This morning I sat the AWS: SAA exam and I’m pleased to say I passed it 
.I used a plethora of resources to prepare for the exam as I have to admit that I underestimated the exam a month ago and thought I would just need a general knowledge of the features and was getting full marks on the acloud.guru practice exams but failed it by ~ 3% percent. I’m not going to list all the resources I used in my preparation as I have already listed them on my blog under my AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Study Resources page. All of the resources listed were really really good and I would highly recommend not just doing the CBT training but also do the labs and spend time using the free tier to go thorough all the features and learn what they can and can’t do. The exam is made up of sixty questions and the blueprint lists the split of the different domains as per the below table:
As you can see from the breakdown the exam is largely about designing a highly available, cost-efficient, fault tolerant scalable system. The questions in the exam varied from relatively straight forward ones where you just had to know what a solution or service provided to more complex ones where a scenario was portrayed in the question and you had to define which 2-3 answers together enabled them to achieve their requirements. Based on my score I am taking it that the ones that required multiple answers didn’t give partial scores if you got one wrong which is akin to a lot of other IT exams so you certainly have to focus on your answers as I found even with eliminating answers I knew were wrong I was still left with a very close alternative.
For the study resources I would recommend watching the vBrownbag series as well as the CBT’s and doing lab work as there were certainly a few things mentioned in there that were directly helpful in the exam. It’s also really great in my opinion to hear about bits from others in the community using the technology.
Good luck if you are preparing for the exam, I’m tempted to keep the momentum going and now do the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam.
Gregg
