All About AWS Solution Architect Associate Course and Examination

08-Dec-2020

Introduction -

AWS is the most popular and leading cloud services provider in the technological world and it is but natural that an IT professional with aspirations will desire to take advantage of it. It is a prime desire of most people to get a good, secure, and high-rewards job for themselves and receive large amounts of money for their work. So it is very understandable that you may have a strong wish and a big goal of being able to work in a business or an organization as an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate. At the present moment, the AWS Solution architect position is at number 1 in the AWS position chain and it is in the line of sight of many hopeful and enthusiastic IT professionals.

Also Read: Top 10 Interview Asked Questions of AWS Architect Associate Exam 2020.

When an aspiring IT professional finally gets the chance to become a part of AWS as an AWS Solution Architect they immediately jump at the opportunity. It is very rare to see anyone turn it down. This is because the AWS Solution Architect is one of the most lucrative and profitable jobs in the IT industry, particularly in the cloud services provider industry at the present moment. As a result, the bandwagon of cloud adoption and AWS is very loud in the industry and there is a long line of professionals who want to jump on it. This is a major reason for the popularity of AWS Solutions Architect Associate training courses online.

What Does an AWS Solutions Architect Do?

At a high-level, an AWS Solutions Architect’s primary duty is to deploy applications to infrastructure in the AWS cloud. Let’s step back and look at why companies are moving to the cloud. Cutting costs is one of the main reasons, mainly because they don’t have to invest in on-premises infrastructure. Sounds simple right?  It turned out not to be so in many cases—ask the early adopters who went into sticker shock when they got their first bill. This is where AWS Solutions Architects come into the picture. It’s their responsibility to create a design that not only cuts costs, but addresses other critical factors like usability, reliability, scalability, and performance.

The AWS Solutions Architect’s primary job responsibility is to ensure that the company’s software applications are deployed to the infrastructure that the company has built in the cloud. The main reason is that companies desire to save on the costs of other technological models. The setup, installation, maintenance, and security costs can rise astronomically high if a company has to invest in on-premise infrastructure. They also have to ensure that the company doesn’t use and depend upon extraneous or unnecessary AWS services. This helps to save the company’s money and stay under their budget as AWS charges not on registration but on the services used. 

So the more efficiently an AWS Solutions Architect designs a company’s application software, the more the company’s model becomes economical and easy on the company’s budget. They also have to address other factors in their design such as performance, scalability, reliability, and usability.

AWS Solutions Architects are also charged with the responsibility to ensure that the risks an organization may face in the future are minimized. For example, application downtime risks, calculation errors, and data breaches all have to be prevented and addressed by them. In order to do this, the AWS Solutions Architect should possess an in-depth understanding and working knowledge of how all the moving parts of the AWS fit together.

AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Details -

To acquire the AWS Solutions Architect certification online, one has to clear the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. The details of the exam are as follows -

• The score which can be achieved in the exam has a range from 100 to 1000 marks and the minimum passing score is 720. The bar for the minimum passing score is set after being arrived at by statistical analysis. This means that the minimum passing score can change depending upon the difficulty of the examination.
• The AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification exam has a cost of $150. There are practice exams available too which have a cost of $20 each. The professional level examination has a cost of $300.
• The duration is 130 minutes and includes two types of questions: multiple choice and multiple answers.
• The total duration of the exam is 130 minutes.
• It includes both multiple-choice questions and multiple answer questions. Multiple choice questions means the candidate has to choose the correct answer out of many different possible answers. Multiple answer questions means that the candidate has to choose the most appropriate answer out of many correct answers.
• The examination is available in many different languages including English, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Exam Syllabus Outline -

• Design Resilient Architectures - 34% 

1. How to choose reliable and resilient storage using services like AWS S3, AWS Glacier, and AWS EBS
2. How to design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services like AWS SNS
3. How to create a multi-tier architecture
4. How to architect for high availability and fault-tolerance

• Define Performant Architecture – 24%

1. How to choose performant storage and databases using AWS RDS, AWS Redshift, and AWS DynamoDB
2. How to improve performance using AWS Elasticache
3. How to design elastic and scalable solutions through AWS Lambda, AWS CloudWatch, and AWS Data Pipeline 

• Specify Secure Applications and Architectures – 24%

1. How to secure applications using AWS Inspector, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS IAM
2. How to secure data using AWS CloudHSM and AWS Macie
3. How to define the network infrastructure with AWS CloudFront, AWS VPC, and Elastic Load Balancer 

• Design Cost-Optimized Architectures – 10%

1. How to design cost-optimized compute solutions using AWS EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, and Aws Lightsail 
2. Design cost-effective storage solutions using AWS S3, AWS Glacier, AWS EBS, and AWS Elastic File System.

• Define Operationally Excellent Architectures - 6% 

1. Perform operations as code.
2. Annotate documentation.
3. Make frequent, small, and reversible changes.
4. Anticipate and tackle failures.

Which Abilities Does it Test in The Candidate?

This certification tests the following abilities in the potential candidates -

1. Should have a working knowledge of the cloud architecture and the product environment and should be able to deploy robust and secure applications on AWS technologies seamlessly.
2. Leveraging architectural design principles to define solutions based on customer requirements.
3. Should be able to interpret customer requirements correctly and leverage architectural design principles to design solutions based on them.
4. Making guidelines and provisions for organizations to follow during the implementation stage of a project by adhering to the best practices for the entire project lifecycle duration.

AWS Exam Format -

There will be an option of ‘mark for later’ in each question. At any point in the exam, the candidate will be able to return to any question that they have marked for later. Thus they will be able to reattempt and revise questions that they have marked in that way at any point in the exam. The system will display the full list of questions along with their answers throughout the exam. So the candidate will be able to revisit any question to answer the ones that they skipped initially or to check their work and review the question and its answer.

The exam will include both multiple-choice questions and multiple answer questions. Multiple choice questions means the candidate has to choose the correct answer out of many different possible answers. Multiple answer questions means that the candidate has to choose the most appropriate answer out of many correct answers. One can take several practice tests and see this exam format for themselves by enrolling in AWS Solutions Architect Associate course online.

AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Preparation Tips and Tricks -

1. Go through the AWS Storage services overview whitepaper -

There will be many questions that will detail certain scenarios related to an organization’s setup and technologies. The candidate will be given a task to complete. For example, if an organization has its network set up in a star topology and is serving its clients with a file storage application software, the question may ask the candidate to determine which AWS storage plan is the most optimal for the company. It may also ask the candidate to list the steps which should be followed to carry out a large-scale migration to the AWS cloud services.

To answer these kinds of real-world scenario and involved questions, the candidate should prepare beforehand by reading AWS whitepapers. This will give the candidate a good overall idea about practical examples and case studies. Thus the candidate will be able to understand the latest research topics and problems in the AWS services area and grasp the real-world scenario questions on the exam. They will be able to answer them effectively.

2. Try to Follow The Process of Elimination for Every Question -

Each question will have at least one or two answers that will clearly be wrong. So the candidate should try to deduce which options are clearly incorrect and mark them as so. By doing this they will decrease the size of the pool of options which they have to analyze and it will improve the probability of determining the correct answer.

3. Read The Questions at Least Two Times – 

Use the first time to get a broad and general overview of the problem the question is posing and what the question is asking. Use the second time to analyze the question’s passage for hints and clues of the correct answer. Only move on to considering the options after you have read the question at least two times.

4. Be Vigilant About Questions Which Contain The Answers to Other Questions -

 In many cases, the question’s passage will contain either the direct answer or a hint to the answer to another question that appeared previously or which is present later on in the exam. The candidate should be extremely observant to catch such questions and use them to find out the answers to other questions. This is a very good way of answering questions very fast. The candidate can use the ‘Mark for review’ feature in the exam to mark questions that they speculate contain hints or answers to other questions.

5. Take as Many Practice Exams as Possible –

The exam format of the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam is unique and very tricky. Therefore the candidate should sit for as many practice exams as possible to familiarize themselves with the pattern and format of the exam. They will also get a good amount of exposure to the kind of questions that appear in the exam and will thus be able to target their preparation more accurately and effectively.

6. Participate in Hands-on AWS Labs -

The candidate should acquire hands-on and practical experience by participating in practice labs. They should try to carry out operations on actual AWS services with the help of demo applications and live websites. The operations should not be merely surface operations. They should be intensive operations that make use of deep functionality within the AWS exhaustively. This way they will gain thorough knowledge and an in-depth understanding of how AWS works.

Fortunately for the candidates, Careerera teaches a learner all these exam preparation tips and tricks in its AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification online course. Enroll now to receive training on all these different aspects!

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