AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate : Exam Readiness

This post is a summary of the training course publicly available on AWS training website.

Exam Readiness AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate - The Exam Overview

Broadly covers:

• What to expect in the exam 
• How to prepare for the questions
• Question Strategy - what to consider when choosing an answer, how to identify key aspects of question
• Content - what to study / key things to know for each domain, practice questions in each domain

5 domains that the exam is about

• Domain 1 : Designing resilient architectures
• Domain 2 : Define performant architectures
• Domain 3 : Specify secure applications and architectures
• Domain 4 : Design cost-optimized architectures
• Domain 5 : Define operationally excellent architectures

These are 5 pillars of the well architected framework (resilient, performant, secure, cost-optimized, operationally-excellent)


What to expect in the exam:

AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate exam is intended for individuals who perform a solution architect role. This exam validates ability to:

• effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS.
• define solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements
• provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout lifecycle of project

Domain-wise question allocation - guidelines that were used to design the exam

Domain 1 : Designing resilient architectures 34%
Domain 2 : Define performant architectures 24%
Domain 3 : Specify secure applications and architectures 26%
Domain 4 : Design cost-optimized architectures 10%
Domain 5 : Define operationally excellent architectures 6%

Exam mechanics:

• 130 minutes
• multiple choice
• can mark a question for future consideration
• 65 questions

Question Strategy:

- What to consider when choosing an answer
- How to identify key aspects of question

General Strategies:

1. Read both the question and the answer in full one time through.
2. Identify the features mentioned in the answers.
3. Identify the text in the question that implies certain AWS features. eg. required IOPS, data retrieval times
4. Pay attention to qualifying clauses that may eliminate certain answer choices eg. most cost effective way, will best fulfill
5. Eliminate obviously wrong answers to narrow the selection of possible right answers