AWS Solutions Architect Associate and Cloud Practitioner – What made my journey more meaningful and reusable for further certifications!

Let’s get to the meat, straight, by trying to understand, what an AWS certification is all about.

Obviously, it is a way that AWS has chosen to educate its potential consumers and the existing ones, about the wide spectrum of cloud based services, it has to offer via a conversationally formatted question and answer sets, where every question is more than likely a problem statement that could be solved by using one of AWS’ services.

For instance,

Question: I want to store the audit data for my web application and, I do not know the size. But, I do know the access pattern. Write once, read rarely with high availability.

Answer: Would be one of AWS service offerings. Here, it would be the Amazon S3-IA (Infrequent Access) storage as it is unlimited in terms of the size of the data to be stored and best fits a scenario where we would like to store as much as we want and read it rarely, let’s say once in a month but with high availability at a relatively lower cost for storage and a similar read price point compared to the standard S3 storage.

Does it look like a catalog of services, where all the answers in a way or other direct us toward picking or embracing one of the AWS services or their value addition? Yes. You’re right. Does it sound boring? Probably, yes. Does it work to get through the cert if I crammed all the questions and their answers in? Probably, yes.

But, is there a way to make it a more meaningful and interesting journey to the test taker? Absolutely, yes! Let’s jump right into it, then.

Basically, after realizing that no one should invest their time into blindly remembering a plethora of services and their use cases, I started looking at those questions and their purpose in my current job. How do I apply these questions to a corresponding use case at work? Looking back at the use case question above, I would now instead of remembering S3 as a storage service with unlimited storage alone, would start seeing its application at work that can help us better implement a service that can improve our customer experience on the whole (it is okay if it is not evident to the customer vividly, that we used S3-IA instead of S3 that optimized our cost while keeping the user experience quality, high. It is more than adequate if a customer feels that their time spent with our bank was efficiently done and was worth it, on choosing us to get a seamless and smooth experience using our applications/services). 

Similarly, there are around 6 R(s) representing migration strategies to cloud and “Retain” is one among them, which is one of the paths that do not end up in cloud. And, the way I relate to it is, through a legacy monolithic, main frame service, that is currently retained and is refrained from migration to cloud at the moment, considering its complexity and a strong dependency of our clients on it, making it hard to be migrated even in parts, at the moment. This “how-I-relate” list can go on.

Bottom-line: Each AWS service offering should be mapped to a use-case at our organization.

Furthermore, how does this practice work better as we cover more and more of AWS’ large services fleet?
As we try to learn more services our memory card (in our brains, although unlimited storage) starts to lack efficiency in mapping the services to their purposes and makes the indexing less unique and thus, increases the time complexity (O(N)) of retrieval of a record from our brain, increasing the latency and hence failing to get the questions right during the exam and probably fall for the distractor options in the test. Sad, isn’t it? Basically, this happens as there is no intuitive reason behind remembering each service and its definition.
Instead, what we can do is, alongside of the above approach of relating to the services through a purpose at work, rely on the nomenclature and its rationale. When we name anything, we do have a reason behind it more than likely (unless we are deliberate enough to not make sense out of the name or are intending to obfuscate the information, which is not the case in here, more than likely). Thus, if we pick any service and try to understand its name, it should help us also understand the service being offered.

Let’s take an example.

• AWS EC2, the most popular AWS service. Let’s decipher the name. EC2 = ECC = Elastic Compute Cloud
  • What could it mean after all? It is Elastic – meaning, it can increase or decrease the capacity of the service.
  • It is a Compute service – meaning, it could offer computational processing power.
  • It is on the Cloud – meaning, it is not on-premises; but is on the cloud, which implies that you can carry it with you, all across the globe based on AWS’ footprint and your subscription’s tier.
  • Now, that must be making more sense, I reckon.
• This way, we wouldn’t have to remember what each service could be offering.

On the other hand, there are services whose names do not convey information, that inclines well with the service being offered. In such cases, we would have to inevitably create a mapping in our memory card entries. One such service could be AWS Aurora – It is a fully managed, enterprise level, relational database engine compatible with MySql and PostgreSql, while by Aurora, all that crosses my mind is the Northern Lights or being a Chicago resident at the moment, a sub-urban region of Illinois called Aurora (famous for the Aurora outlet mall and a Hindu Temple that I visit often for the great food and blessings I get there haha). Mnemonics are the best in these situations.

Now my mnemonic would be, Aurora outlet mall being large shopping space and is managed by another entity such as AWS and the stores (Nike, Adidas etc.,) in the mall are similar to the services offered by AWS Aurora. Just that AWS Aurora is limited to MySql and PostgreSql database offerings, while the Aurora outlet mall has more than 2 stores being offered. Funny but, we all have our own ways to remember things. Just making it sensible, makes the indexing stronger and efficient.

What other benefits can we leverage, with this approach?

• Now, that you don’t have to memorize all the services without a reason, at least. You’re more intuitive.
• Based on my experience as I started preparing for AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam, I was able to relate to the services covered there, better and making the hands-on labs quite comprehensive, than otherwise.
• Most importantly, you are able to come up with a use case at your organization, behind every service you would like to implement and therefore, you’re not making any entries in your brain that is badly indexed and hence the retrievals are of almost a constant time complexity O(1) – the ideal speed!
• Furthermore, now you’d start thinking from time, space and cost optimization stand points, with respect to any problem to be solved at work or your personal project.

Now, let’s take a look at some reliable sources of information that we can learn from, for this foundational level exam.

• Cloud Practitioner Essentials – although a 6 hour course, that contains video explanations about some of the important offerings with respect to this exam, it can be watched at higher speeds and completed way faster.D
• AWS Solutions Architect Questions – this is a comprehensive questions list that is gone through by an expert who explains each service mentioned in the questions, why, and why not. This in fact acts as both the dictionary of AWS services and parctical applications scenarios with strong reasoning.

Recommended order:

1. Start with a Sample Exam Questions walk-through of your choice. This would help you gauge your current level.
2. Once done with one set of such sample questions, you can proceed to take the Cloud Practitioner Essentials course and AWS Solutions Architect questions video mentioned above. It perhaps, sounds like a reverse engineering process but helps grasp things better and quicker.
3. Post course completion, you can go on to either answer the further sets of sample questions.

With the above materials, you should be quite equipped to tackle this exam and also get through with a “passing” score! Hurray!!

If you are wondering, why the word “passing” was quoted, then here’s why – from my experience in the exam, with respect to the above material for preparation, I came across around 7-8 AWS services that I had never encountered in the above material such as AWS Kinesis, AWS Connect, AWS Rekognition, AWS XYZ (which was not even a legit service offering – a distractor, perhaps), and a few more.

What I did post-test was that, I read about as many services that I could remember in the above category once I got out of the testing center.

My take away from the Examination: What I recommend to my fellow test takers prior to the test is, to go over as may AWS services and their one-line definitions, as possible. Really helps identify services, make a confident guess and be able to score with certainty.

If you have reached until here, then it’s time for you to get the ball rolling. First things first. Reserve a spot for your examination (here you’d have to sign in/up using your personal amazon account not the work ones) and follow further instructions.

You would also have an online test taking option, which could prove relatively efficient with respect to time and commute as you can take the test from home. I just happened to prefer the test center this time, but have heard from people who have taken it from home with ease.

Thank you, for reading. If you liked this content, or have any comments, concerns or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me and I would be happy to discuss. If you’d like to understand containerization, or are interested in learning about Containerization in simpler terms without obfuscation, then this is for you: Why Containerization Exists?

Now, let’s earn our certifications! Let’s talk a common tongue! Finally, let’s go CLOUDDD!