Earn your AWS Cloud Practitioner certification within 15 days 😮😮😮

Well well well! If the above comic illustration isn’t true? Cloud computing is in! (as the kids say these days). Companies are looking towards adopting cloud services and looking for skilled graduates to work with them and smoothen the process of cloud adoption.

“If someone asks me what cloud computing is, I try not to get bogged down with definitions. I tell them that, simply put, cloud computing is a better way to run your business.”

- Marc Benioff, Founder, CEO and Chairman, Salesforce

Now in this article, I am gonna be focussing on AWS Cloud services. Why you say! when we have so many other cloud options… Well, the next infographic will tell you why -

Now hey! I am not saying that completing the AWS Cloud Practitioner will land you a job with the top companies… Nope! But yes, it sure is an important stepping stone towards a better future. Now that we are done with assuring you why this is the right decision you are making, Let's get started —

Things to note before starting the preparation

• Remember the goal here is to understand the different services AWS offers to a level that you would be able to act as an external consultant for a company that wants to adopt cloud for their company. You would easily get the certification if you start the preparation with this mindset.
• It may be recommended to have experience of about a year working with AWS, but it sure is not necessary. Hey! I scored a 929/1000 on my first attempt being a fresher just out of college with no IT background.
• Whenever you come across a new AWS service — while reading about it, make sure to analyze in what situations will that service be used in a real-life business cycle. And then try to compare with the available use cases of that service on the internet to see where you may have gone wrong. This would help you answer correctly many questions in the exam as many of them are application-based, where you would be asked to select which service(s) have to be used for a particular situation.
• Make sure after successfully passing the AWS Cloud practitioner certification (thanks to my article, JK 😅), you remain focused and go for the level certification as well to be more relevant in the industry.

Important topics as per the exam perspective (not an exhaustive list)

a. Fundamentals of AWS: IAM, S3, EC2, EBS, EFS, Redshift, RDS, DynamoDB, Auto Scaling.

b. VPN, VPC, Transit Gateway, Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway.

c. CloudFront, CloudFormation, CloudTrail, CloudWatch.

d. AWS Security best practices such as IAM policies and KMS.

e. What are Region and Availability Zone (AZ) restrictions for different AWS services: Single AZ, Multi-AZ, Single Region, Multi-Region.

f. What AWS services are global: IAM, CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, WAF, Amazon Chime, DynamoDB, WorkDocs, WorkMail, WorkSpaces, WorkLink, Service Certificates.

g. What AWS services are truly free: Security Groups, Auto Scaling, CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk.

h. What AWS services include a free tier for 12 months for new AWS customers: EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFront, DynamoDB*, Glacier*, Lambda*.

*Does not automatically expire after 12 months

i. What AWS services are never free (need to pay to use)

• WIREE — WAF, Inspector, Route 53, EBS volumes, ELB

j. What AWS services are serverless

k. What AWS services scale automatically without intervention: S3, Lambda

l. Which data storage options have auto-backup:

• REEDS — RDS, EFS, EBS, DynamoDB, Storage Gateway.

m. What is CloudFormation and how it is called Infrastructure as code.

n. What is Route 53 and what are the different routing policies along with its application in real-life scenarios.

o. DDoS attacks and how a combination of the ld, WAF, Cloudfront,and Route 53 helps us provide defense against DDoS attacks.

p. AWS Billing tools and services (Ex. Cost Explorer has the ability to predict usage and cost up to 3 months ahead of time.)

q. Support plans of AWS. (Basic Support Plan, Developer Support Plan, Business support plan,and Enterprise support plan) [Very Important: Remember all the salient features and the differences between the plans to answer questions that ask us about which support to use in a given real-life scenario]

r. AWS Well-Architected Framework: This one will be a little difficult to remember, but if we read it by making our own little examples, it sure helps us to answer the questions in the Exam.

Reference is taken from an excellent post on Medium. Do check it out.

Important resources to nail the exam

Note- I won’t be giving you a long list of resources to go through, but just the best ones out there. Just stick to this, I assure you that you will pass the exam with 800+ marks guaranteed.

• [PAID] Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — 2021 (Highly Recommended) : This is the ultimate course by Stéphane Maarek for any beginners out there, who wants to earn their certification. It contains excellent material on all the topics required for the exam in the most concise and easy-to-understand manner. Apart from making you exam-ready, it also contains hands-on videos of important AWS services which would help one get ready to use AWS in the real production environment. I think this was the best part of the course because it was quite practical and helpful for me to answer some tricky questions in the final exam.
• [PAID] SkillCertPro sample question papers (contains more than 840 questions): If you are giving the exam as a group, then I would highly recommend you to pay for this 12.99$ practice paper set, as almost 80–85% of questions come from this questions dump. If you buy as a group, then you can easily share the papers among yourself without any dent in your pockets. And if you can easily afford 12.99$, then just go for it. It actually guarantees that you will pass the exam, and if you don’t you will get all the money back, no questions asked. It genuinely helped a lot before the exams to get acclimatized with the exam beforehand. It gives excellent explanation to the answers with links, which really helps to know a man related subjects as well in the most concise way possible.
• [FREE] Examtopics sample question papers (Considering it is free, there are few questions that have wrong answers, so make sure to check the discussion sections): If you don’t want to go by paid resources, you can check this out, it also has great explanation to the questions and especially the discussion board is the where the magic lies, as you can know the mentality behind answering a practical real case scenario question.
• And finally, if you have time go for the whitepapers provided by AWS. They will give you a comprehensive idea about each AWS services.

Penultimate D-Day advice

• Considering the pandemic, most of you must be applying for online exam through Pearson Vue, hence make sure you go through youtube videos to know about the do’s and don’ts.
• Make sure you complete your system check well before the exam (ideally 2–3 days before the scheduled date of exam. (Note: Mobile Hotspots are prohibited).
• The exam is online proctored by an individual watching you throughout the exam through the webcam, so do not do any funny business to pass the exam. (No wristwatches or smartwatches are allowed).

Finally guys, hope all the things I learned through my exam preparation really helps you all. Make sure you keep the final 2 days for just solving all the questions from the practice paper banks, as it will be driving your scores up to 950+.

— From someone who has recently passed my AWS cloud practitioner certification with a score of 929/1000.