the preamble forms the first part of the question.
What follows is the question itself,
which, at an associate level, is usually very brief,
generally one line or less.
So you've got the preamble,
you've got the question itself,
and then immediately following that, a number of answers,
and at an associate level,
commonly that's four or five answers.
Now, questions come in two different styles,
either multiple choice where you need to select one answer
from a group of answers,
and this style is generally
about identifying the correct solution
from a group of incorrect or less correct answers,
and then there's also multi-select
where you can select more than one answer
and this is either multiple parts of a single solution
or identifying multiple ways
that something can be done correctly.
Multi-select questions will generally indicate
how many answers to pick.
So choose two or choose three.
Rarely, though, it can say, "Choose all that apply,"
and you have to pick whichever answers are appropriate,
but generally these are not present at an associate level.
This is something that's found much more at a pro level.
At an associate level,
you'll either have multiple choice
or multi-select where you're told how many answers to pick.
Now, also at an associate level,
the overall structure is usually pretty simple.
Answers are generally right or wrong.
Occasionally, though, you might get questions
where there are multiple possible answers
and you have to select the most suitable.
These most suitable style questions
are much more common at the professional level.
From an associate perspective,
they are definitely the exception to the rule.
So generally you're picking right and wrong.
It's relatively rare
that you need to pick the most suitable
from a list of answers.
Now, another common occurrence at the associate level
is that generally questions have at least one answer
which can be excluded,
and a great tactic is to locate those first.
If you can immediately exclude answers from a question,
identify answers which just don't make sense,
you can reduce the amount
that you have to read and consider.
And if you can do that as a first step
before you even look at the question,
then it significantly reduces the amount of time
that you have to spend on that question.
If you only need to evaluate between two possible answers
rather than four,
it's significantly easier.
Now, most questions on the exam
will have a theme-based overall criteria or a restriction
and these will help direct which answer you select.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, you might be asked
to pick the most cost-effective answer.
The scenario might paint
the business the question relates to
as either cash-strapped or cost-conscious.
If there are two answers where both are possible
and one is significantly cheaper,
if cost is mentioned in the preamble part of the question
or the question itself,
then you can probably default to the cheaper option.
You might also see the term best practice get mentioned,
and an example is best practice security.
Now, this is a funny term.
When you see best practice, I want you to assume
that it simply means, do what AWS want you to do.
A great example is using an EC2 instance role
to give permissions to things running on an EC2 instance.
AWS recommend this.
So in those type of situations,
a best practice way of giving permissions
to something in an instance is via an instance role.
Now, you might also see questions which mention performance.
This is often the inverse of cost effective.
The question might be asking you
to select a product or service
which delivers a certain type of performance.
An example might be that you're asked
to select between EBS volumes
and instance store volumes,
or the question might want
the absolute highest performance option for something,
so picking Direct Connect over a site-to-site VPN
because Direct Connect can achieve
significantly better performance.
In contrast to this,
questions might inflict a timeframe restriction.
For example, if you have one week
to perform an implementation,
that probably means that you can't deploy Direct Connect.
So if you have multiple different answers
and the question does present a time restriction
or a time priority,
the first thing you need to do is review the answers
and work out exactly how long each of them
will take to implement
and then you can quickly exclude any
which don't fit into the time window
that the question suggests.
Now, at this point,
I want to step through two example questions
and show you how these techniques work in practice.
And I've selected these example questions
from the AWS official exam questions
for this particular exam,
and I've linked that attached to this lesson.
So let's look at the first sample question.
This is the type of question
that you might find in an associate level exam.
At the top is the preamble and scenario,
in the middle is the actual question itself,
and below it, four individual answers.
And this is an example of a multiple choice question
where you have to select one answer from those four options.
Now, the first thing that you need to do
when you first arrive at a question
is to look whether you can eliminate
any answers immediately.
If we can eliminate answers,
we can go from four options to three or two.
So sometimes you can identify answers
which can be eliminated
even before you read the question.
Sometimes the wording of the answer just doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense,
it uses the wrong products,
or it uses a feature of a product
which you know isn't something that that product offers.
Now, in this case,
nothing jumps out as being crazy or stupid
and so we can't immediately eliminate
any of the answers from this question.
The next logical step
is to break down what the question means.
So we need to identify what matters
and what doesn't matter in the preamble
and the actual question.
Now, this process does come with practice,
from trying lots of different exam questions,
but at a high level, we're trying to find keywords,
keywords which can impact the answer that we select.
And if we can identify those keywords,
then we can ignore most of the word usage in the preamble.
And for this question, it might look something like this.
The gray doesn't matter, the red does.
What I've done is to identify the keywords
in the question preamble.
We don't really care that the question refers
to a customer relationship management system
or CRM application.
We do care, though,
that it's running on multiple EC2 instances,
that multiple Availability Zones are involved,
and that it's running behind an Application Load Balancer.
Generally, what I also try to do
is identify what's missing.
So throughout the course,
you've been exposed to various standard architectures.
At this point,
you'll know that normally when you have a load balancer,
you'll probably also have Auto Scaling groups.
But in this question,
there's no mention of any Auto Scaling groups.
Now, understand that by not having an Auto Scaling group,
you don't benefit from any of the capabilities
that the Auto Scaling group provides.
So you know by now that an Auto Scaling group allows you
to scale out and in
and can auto-provision and auto-terminate instances.
And because there isn't an Auto Scaling group,
then potentially the functionality provided by it
is missing from this solution.
So keep that in mind.
Focus on the fact that there's no Auto Scaling group.
The next step is you need to identify
what the question is really asking.
So like the preamble,
some parts of the question matter and some don't.
In this case, you're being asked,
if one of the instances fail, then what occurs?
Now, one tip that I always try to provide to my students
is to look for any amount-based keywords.
So if one fails or if any fails
or if multiple fails
or if all fail.
In this case, it's one instance failing.
What occurs if one instance fails?
Now, at this point, this is a perfect opportunity
with what we've identified in the preamble and the question
as well as what's missing from the question,
we can go back and look at all of the answers
and identify any of them that we can exclude.
So we know that there isn't an Auto Scaling group.
I made a point of highlighting that for this very reason.
And that omission of an Auto Scaling group means
that there's no real ability for the load balancer
to terminate or recreate any instances.
Remember, it's not the load balancer
that can perform any automatic terminations or provisioning;
it's the Auto Scaling group.
And so at this stage, if you look at answers B and C,
you'll see the words terminate and replace.
And because we don't have an Auto Scaling group,
we can't perform the steps that are listed in B or C
and so they can be fully excluded.
So at this stage,
answers B and C are ideal candidates to ignore
because there is no Auto Scaling group.
So as we're working through this question,
mentally mark off that B and C potentially can be removed.
Only think about B and C any more in this exercise
if A and D don't fit.
So next, we can focus on the answers in more detail.
Another technique which I use
is looking for what I call word fluff.
If you have multiple answers
which all have the same wording at the start or at the end,
then that wording is not actually needed
when evaluating those particular answers.
So if the same wording is used
at the start of, say, answers A and B,
then just when you're selecting between A and B,
that wording isn't required.
In this case, the same wording is used
for all four answers,
and so when you're logically looking at those four answers,
this word fluff has absolutely no meaning.
You don't even need to read it.
We know that one of these answers is correct,
we know that all four of them
have the same starting wording,
and so we know that none of these words matter.
Now, if only certain answers have this wording
and others don't,
we need to identify whether that is one reason
to either pick the answers as possible
or exclude them as being impossible.
Now, in this particular case,
at the associate level,
you might not gain all that much time
by performing this step,
but at a pro level,
where each of the answers can be two to three lines long,
by eliminating sort of the same wording,
you can save yourself significant time
and reduce the mental load
of evaluating each of these individual answers.
Now, in order to reach the point
where we can answer this question,
we need to look for action keywords in the answers.
It's the keywords which matter.
And these are those keywords:
stop sending requests,
terminate, automatically replace,
and return 504 Gateway Timeout errors.
Now, we're already ignoring answers B and C
because there are no Auto Scaling groups involved
in either the preamble or the question.
So we only have two real options:
A, which is to stop sending requests;
and D, which is to return a 504 Gateway Timeout error.
So we have to pick between these two answers.
So compare these keywords to the question keywords.
We know that we're being asked
to identify what will happen when one instance fails,
not all of them.
And earlier in the course,
you should remember me saying
if one instance behind a load balancer is working,
then the load balancer itself is working.
So because the question only states
what happens when one instance fails,
we know that we will have others
and so it won't return a 504 error.
So the only remaining potentially correct answer is A.
The final step is to check that A makes sense,
that there's nothing wrong or weird,
and if we're happy, then A is our answer.
If an instance fails,
then the load balancer will simply stop sending requests
to that instance.
It won't 504 as long as at least one instance is active,
and it can't terminate or automatically replace instances
because there is no Auto Scaling group.
Okay, so this is the end of part one of this lesson.
It was getting a little bit on the long side
and so I wanted to add a break.
It's an opportunity just to take a rest or grab a coffee.
Part two will be continuing
immediately from the end of part one.
So go ahead, complete the video,
and when you're ready, join me in part two.