AWS SysOps Administrator Associate — Preparation Tips
Full Disclosure: I’m a full time developer who enjoys systems, networking and security and not from a DevOps/SysOps background.
Although, this is an associate level certification, it is advisable that you have either cleared the Solution Architect (Associate) or Developer (Associate) exam prior to attending this exam.
Having said that, listing below the list of resources, tutorials, practice tests and reference materials used for preparation.
*** YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY ***
Generic References:
1. Understand the concepts from the AWS Well-Architected Framework as knowing the right definitions will do wonders to get the fundamental grasp of AWS services and cloud in general
2. Have a read through on the FAQs of — S3, EC2, RDS, EBS, IAM, VPC, Cloud Formation, ELB, Cloud Watch & Cloud Trail — as these combined can easily carry >80% weightage for the exam
3. Read the below white-papers (in no particular order)
a. AWS Well-Architected framework
b. Best practices for DDoS resiliency
c. Building a scalable & secure multi-VPC network infrastructure
e. Web application hosting on AWS
f. Overview of security processes
g. Backup and recovery approaches
Tutorials:
1. The video tutorial which I followed was from A Cloud Guru. This touched upon the essential services to give you the required pointers for further reading. However, please do bear in mind that following only this tutorial will not be sufficient. There are also quizzes/tests at the end of every section, but these are sometimes too easy and the exam questions are of slightly higher difficulty. DON’T GET COMPLACENT if you ace all the questions from the section quiz.
2. If you’ve a Pluralsight account, there are some great content available for this exam with various courses neatly categorized with various level of difficulty. Disclaimer: I haven’t attended it
Practice Tests
- My #1 recommendation for this exam will be WhizLabs. They have a great collection of mock questions which tests your knowledge at a service level or from a full test perspective which would throw away your exam jitters. Kudos to them for doing a great job!
2. If you had taken and cleared AWS exams before, use your free coupon to purchase a mock exam from official AWS training website as well.
Hope you liked this list of resources that I relied upon and if you found it useful, do show some love by clapping and sharing the same. TIA and best of luck!