After achieving 2 cloud based certifications last year, I decided to go for another AWS certification this year. Since I had already completed the Solutions Architect associate certification, I was looking at either the Developer associate or the SysOps associate exam.
I decided to prepare for the SysOps exam after considering my interest and background. I also realized that the current version of the exam was going to expire on Jul 26, 2021. Hence, I had approximately 4 weeks to prepare for the exam.
This blog describes the material I used to prepare for the exam and the exam day experience.
Preparation:
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A Cloud Guru:
I had A Cloud Guru’s subscription through my employer. Hence, I started going through the ACG’s course about the SysOps administrator exam.
As I started going through the course and doing the labs, I realized that there was a lot of overlap between the SA associate and the SysOps associate exam.
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Tutorial Dojo’s practice tests:
I then purchased Tutorial Dojo’s practice tests from Udemy for practice. These exams had helped me prepare well for the Solutions Architect associate exam so I decided to refer them again for this certification.
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Andrew Brown’s AWS SysOps Course:
This one is a free course available on YoutTube. This course gives a great overview of the topics covered in the exam. I had already gone through his SA associate course in the past and decided to watch and follow along this course as well.
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Stephane Maarek’s SA associate course:
Although I didn’t purchase his SysOps admin course, I did go through some of the lectures from the SA associate course as there was a lot of overlap with the topics (SA and SysOps associate) covered by both the exams.
Exam day:
After taking 2 Cloud certification exams from home last year, I decided to take this exam from an exam center.
This is because I didn’t want any external factors such as electricity and the internet to affect my performance on the exam. Also, I had faced several connectivity related issues while taking the AZ-900 exam from home and didn’t want that to happen again.
I reached the exam center 15 minutes in advance and noticed there was only one other candidate taking an exam. This made me feel better considering that we are still in the pandemic. After submitting my personal things in a locker, my exam started right on time.
I felt confident throughout the exam as I had prepared well for it. They had also given me headphones to block any external noise and I did use them for a while to avoid any distractions. I also used a notepad and a pen that they had given to draw diagrams and to understand questions in a better way.
I answered all questions when there were 30 mins left on the clock and then went through the questions which I flagged to ensure that I was selecting the best answer possible. After I went through the flagged questions, I finally submitted my exam when there were 15 mins left on the clock.
At that time, it was too late to go back through the questions and change answers if required. Hence, if you are deciding to take the exam, then make sure to have enough time to go through the flagged questions. Once I completed the post exam survey, I finally saw the result which said “Passed”.
The next day, I got my official result from AWS and I was glad to see that I scored 884 on the exam. This was my journey of achieving the SOA-C01 certification. All the best if you are also preparing for any certification. Happy cloud computing and keep on building…