The last step before taking AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam

Recently, I’ve decided to systematize my knowledge about AWS and take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. You can read a lot of reviews about this exam in the Internet so there’s no point to repeat it here. However, what I missed in all those reviews were cumulative notes, which I can read just before an exam and be sure that they cover key topics enough to pass. So in this post I’d like to share my personal notes in a form of mind maps. Why mind maps? I simply memorize information much better arranged in a such form rather than classic wall of text. By browsing through my notes you can easily see if you already know all these things or you have gaps instead. For example, these are my notes regarding the SWF service:

Paweł Rzepa 2018.03.12   –   2 MIN read

Recently, I’ve decided to systematize my knowledge about AWS and take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. You can read a lot of reviews about this exam in the Internet so there’s no point to repeat it here. However, what I missed in all those reviews were cumulative notes, which I can read just before an exam and be sure that they cover key topics enough to pass. So in this post I’d like to share my personal notes in a form of mind maps. Why mind maps? I simply memorize information much better arranged in a such form rather than classic wall of text. By browsing through my notes you can easily see if you already know all these things or you have gaps instead. For example, these are my notes regarding the SWF service:

My learning path

My main source of knowledge during prepartions to AWS SAA exam was the ACloudGuru’s course taken on Udemy (on Udemy this course costs ~20$). Lots of labs, excellent instructor Ryan Kroonenburg and awesome course content focused on the exam — I definitely recommend this course. After finishing the course I went again through some labs, watched summary of each section and passed all quizzes one more time. Any information which I thought may be valuable I put into my mind map. Then I read official FAQs of S3, EC2 and VPC services. After all, I always asked a question: was it enough to pass the AWS SAA exam?

Time for recap

I searched some websites for cumulative notes to challenge my current knowledge against them. Luckily I found such one! I strongly recommend you to go through those cheatsheets. I remember that after reading it, I have ceased to feel uncertainty. This is also the main reason why I want to share my notes with you — if you go through them and you don’t find anything new then you should pass your exam without bigger problems.

Here you can find my notes:

Please remember that some information you may find too short (when I already knew it) or too detailed (when I was new to this concept), so treat it rather as a way of testing yourself by asking — do I know that? What else do I know about this concept? How to set it up in a real life?

Hope you will like it 😉

Post Scriptum

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Paweł Rzepa
Paweł Rzepa Senior IT Security Consultant