How I managed to pass the AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam?

4 min readMar 1, 2021

Disclaimer: The reason for writing this post is to share my journey in passing the AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam (SAA-CO2) on my first attempt. The below things & resources worked for me, hoping some of things mentioned below might be useful for the fellow readers.

So, I started preparing for my exam somewhere in mid October 2020, and finally appeared for the exam on 21st Feb 2021. I thought of giving the exam earlier couldn’t do so had to reschedule twice, due to other commitments.

I tried breaking the entire article down into the following subtopics, feel free to jump around as per requirement.

Why do want to be certified?
A quick overview of the exam
Study materials (Videos, Labs, Practice Tests, Notes)
AWS Practice Exams
AWS Whitepapers and FAQs (Good to have)
Conclusion

Why do want to be certified?

Feel free to skip this part if you already have a solid why that will help you get back on track on those lazy & unmotivated days. Otherwise, I would highly recommend spending few minutes figuring out the why part. Trust me, it will be worth it.

A quick overview of the exam

So, through this exam AWS wants to test the applicants understanding in the following domains.

Design Resilient Architecture
Design High Performing Architecture
Design Secure Applications and Architectures
Designing Cost Optimized Architectures

The exam consists of scenario-based questions aimed to test applicants’ ability to demonstrate his/her understanding to solve real-life problems. The question could have a single correct answer or multiple correct answers, it depends on the type of question.

Study materials

In this section, I will talk about the resources I used while preparing for my exam. Before diving deep into it, I do want to highlight that I had some technical background in DevOps and had some hands-on experience using AWS Cloud and was using it in my day-to-day job.

a) Video Lectures

For learning about different AWS Services, I used A Cloudguru’s Solution Architect Associate Course. I really liked the way the entire course was laid down across different modules each having its separate hands-on labs along with quizzes and exam tips.

b) Labs

Hands-on experience plays a crucial role in passing the exam, you should be able to do things inside the AWS Console. The console shouldn’t be alien to you. There are a bunch of hands-on labs in A Cloudguru courses to walk you through the entire process. Also, they have their Cloud Playground which lets you play along in real-time in sandbox environments, so you can learn by doing in a real cloud environment why worrying about AWS bills and whatnot.

c) Practice Tests

Although A Cloudguru provides two good luck quizzes and one full practice test, it’s better to sign up for a third part practice test.How I managed to pass the AWS

Tutorials Dojo SAA-CO2 practice exams and Whizlabs practice tests are few good sources. Both provide awesome explanations for each question comparing given choices and suggests appropriate AWS resource for further reading.

Tutorials Dojo has 25+ quizzes broken down into different modes such as Timed Mode, Review Mode, Section Mode, Topic-based Mode. Whizlabs has topics-based questions along with 7–8 practice tests. I chose both to solve more questions before taking the final exams.

d) Notes

Taking notes while going through the A Cloudguru course really helped me in revising the contents before the exam. Along with taking notes, I frequently use to pause videos and take screenshots.

Personal Tip: Take screenshots of the exam tips present at the end of the module it helps in quick revision one day before the exam.

AWS Practice Exams

AWS Practice exams are designed to simulate the real experience before the exam, duration of the exam is 30 mins, consisting of 20 scenario-based questions.

Personal Tip: The exam is not Free. It cost me around $23 (incl. taxes). So I would suggest taking screenshots of all the questions in the exam so that later it comes in handy in understanding the question structure and types of questions to expect in the actual exam.

AWS Whitepapers & AWS FAQ

I will be honest with you, I couldn’t read all the whitepapers there are like 6 of them, which makes the foundation of the well-architect-ed framework. But I did manage to read the AWS Storage Service Overview. Apart from that, I went through the FAQs for S3, EBS, EFS, etc.

My strategy was very simple, in whatever topic I was under-confident. I spent more time learning about it. In my case, I was kind of having a good understanding of VPCs, Security groups, NACLs, etc. So, I didn’t spend much on it, instead, I worked on EFS, EBS, Storage gateways, etc as I wasn’t having much clarity on when to use what and why.

Conclusion

So, the exam is designed to test the applicant’s understanding, knowledge, and ability to demonstrate these in real-world scenarios. Your performance is a maximum flow of these three functions. The worst determines the overall score.