My Tips and Study Notes for AWS Certified Solutions Architect

My tips are as follows:

1. Don't bother memorizing "count" stuff, like "how many subnets can you have in a VPC by default" or whatevever. Any of these resource limit type things are subject to change, and they mostly try to keep the test questions to things that stay fairly consistent (I've been told this by somebody who works at Amazon and contributes to the certification process, and who wrote a popular certification study guide for this test).

2. Focus on the "core" services: VPC, EC2, S3, RDS, Route53, etc. At least for the Associate level test, I wouldn't expect to get many (if any) questions on AWS Batch or Sagemaker, or Rekognition, etc. Especially something like Sagemaker which has it's own "specialty" certification.

3. Expect lots of networking questions. Know subnets, security groups, subnet ACL's, etc. really well.

4. Know RDS really well.

5. Know auto-scaling groups, and load balancers pretty well.

Actually, if you know anything about AWS at all, and then study the hell out of everything about RDS, auto-scaling groups, the various load balancers, the networking stuff, and S3 (storage classes in particular), then you will probably be good to pass the certification.

Nice post!