Cloud Academys Preparation Guide For AWS Solutions Architect Certification

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The exam guide to

AWS
SOLUTIONS
ARCHITECT
CERTIFICATION
© 2015 - CloudacAdemy.com

Table of content

1. Introduction
2. Requirements and Structure of the Exam
3. Who this exam is for
4. How to use Cloud Academy to study
5. Suggested Learning Paths
6. Final Tips and Conclusions

1. Introduction
AWS Solution Architect - Associate

• Selecting the appropriate AWS service based on
data, compute, database, or security requirements

The following information is from this AWS Web Page

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
exam is intended for individuals with experience
designing distributed applications and systems on
the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should
understand for this exam include:
• Designing and deploying scalable, highly
available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS
• Lift and shift of an existing on-premises
application to AWS
• Ingress and egress of data to and from AWS

• Identifying appropriate use of AWS architectural
best practices
• Estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control
mechanisms

Candidate Overview
Eligible candidates for this exam have:
• One or more years of hands-on experience
designing available, cost efficient, fault tolerant,
and scalable distributed systems on AWS
• In-depth knowledge of at least one high-level
programming language

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• Ability to identify and define requirements for an
AWS-based application

• Practice Exam Registration fee is USD 20

How Cloud Academy can help?
• Experience with deploying hybrid systems with
on-premises and AWS components
• Capability to provide best practices for building
secure and reliable applications on the AWS
platform

Exam overview
• 55 Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
• 80 minutes to complete the exam

Cloud Academy is a great place to start studying for
AWS Certified Solutions Architect. Cloud Academy
has many courses that cover the required
knowledge for the associate level.
The three-part “AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Level Certification” series thoroughly addresses
the skills you’ll need for the exam.
In addition to courses, Cloud Academy has ten
essential labs on AWS Solutions Architect-related
topics. Cloud Academy quizzes and CloudCareer
help a lot in preparing for the exam and testing your
level of knowledge.

• Exam Registration fee is USD 150
• Available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese,
Korean, French, and German

4

2. Requirements and General Structure of the AWS
Solutions Architect Certification
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest public
cloud on earth. Their services have lead the public
cloud market since the very dawn of cloud
computing. AWS started in 2007 with one service
(Simple Storage Service – S3), and has since
expanded rapidly in all directions while, at the same
time, consistently dropping prices (they currently
have more than one million active customers).
In 2013, Amazon introduced their certification
tracks which measured professional
administrators’ AWS expertise. AWS tracks focus
on three areas: Solutions Architects, Developers,
and SysOps.
In this E-Book, we will address the skills required
for passing the AWS solutions architect exam –
Associate level.

Although there are many information sources on
AWS, your first stop for reliable information (after
Cloud Academy, of course) should be AWS
documentation.

5

Basic requirements
Linux and other Operating Systems
You don’t need to be expert in any one operating
system, but you’ll need to know how to access
(using Windows RDP or Linux Shell) and manage
EC2 Instances from the command line. Familiarity
with the basic principles of virtualization can also
be useful.
Networking
Good understanding of TCP/IP networking
concepts, IP addresses, CIDR is necessary. You
should be very comfortable with configuring and
working with AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPC).
Experience using network route tables, access
control lists, firewalls, NAT, HTTP, DNS, IP and OSI
are all helpful.
Security and Reliability
You must understand how AWS access control lists,
security groups, and IAM work. And you’re

expected to be comfortable with high availability
and design for failure best practices, along with
those related to disaster recovery. Your application
security experience should include public key
encryption, SSH, access credentials, and X.509
certificates to pass AWS Solutions Architect exam.
Storage and Databases
You should have at least a basic understanding of
your OS’ file systems to be able to properly work
with Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Simple
Storage Service (S3). Understanding RDBMS (using
MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server), and NoSQL will also
be expected.
Enterprise architectures and Software life cycle
Be familiar with loose coupling and stateless
systems, web servers (Apache, nginx, IIS), caching,
application servers, and load balancers, along with
message queuing and RESTful Web Services, XML,
and JSON. A strong understanding on how to

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interact with AWS (AWS SDK, AWS API, Command
Line Interface, AWS CloudFormation) and the
software development lifecycle are also assumed.
Time and resources
Amazon recommends that you have at least one
year of practical experience with AWS before doing
the AWS certified solutions architect – associate
level. The exam blueprint lists all the elements you’
ll need to focus on. One month of focused study
before the exam is a reasonable time.

WARNING!
Don’t look for leaked exam questions (brain
dumps), as all candidates agree to an NDA
prohibiting them before signing up for the exam –
besides the fact that many of the question sets
available on the web are misleading or downright
wrong. In any case, it’s good to have a real
evaluation of your level of mastery that only an
honest exam result can give you. The Solutions
Architect exam questions are meant to test the real
level of the candidate, as they are written by AWS
experts, and don’t contain filler questions.

General Structure of the exam
Question Weighting:
1. Designing highly available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, scalable systems 60%
2. Implementation/Deployment 10%
3. Data Security 20%
4. Troubleshooting 10%

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CLOUD ACADEMY TIP
You should definitely check out the sample exam
questions that AWS provides for free. Since some of the
exact questions might pop up on the actual exam, it
would pay to not only learn the correct answers, but
learn why those answers are correct. There is also a
practice exam that will cost you US$20, but in our
opinion it's definitely money well spent. At the end of
the practice exam you are given a score, which is a
pretty good indication of whether you are ready to
undertake the AWS Certification Exam. You can
register for the practice exam here.

Response Limits
You will select from among four or more response
options, choosing the option or options that best
complete the statement or answer the question. If
your knowledge is still incomplete, it's easy to
incorrectly choose a distractor option, but proper
preparation should usually make the correct
response obvious.

Test item formats used in this examination are:
Multiple-choice: You select the single option that
best answers the question or completes a
statement. The option can be embedded in a
graphic on which you “points and click” to complete
your selection.
Multiple-response: You selects all of the displayed
options that correctly answer the question or
complete a statement.
Sample Directions: You read the statement or
question and from the response options, select only
the option(s) that represent the most correct or
best answer(s), given the information.

8

3. Who needs this Certification and what job opportunities
does it bring?
Over the past few years, there has been no area
within the tech world that's been attracting the
kind of attention showered on Cloud Computing.
Technology vendors are working hard to deliver
products and solutions sporting the “Cloud
Computing” touch and name, with new cloud
functionality being announced almost daily. As
such, training programs and certifications are of
great value for both employees and their
companies. Cloud Computing IT certifications guide
candidates towards certain tracks with clear
defined objectives and outcomes, and they
demonstrate the presence skills employers find
very desirable.

The Cloud is Creating Jobs
Companies like Amazon and Google obviously have
a serious need for IT administrators who
understand the specific concerns of the cloud. But
other companies, as they come to realize how
important the cloud can be for their business plans,
are joining the hunt as well. Below is a list of what
we believe are some of the current professions that
would benefit from the AWS Certified Solutions
Architect Certification:
●
•
•
•
•
●
●
●

Network System Administrators
Network Communications Analysts
System Security Specialists
Systems analysts
Database Administrators
Solutions Architects
IT Educators
Project Managers

9

Did you know?

"There are 3.9 million jobs in the U.S. affiliated with
cloud computing today with 384,478 in IT alone.
The median salary for IT professionals with cloud
computing experience is $90,950 and the median
salary for positions that pay over $100,000 a year
is $116,950.Globally there are 18,239,258 cloud
computing jobs,"
(Forbes.com)

10

Job Opportunities
Once you pass the AWS Solutions Architect
Certification, a wealth of new job opportunities
present themselves, many of which you probably
never even considered. Some of the world's most
innovative Big Data companies couldn't accomplish
anything without AWS and, more importantly,
without AWS Certified Solutions Architects.
Some of the Companies currently using AWS for
their Big Data operations are General Electric, IBM,
SPLUNK, and The Weather Company. Perhaps
you'll find yourself working for a medical company,
building a solution to map patients' genomes to
predict diseases. If you love to travel you might land
yourself a job at the popular online travel site,
Expedia, who use Amazon AWS to host the travel
suggestion service, "Expedia Service." Let's not
forget Netflix, possibly AWS's biggest Customer,
who trust AWS with the highly-available and faulttolerant content delivery of its films and media.

Due to the sheer volume and fluctuating usage
patterns of its customer base, Netflix relies on
Amazon’s infrastructure capabilities for rapid
scaling, server, and storage deployment. I can only
imagine that they have employed hundreds if not
thousands of AWS Solutions Architects.
The possibilities are endless, and with the cloud
market expected to grow exponentially over the
next few years, we think that getting the AWS
Certified Solutions Architect certification now is a
great, forward thinking long term career step.

11

4. How to use Cloud Academy to study

Video Courses
Cloud Academy has more than three hundred videos covering all the core AWS
Services (not to mention services offered by other cloud providers like Google and
Azure). In this e-book, however, we've hand-picked those we believe will be most
valuable to you as you work towards AWS Solutions Architect certification:
Highly
recommended:

AWS Solutions Architect Level Certification Course - Part 1 of 3
EC2, EBS, S3, IAM

AWS Solutions Architect Level Certification Course - Part 2 of 3
EC2,Networking,VPC,CloudWatch, Design Principles,Database Config, Cloudfront,Route53

AWS Solutions Architect Level Certification Course - Part 3 of 3
RDS,DynamoDB,Glacier,Elastic Beanstalk,CloudFormation,SQS, SES,SWF

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Recommended:
Beginner-level

●
●
●
●
●
●
●

Recommended:
Intermediate-level

●
●
●
●

AWS Technical Fundamentals - AWS 110
Load Balancing with ELB
Introduction to IAM
Databases on AWS - Part 1 and Part 2
Storage on AWS
Amazon RDS Introductory course: running your
database in the cloud
Amazon EBS 101

How to Architect with a Design for
Failure Approach
Automated data management with EBS,
S3 and Glacier
AWS Automation: how to use
CloudFormation
Understanding VPC

CLOUD ACADEMY TIP
If you're exclusively focused on
passing your Solutions
Architect certification, then
there are a few Cloud Academy
videos that you can safely
ignore. From my experience, I
haven't seen any questions in
the Solutions Architect exam
pertaining to either using the
AWS Command Line Interface
or installing and running third
party applications like
WordPress. They are, of
course, outstanding videos
filled with useful information,
but they're just not that
relevant to this certification.

13

Quizzes and
AWS Certification Prep
Cloud Academy provides a quizzes with which you can test yourself on various AWS
Services. But more importantly, we have a 250 question AWS Solutions Architect
certification prep quiz aimed at helping you prepare adequately for the exam.
Quizzes - This screen­shot (of a menu accessible by
clicking on the "Select AWS Service" button at the
top left of any quiz question page) is from the Cloud
Academy Quizzes Page. We're working on having a
quiz available for each AWS Service. Currently that
is not the case and the above services are the only
ones that are currently available. See below for our
recommendations concerning which quizzes we
believe are most needed for the AWS Solutions
Architect Certification.
Cloud Academy AWS Quizzes can be found here.

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Recommended
quizzes:

• AS (Auto Scaling)

• ELB (Elastic Load Balancing)

• AWS General

• Glacier

• CloudWatch

• IAM(Identity and Access Management)

• DynamoDB

• RDS (Relational Database Service)

• EBS(Elastic Block Storage)

• Route53

• EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud

• S3 (Simple Storage Service)

• EIP(Elastic IP)

• VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

15

Certification Prep - At Cloud Academy, you can use the
Certification Paths to learn and test specifically those
skills you'll need to pass certification. Obviously the
one in the screen­shot above "AWS Solutions Architect
­ Associate" is the one that is recommended by Cloud
Academy as it designed to confirm that you can design
and deploy scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant
applications.
The AWS Solutions Architect associate level
certification Path can be found here.

CLOUD ACADEMY TIP
If you are pressed for time and aren't sure which quizzes or preparation tools you should take, we definitely recommend
doing the AWS Solutions Architect ­ Associate Prep listed above over the individual quizzes.

16

Labs
Our hands-­on labs are designed for a learn­-by-­doing approach. Once you start
a lab you will access the real AWS console in a live environment. The lab will
guide you through the whole process and will notify you for every successful step.
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) practical stream provides
hands­-on lab activities to help you understand how to design distributed
applications and systems on the AWS platform. These subjects (all covered by
Cloud Academy labs) are recommended by Amazon for anyone who is interested
in using AWS services and getting certified: Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), EC2
and EBS; Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and AutoScaling; RDS and DynamoDB.

Cloud Academy Labs can be found here.

17

The ten Cloud Academy Labs you’ll most useful for AWS
Certified Solutions Architect exam prep:

18

5. Suggested Learning Paths

Learning Paths
Below are two suggested paths you might follow through our Cloud Academy material that
should work well for your exam preparations.
The first should be adopted by people without much hands­-on AWS experience.
The second should be effective for people with more experience with AWS practical
applications, but mainly using the console.
You can of course use your own discretion to decide how to move through our material,
however we do advise you to try and keep to a some kind of organized structure, skipping over
material you feel you already understand well.
Key

GREEN: Hands-on Labs

(see following page)

BLUE: Video Training Courses
YELLOW: Quizzes

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Minimal AWS Experience

AWS Console Experience

• All Beginner recommended Videos

• Any recommended Beginner videos you feel you
don't know well.

• AWS Essentials (7 Labs)
• Any quizzes whose service you learnt in the Labs
or the recommended videos
• All Intermediate recommended Videos
• Any quizzes whose service you learnt in the
Intermediate recommended Videos
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect ­ Associate
(10 Labs)
• AWS Solutions Architect Level Certification
Course ­ Parts 1, 2, and 3
• AWS Solutions Architect Prep

• Any AWS Essentials Labs you feel you don't know
well.
• Any quizzes whose service you learnt in the Labs
or the recommended videos
• All Intermediate recommended Videos
• Any quizzes whose service you learnt in the
Intermediate recommended Videos
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect ­ Associate
(10 Labs)
• AWS Solutions Architect Level Certification
Course ­ Parts 1, 2, and 3
• AWS Solutions Architect Prep

20

6. Final tips and Conclusions
There is no one thing that we can tell you to study
that will magically help you to pass this exam.
Rather, with this e­book, we've tried to describe the
various resources that are at your disposal if
you are a Cloud Academy member.
Finally, we will leave you with a few more Cloud
Academy Tips that will hopefully provide some
more insight into successfully passing this exam.

Read the recommended white papers
These White Papers will give you a good
understanding of AWS Security Compliance, Best
Practices, Risk Compliance, and Storage Options.
See Documentation Recommended by Amazon below.

Exam blueprint
Familiarize yourself with the AWS Certified
Solutions Architect Exam Blueprint here.

Read all the FAQS
Most AWS services have FAQs. You should try and
read these for the main services that may be on the
exam.
The FAQ's can be found here.

Learn the AWS architectures
AWS has an architecture section where you can
learn about the different scenarios in which a
particular service can be used. Many AWS exam
questions are scenario based, so you will need to
know more than just service basics to pass the
exam. You should also be familiar with the
scenarios in which a particular service can be used.
So you should definitely take a look at these
architectures and try to understand them as best
you can.
The Architecture Section can be found here.

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Documentation Recommended by Amazon
Architecting on AWS (here)
AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers (here)
● Overview of Amazon Web Services
● Overview of Security Processes
● AWS Risk & Compliance Whitepaper
● Storage Options in the Cloud
● Architecting for the AWS Cloud: Best Practices
Utilization of the AWS Architecture Center website (here)

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About Cloud Academy
We help both companies and individual users learn everything about cloud computing,
providing the best content and training in the industry. The content available at Cloud
Academy cannot be found anywhere else online. Cloud Academy is a diverse, curated,
centralized database and learning platform that can quickly get you off the ground in your
cloud computing journey.

Visit Cloud Academy website

23

Get daily tips and articles on
AWS Certifications on our
Blog!

24

Ready to become AWS Certified?
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© 2015
275 Battery Street, 2600 Suite San Francisco (CA), 94111
info@cloudacademy.com
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