Thread by @adamdotdev

Earlier this year, I prepared for and passed 12 AWS certification exams.

This thread is an attempt to distill my learnings into a practical guide for others that are pursuing AWS certs.

If you're more of an auditory learner, I recently presented much of this information to my local AWS User Group.

You can watch the talk on YouTube (~1 hour):

There are lots of reasons to pursue AWS certifications, and I'll assume you're already convinced of their value.

If you do need some convincing—or you're just curious—I did briefly cover the "why" in my talk ☝️.

Below I'll go through each of the exams and outline key services covered as well as study materials I'd recommend.

I'll also provide a few metrics (on a 1 to 10 scale) that add some color:

Breadth = how wide is the subject matter; how many services/concepts covered

Depth = how deep into each service/concept will you go

Difficulty = how challenging is the exam; how much prep will be needed

Alright, let's dig into each of the exams. 📋📚

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Breadth: 3/10
Depth: 1/10
Difficulty: 1/10

The easiest of the AWS certification exams, Cloud Practitioner focuses on high-level AWS concepts. Lots of "Which AWS service does X?".

If you've already been building on AWS, you may not need to prepare for this exam.

If Cloud Practitioner is your first exposure to AWS, I'd recommend the @acloudguru (ACG) course if you can afford a subscription.

ACG also has fantastic courses for all 3 associate-level exams.

If you'd prefer to stick with free resources, @andrewbrown has a too-good-to-be-free course on YouTube (~4 hours):

AWS Certified Solutions Architect—Associate

Breadth: 8/10
Depth: 2/10
Difficulty: 3/10

This exam is a significant step up in difficulty from Cloud Practitioner, mostly because of the volume of services covered.

I only used the ACG course and felt well prepared heading into the exam.

In fact, I only used the ACG courses for each of the 3 associate-level exams; @KroonenburgRyan has a very deliberate teaching style that was super effective for me, even at 2x speed.

One thing I'll say about the 3 associate-level exams, that I believe Ryan hammers home in his respective ACG courses:

Study VPCs. If you can build out a VPC from scratch (and from memory), you're in good shape for the associate-level certs.

VPC concepts are featured heavily.

AWS Certified Developer—Associate

Breadth: 7/10
Depth: 3/10
Difficulty: 4/10

I took this exam the day after I passed Solutions Architect—Associate, because I read there was a lot of overlap.

And there was, in my experience.

The Developer exam does introduce some services that aren't covered in the SA exam; namely the SDLC services (CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline).

CloudFormation and ElasticBeanstalk show up a fair bit here as well.

Again, I only used the ACG course and passed this exam with ease.

If you'd prefer free resources, Andrew Brown has excellent, free video courses for each of the associate-level exams:

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator—Associate

Breadth: 6/10
Depth: 5/10
Difficulty: 5/10

SysOps Administrator—Associate was the most difficult of the associate-level exams, for me.

Note that difficulty is subjective.

An exam is only difficult if you're not prepared; and, on the flip side, it's only easy if you're well prepared.

How much preparation you need to do for any given exam will depend on your background and prior knowledge/experience.

The SysOps Admin exam was relatively more challenging for me because it doesn't line up with my day-to-day role.

This means I had to prep more to be comfortable heading into the exam.

Just keep that in mind as you prepare for any exam: how familiar is the subject matter?

In terms of prep materials, I thought the ACG course was excellent and gave me the confidence I needed to take and pass the test.

There is some overlap with the other two associate-level exams, but new services will be featured as well. Systems Manager and OpsWorks come to mind.

This exam also features CloudWatch heavily, which makes sense.

Again, another free resource from Andrew Brown for those on a tight budget:

I assure you I'm not getting any kickbacks from Andrew or anyone else mentioned in this thread. 😅

Just sharing resources that I've personally used or vetted.

AWS Certified Security—Specialty

Breadth: 5/10
Depth: 7/10
Difficulty: 6/10

I really enjoyed prepping for and taking this exam. Security is "job zero" at AWS, and the concepts you learn preparing for this cert will benefit you daily in your work with AWS.

Expect to dig deep into IAM. CloudTrail comes up quite a bit as well.

Make sure you understand network security on VPCs (security groups and NACLs, for instance).

You'll need a fair bit of knowledge around CloudHSM, KMS, Shield, WAF and Secrets Manager.

There's also a question or two on each of the more specialized/obscure security offerings:

Inspector, Macie and GuardDuty come to mind.

All of this is covered nicely in @fayecloudguru's ACG course, which was my only prep resource.

Faye shares Ryan's course format and teaching style and I can't recommend these courses enough.

AWS Certified Database—Specialty

Breadth: 4/10
Depth: 7/10
Difficulty: 6/10

The Database specialty exam is relatively narrow in scope, and, as you might guess, focused on the AWS database services:

RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora, DMS, ElastiCache, DocumentDB, and Neptune.

I listed the above services in order of importance, based on my experience.

The first five (RDS through ElastiCache) are featured heavily, whereas DocumentDB and Neptune will be touched on lightly—just a couple of questions each.

Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) might have shown up, but, again, only a question or two.

You'll want to focus your prep around RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora, and DMS.

Unfortunately, I don't have a great recommendation for study resources here. I used ACG as I had for the previous exams, and felt very unprepared.

This could very well have been my own fault; I may have grown complacent.

I would eventually discover @StephaneMaarek and his excellent Udemy courses; I haven't taken his Database Specialty course, but can only assume it's of the highest quality:
udemy.com/share/103o6K/

This is also a great time to point out @jonbonso and his Tutorials Dojo practice exams.

These are the best practice exams I've come across. They're a great gauge of where you're at, and also serve as a study resource.

After each practice exam, you're able to review each question.

Jon packs in so much useful information in these question recaps; much of it seemingly pulled from the pertinent AWS docs themselves.

If you can afford another paid resource, you won't regret purchasing these.

Here's a link to the Database Specialty practice exams:
portal.tutorialsdojo.com/courses/aws-ce…

AWS Certified Data Analytics—Specialty

Breadth: 6/10
Depth: 7/10
Difficulty: 7/10

Like all of the specialty certs, the difficulty of this exam will depend on how much experience you have with the subject matter—data analytics on AWS.

There are quite a lot of services covered in-depth.

Kinesis, Glue, Redshift and EMR are the most important, followed by Athena, S3, QuickSight and ElasticSearch.

Data Pipeline and Lake Formation are touched on lightly.

I once again used the ACG course exclusively for this exam. I thought it was good, though not as good as the associate-level courses.

My perception could be tainted by the fact that Ryan doesn't teach this course; he spoiled me with his recaps and exam tips!

AWS Certified Machine Learning—Specialty

Breadth: 5/10
Depth: 8/10
Difficulty: 7/10

This was another exam I was excited to prepare for.

I don't have a ton of real-world ML experience, but I have some.

I have mixed feelings about this exam and the knowledge necessary to pass it.

On the one hand, it does dive into some esoteric ML questions around tuning hyperparameters to achieve specific business goals.

But, the exam is also largely about AWS-centric data prep (using Kinesis, Glue, etc.); so much so, that I feel you could likely pass without having much real-world ML experience.

I suppose that's not inherently bad. It is an AWS certification, after all.

I should call out here that the order I've listed the certs in is the order I recommend taking them.

Going from Data Analytics—Specialty to Machine Learning—Specialty provides you with some study efficiencies.

Much of your learnings around Kinesis, EMR and Glue while studying for the Data Analytics exam will help ease your prep for the Machine Learning exam.

This allows you to spend more time learning the ML-heavy concepts like the SageMaker family of services, and algorithm selection.

In terms of prep materials, this was the last exam that I relied on ACG exclusively for and I passed with relative ease.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking—Specialty

Breadth: 7/10
Depth: 10/10
Difficulty: 9/10

This is the point in my journey where I almost quit.

Some would argue that this is the most difficult AWS certification exam.

I wouldn't argue against them. This exam is hard.

The difficulty of this exam is largely driven by the fact that it's centered around a service that few have real-world experience with: Direct Connect (DX).

I also don't have a networking background; if you do, you'll likely have an easier time preparing.

But, even if you're a professional network engineer, you'll need to be well versed in AWS-specific services and concepts in order to pass this exam.

It's the melding of those two worlds (AWS and networking) and the depth of knowledge required in both that make this so daunting.

Aside from DX, you'll also need to go deep on VPCs, ELBs, VPNs, Route53, CloudFront, Transit Gateway, and PrivateLink.

You'll want to leverage several resources to prepare for this test.

I started with the official study guide:
amazon.com/Certified-Adva…

I also recommend the official Exam Readiness Training:
aws.training/Details/Curric…

AWS provides Exam Readiness Training for free for each of the certification exams.

They vary in terms of format (and quality, imo).

For Advanced Networking, it takes the form of an excellent video series and it was a huge help for me in preparing for this test.

As always, Tutorials Dojo practice exams are another great resource. You're going to want to take some quality practice exams leading up to your test date.
portal.tutorialsdojo.com/courses/aws-ce…

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer—Professional

Breadth: 8
Depth: 8
Difficulty: 9

The professional-level exams are challenging, but I found DevOps Engineer to be the easier of the two.

This is likely due to me being a full-stack engineer; I have a lot of real-world experience here.

This exam will cover much of the same services that were covered in the Developer and SysOps Admin associate-level exams:

VPC, DynamoDB, ElasticBeanstalk, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, SSM and ECS, to name a few.

The CodePipeline family of services are also covered in-depth.

For this exam, I mostly relied on Stephane Maarek's Udemy course:
udemy.com/share/101WpU/

As well, I purchased the Tutorials Dojo practice exams:
portal.tutorialsdojo.com/courses/aws-ce…

I should also point out that Tutorials Dojo has some really nice (free) cheat sheets:
tutorialsdojo.com/aws-cheat-shee…

AWS Certified Solutions Architect—Professional

Breadth: 10/10
Depth: 9/10
Difficulty: 10/10

The final boss, this exam is super difficult and the certification carries a lot of weight in the industry.

The real challenge here is that you have to know so many details about so many AWS services.

The good news is that if you've taken all of the specialty exams leading up to this point, the SA Pro exam almost serves as a recap of all you've learned.

This is another exam where order can help you out.

Taking Advanced Networking—Specialty before you prepare for the SA Pro exam will eliminate networking study from your prep time, which helped me out a lot.

For prep materials, I once again relied on Stephane Maarek's excellent course:
udemy.com/course/aws-sol…

And Tutorials Dojo practice exams:
portal.tutorialsdojo.com/courses/aws-ce…

A note on practice tests:

There are so many practice tests out there, and they don't all mirror the difficulty of the actual exam accurately.

I think the most accurate practice test questions are the 10 free sample questions provided by AWS on each of the certification pages.

These questions sometimes show up on the actual exam, with minor tweaks.

If you can answer 8 or 9 of the 10 sample questions confidently, you're probably ready to take the exam.

I also took some of the paid practice tests provided by PSI; you get a free practice test voucher each time you pass an exam.

For me, these were more challenging than the actual exams. They also don't tell you which questions you got right or wrong, so they're less helpful as a study resource.

If you can afford it, buy the Tutorials Dojo practice tests.

They're the most accurate third-party tests I've taken and they're an invaluable study tool as well.

Finally, some general tips for your certification journey:

• Find helpful communities.

I personally found inspiration and lots of the above resources on the /r/AWSCertifications subreddit:
reddit.com/r/AWSCertifica…

• Check with your employer to see if they'll reimburse your exam fees. Mine did.

If they're part of the APN, they could be reimbursed in the form of AWS credits!

• Book the exam!

The biggest motivator for me in my certification push was having hard deadlines.

Book each exam in advance and stick to the date! You might surprise yourself with what you're capable of.

Best of luck on your certification journey! 🎉