It all started with the interest to gain in-depth knowledge on AWS Services. It was followed by lab sessions and Q&A on basic AWS services. It was all going according to the plan until there was an announcement that SAA-C01 will be replaced by SAA-C02. Unlike previous exam, SAA-C02 is more focused on scenarios and use-case based questions. I restarted the preparation following the SAA-C02 exam guide and decided to cover most of the topics from AWS whitepapers and study guide.
In our day to day job we are only exposed to commonly used services like EC2, ELB, CloudFormation, CloudWatch etc. However, having in-depth knowledge of different AWS services related to Storage, Compute, Networking and Security allows us to build an effective, efficient and scalable systems. Proper designing of an enterprise application happens when most of the services are explored. SAA-C02 certification is a way to validate the understanding gained through the lab sessions and exploring of these services.
More about the exam:
You can expect more scenario/use-case driven based questions rather than direct questions like what a particular feature of the Service is used for. In fact, for a given question all the provided options will appear to be correct in some or the other way. But based on the mentioned business requirement in that question you need to judiciously select the right answer.
Concentrate more on migration strategy or supporting the hybrid on-premise infrastructure to AWS Cloud. Focus more on Storage Gateway and its scenarios like when to use file storage, volume storage in stored/cached mode. Features like Lambda@Edge, Snowball Edge, FSx, Elastic Fabric Adapter, Aurora Serverless. Aurora Global database, DynamoDB transactions etc.
Learn about Storage S3 lifecycle for best cost reductions scenarios. Services like: Kinesis Data Stream, Kinesis Firehorse and Kinesis Data Analytics and their use-cases. Whitepapers are the best way to learn and go through AWS FAQs on a particular topic, it does provide lot more insights. Time to time, AWS do provide webinars on a particular exam ensure to attend them for better understanding question patterns.
Useful references:
https://amazon.qwiklabs.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia-UEYYR44s
https://jayendrapatil.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-saa-c02-exam-learning-path/
https://github.com/keenanromain/AWS-SAA-C02-Study-Guide
Above passage is based on my personal experience and reference guides used for preparation. View my achieved certification details.
