AWS Architect Professional (Recertification)

This article discusses my experience of re-sitting the AWS Architect Professional Exam (Spoiler: 3 years makes quite a difference!! ), and the approach I took to studying for it.

Preparing for the Exam

E-Learning (2 weeks - outside working hours)

A Cloud Guru is my go-to site for online learning. It is easy to use, to navigate, and is reasonably priced. I recently sat the AWS Security Speciality Exam - and their course covering this was fantastic.

However, their AWS Architect Professional course was - erm.. - an omnishambles. There were a number of problems with this course:

1. Too many cooks - because there are so many different instructors covering topics in the same course, it made it feel very thrown-together. Each instructor had a very different pace when delivering the training, which often made following the course exhausting (tip: I played some videos at 1.5x speed to keep me awake);
2. The end-of-chapter questions sometimes weren't covered in the course content;
3. The structure of the course didn't make sense. It aligned itself exactly to the AWS-recommended exam topics; however, it would have been much better if the course had been split into service types, and services - and the theory kept separate.

I sat through most of the course - and skipped over the parts that I was extremely familiar with. By the end, however, I didn't feel confident that I had learned that much.

Note: A Cloud Guru states the course is being revisited - I suggest they do that quickly!

AWS FAQs (1 week - outside working hours)

By a country mile, AWS FAQs are the best source of information on AWS Services. Think of it as super-concentrated content. Any information that was not covered in the A Cloud Guru Course - which was quite a lot to-be-Frank - I captured from the FAQs

So how did I record all of the notes?

Over the years I have used various approaches to recording information with differing levels of success. One thing that has always been critically important to supporting studying, however, has been capturing notes in an efficient way.

I am a studious note-taker. Whilst writing lengthy blocks of text excels at capturing the content of meetings, it does not work as well for structuring revision notes that you may need to scan through quickly.

For the last couple of years, I have been using mind maps to structure my notes. For example, here is a map covering Dynamo DB Scaling and Performance options:

This approach has a number of benefits:

1. You can create different mind-maps for different domain subject areas: scalability, migration, high-availability - making it easy to get to your notes quickly;
2. Each "map" can contain multiple "tabs" - much like in Excel. I used these tabs to separate the different AWS Services;
3. You can access important information quickly, and easily annotate information that is important, do's, don'ts, warnings, service limits, etc. with icons.
4. When you find new information about a topic or service, inserting that information in the right place is effortless (think of the alternative - the unsightly in-margin notes, arrows, and footnotes that updating paper requires!)

For reference, the software I use for creating mindmaps is XMind (a free version is available). I have tried others, but XMind is head-and-shoulders above the rest (note: I have no relationship with XMind).

Test Exams (1 week - outside working hours)

I used Whizlabs exams to test my knowledge. The sample papers give you a good approximation of the nature and length of the questions in the real exam (but featured atrocious grammar). I can categorically say that contrary to some attestations the Whizlabs papers did not contain real exam questions, rather they were indicative of the types of questions that would be asked.

Their greatest use, however, was in identifying gaps in my knowledge, and I used that in two ways:

1. When I answered a question correctly, I confirmed that my "maps" contained the information required to answer that question correctly the next time around;
2. When I answered a question incorrectly, I researched the topic further and then updated my maps to add any missing content.

I found as I progressed through the sample paper that my results improved, and my maps had matured quite nicely by the time I completed the last sample exam.

Knowledge Refresh (last 2 days before the exam)

For areas I was most unfamiliar with (most notably - Cognito) - I spent some time re-reading those sections prior to sitting the exam.

The Exam

So: I was re-sitting the exam 3 years after my first AWS Professional Exam. And the content is radically different. I suspect this may be something to do with the newer "Specialty" exams that AWS have been rolling out, and that content now covered in those specialty exams (Security, Networking, etc.) have a reduced presence in the Professional Exam because they are covered in better depth elsewhere.

From my perspective the topics you need to particularly focus on for the Architect Professional exam are:

1. Approaches to migration;
2. Hybrid Deployments;
3. High volume, streaming, and video architecture use-cases
4. High Availability; and
5. Recovery approached (Think RTOs and RPOs)

Questions 1-5

OK, at this point I was concerned (alternative words exist, but are unprintable). There was a lot of content in each of the questions. So I needed to change tack very quickly so as not to be overwhelmed. So I:

1. Immediately skipped the wordiest questions - I would revisit these at the end;
2. I only marked any questions I was absolutely unsure about (The Whizzlabs tests give you good practice at doing this). I have a bad habit of marking 60% of the questions for review and - trust me - you will not be able to review much more than 10 questions at the end. So be very selective of the questions you mark for review.

Half-Way Through

At this point, I was asking myself what was the point in continuing further (I also tend to focus on negatives rather than positives - great for corporate risk-reduction, but terrible for personal stress levels). However, I soldiered on.

IMPORTANT - Several questions in the exam will be "test" questions - these are questions that AWS is using to see how candidates react to them and answer them. They will not count towards your final score. I suspect a few questions I came across that discussed new services that I was not yet familiar with were "test" questions. Because these test questions are not marked as such, it really builds on any despondency you are already feeling...

Finishing the Exam

Now I was exhausted! I had convinced myself that I had failed the exam by this point.

But I still needed to finish the non-completed (lengthy) questions.

Once these were complete, I began going through questions that I had marked for review. I had identified 15 in this manner, but could only revisit 5 of them before the clock stopped.

So I finally clicked submit (and immediately did that thing where you turn your head away from the screen for a few seconds and close your eyes before looking back - because that makes a difference):

I PASSED

I was (in order) - re-reading (just to be sure "congratulations" was not being used sarcastically), shocked, surprised, leaping around, worrying that the proctor (who had already admonished me for holding my head in my hands partly out of camera-shot) would consider leaping a good reason for invalidating my result, and finally thinking there had been some mistake,

Within 24 hours I received my score, and I had passed with a healthy margin.

Key Exam Takeaways

1. There is no escaping it, this is a hard exam - you need solid AWS experience and plenty of time to refresh your knowledge;
2. A 3-hour exam, proctored online, reading through masses of text is demoralising and can make you doubt yourself. That was the biggest challenge for me - trying to stay positive;
3. You need to keep ploughing-on - realise that there may be a few "test" questions in there that do not count towards your total score.

Note: all images used in this blog were identified as "creative commons" by a popular search engine.