AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam review

Dear Reader, I’m happy to share that I have cleared AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam and in this blog I would like to brief my experience and review on the exam.

Introduction

Please go thru my post on AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate learning path to understand overview of the exam. Don’t miss that 🙂

Exam Tips

Here are few exam tips from my experience. Please add in comments if you have anything more. I will include in my blog.

  • Every question has multiple choices. please understand the question carefully. in some questions, they might ask ‘what are the least preferred solution‘ or ‘what are not advisable methods‘ or ‘which statements are false from given below choices’ on given scenario. so be careful you understood the question they are asking for negative answers.
  • For some of the questions, all choices or more than one choice seams to be correct answer to the question. but we need to choose the best answer from given question perspective.
  • While answering the question, I select best choice out of given options. But I always confirm why other choices are not answer to the question to myself before answering question.
  • we have 210 minutes for 65 questions for sysops administrator -associate 2020 exam. Also, there is an option to select “flag for review“. we should have sufficient time to review flagged questions before ending the exam.

The best approach to understand the AWS concepts is start practicing it. If you have an opportunity to get hands on AWS services at your work place, still that may not be enough. because with work, we need to focus on few services and areas that are related to work. Also, some services like IAM , AWS Organization etc might already be in place with best practices. so we might not get an opportunity to explore all the services that are needed for exam. But this exam expects that user has experience in all domains listed by AWS. so everyone have to find their way to practice AWS services. Especially, this sysops admin exam expects that examine has good experience in AWS services.

How to practice AWS services

I practiced this exam by doing my own exercises. Also, I setup a new blog with wordpress (which you are currently reading) using cloudfront, Route53, VPC, subnets, NACL, security groups, VPC endpoints, S3, ASG, EC2, EFS, WAF , Kinisis data stream, KMS, IAM, Coudformation with most of its features, Cloud watch metrics, logs (VPC, ELB), cloudwatch logs, RDS multi-AZ, read replicas etc. This helped me to get smart on the concepts at the same time I exited to see that my blog is available as a result 🙂

I have gone thru some of practice tests. but I feel this exam has completely different questions and they are very tricky. Focusing the questions helped me to choose right answer. Here are the services that I remember from where I saw some tricky questions.

  • Service catalog with cross account administration
  • Elastic cache cluster improving the performance
  • EC2 instance best cost optimization techniques
  • IAM resource tagging
  • Automation on AWS resources with AWS Config
  • performance optimization in Cloudfront distribution
  • ELB sessions, logs and healthchecks

Training courses

I’m not recommending any courses nor coupons for these courses. But I found below are the stuff which are really helpful to complete the exam with good understanding.

Practice tests

For practice tests, I found following are good to get smart with exam

  • Wizlabs
  • Braincert
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exams from Tutorial Dojo in Udemy