Last year around June/July I started to learn for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. A few of my colleagues and I started to meet up weekly for 30 minutes up to one hour to discuss AWS related things that would help us in our path to get certified.
It took me about 5 months to feel confident to schedule my exam. During these 5 months I went through different learning materials as you will see below.
A Cloud Guru — AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02)
This was my main learning material. It is very well organised, starting point for our weekly discussions. It has hands on labs and also a practice exam that you can take several times where questions are shuffled from one try to another. The practice exam questions were easier than the questions received during the real exam, but it’s a good place to start.
Even though I felt that I would have liked more info in some of the chapters or sections, I know that for my next certification I would choose A Cloud Guru again as a starting point.
Link: https://learn.acloud.guru
Stephane Maarek — Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (can be found on Udemy)
This is also very well organised and I believe at certain topics it contains a bit more details (e.g. High Availability & Scalability, EC2). It’s great to listen to Stephane and surely at my next AWS certification I will listen to him again.
Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-saa-c02/
Jon Bonso — AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams (can be found on Udemy)
This contains a selection of 6 practice exams, 65 questions each. In my opinion these were harder than the actual exam, but the questions here helped a lot. During the exam I had a few similar questions so I was prepared. I believe these exams also help you create a technique when reading, when selecting the right answer, when eliminating the incorrect answers.
Whizlabs — AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
I did not use the Whizlabs course. However it contains 7 practice exams which are the closest thing to the actual exam in my opinion. You can opt for doing the exams in two ways:
- Practice mode: you can see results and explanations ongoing. Use this for learning. I only used it for one exam out of the 7.
- Exam mode: simulates a real exam.
Link: https://www.whizlabs.com/
The four things above were my learning materials. I know there are more good ones so please add comments with the learning materials that you have used. Thanks and good luck at the exam!
