AWS (re)Certified Solutions Architect - Professional

This article is to share my experience with the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (recertification) exam:

If you’re taking the exam for the first time or, as in my case, seeking recertification, I recommend that you review the new content and check what has changed compared to the previous exam. Examples of these changes could be AWS SSO to AWS Identity Center. I also recommend that you familiarize yourself with new services such as AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, EventBridge, Amazon Managed Services for Apache Flink, among others.

There were 75 questions in 180 minutes. As is typical with AWS professional certifications, the exam is long and features extensive statements and lengthy answers. For those whose native language is not English, this can be confusing, so you will likely have to read several questions more than once (and their options). If you’re taking the exam for the first time or, as in my case, seeking recertification, I recommend that you review the new content and check what has changed compared to the previous exam. Examples of these changes could be AWS SSO to AWS Identity Center. I also recommend that you familiarize yourself with new services such as AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, EventBridge, Amazon Managed Services for Apache Flink, among others. My recommendations for saving time in this exam are:

• Answer the easy questions quickly; don’t spend too much time pondering whether it’s the correct answer because it most likely is.
• Mark the questions where you genuinely have doubts, so when reviewing, you can focus only on those. If time remains, then start reviewing the rest.
• Mark multiple-choice questions for review, even if you think they are correct. It’s better to be 100% sure of the options because if you make a mistake in one, the answer can be considered incorrect.
• Read the questions carefully because the statement contains the information that will help you eliminate options or choose the correct ones.
• Remember that this is an Amazon certification, so always ask yourself which Amazon service is relevant.
• Dismiss solutions that can be done at the OS level if an Amazon service provides it, only considering it when there is no other option.
• Not everything is solved with Lambda + SQS, even if it seems correct. Review which options or services meet the requirements of the question and don’t be misled by options that initially seem correct.

If you are interested in this certification, I recommend some links:

Online courses

For this exam, I stayed loyal to AWS A Cloud Guru, but to be honest, it seems to me that the content is covered superficially, and the course as it stands today looks like a Frankenstein creation. There are at least two instructors with different content formats, as if they had merged the best of Linux Academy’s courses with those of A Cloud Guru. Nonetheless, if you are interested, here it is available:

• A Cloud Guru - AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional

AWS Documentation

• Whitepapers
• Documentation
• FAQs