I recently earned my AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification, so I’d like to reflect on why I chose to seek it, how I studied for it, and how the exam itself went.
Why get the CSA - Associate certificate?
I blame AI :)
I had been out of work for a minute or two, and felt that I needed to stand apart from the crowd when job hunting. I can’t immediately change my job history, which I feel is about average, and personal projects don’t really hold the same weight anymore, given that anyone can ask Claude/GPT to generate anything. Ironically then, I consulted Claude, which recommended the AWS CSA - Associate. I thought that sounded doable, given I have been using AWS since college.
How to study
AWS has an exam guide, but it doesn’t have actual sample questions, which I thought would be helpful for memorizing the ideas. I searched around for more concrete study prep material, and Reddit recommended Tutorials Dojo as a solid source. Paying $10 USD unlocks access to their AWS CSA - Associate course, which contains about 500 review questions. They have a good flashcards section, but that and all of their content is stuck online. I’ve used Anki for memorizing in the past, so I went to the review page of each practice exam where it shows each question, your answer, and why it was right or wrong. I right-clicked to save the HTML pages, then had AI convert them into Anki flashcards. I didn’t upload them to Anki’s shared decks, as that would violate Tutorial Dojos TOS. Anki powered flashcards in hand, I studied for a few weeks, until I felt that I was consistently answering correctly, never guessing, and I knew why the answer was correct and why the others were wrong.
The exam
The exam costs $150 USD. Not cheap, but the cert is valid for three years, and I figure if it helps with my career then it’s money well spent. You need to schedule a time, to take the exam. The exam itself is 130 minutes, but you also need to spend some time beforehand to set up and verify your environment. This means having a webcam, clean desk, no one else in the room (obviously), and setting up the OnVue software on your computer. It needs to verify you with a passport or driver’s license, and make sure you have a working mic and webcam. Then a person will make sure your room is valid, and you aren’t wearing RayBan’s pervert glasses. An aside: I had a technical glitch the first time with my Macbook M1 air, and had no issues with my Windows PC, so if you have both, maybe lean that way.
Then the exam itself kicks off. 130 minutes sounds like a lot of time, but the exam has 65 questions, which comes out to two minutes per question. So if you aren’t fairly rock solid on most of the content, then you might run out of time. I felt pretty confident going in, and was scrambling by the end to review questions I was iffy on. Speaking of, you can flag a question and come back to it later, so if you hit one which is confusing, or you feel may end up being too time-consuming, then just flag it and come back later. Better to nail the ones you know for sure, then run out the clock with only a few dozen answered.
The result
I felt 50/50 like I passed or failed, so was pleasantly surprised when I got an email a few hours later that I’d passed. The email contains a link to Credly, which hosts the credential and lets you link to it, mine looks like this: https://www.credly.com/badges/27c58a58-9eb5-4be8-aef7-b98c40918472/public_url.
Was it worth it?
Time will tell. I do feel like I have a more solid grasp of AWS, including some things I probably should have known before, such as the details of S3 tiers. I’m by no means an AWS guru, or an evangelist, but AWS is a useful suite of tools I’ve been using for almost a decade now, and I feel will probably continue using for a few more, so I’m glad I know a bit more about it now.