Passed SAA-C01 a few weeks after CLF-001

I had just sat the CCP a fortnight ago so felt more comfortable about doing an exam via Pearson.

The actual exam was harder than I expected, I’ve been revisiting ACG, LA, and Bonsos exams over the past 6 months quite intensely, but there were still things in the exam that caught me off guard, probably because I just can’t remember every little detail.

Here are my observations, for exam takers and makers 😉

• Question about scaling policies, step/dynamic/scheduled. I couldn’t remember the differences between step and dynamic.
• Poorly worded question about sharing private content via S3/Cloudfront, one answer was like "use cloudfront to set signed urls", and another answer almost identical as "host website in S3 then use cloudfront for signed for URLs", they are both right to me.
• No questions about EBS types (provisioned IOPS, cold HDD etc)
• Pretty much the exact same question from Bonsos tests, about 4 instances in AZ1, four instances in AZ2, no instances in AZ3 etc.
• Lots and lots of questions regarding load balancers, at least 10 questions mentioned it.
• Lambda@Edge popped up 2-3 times, there was a question about serving customised content to mobile users, whereby Lambda@Edge and cloudfront were both possible answers.
• Some questions were incredibly wordy, and so were the answers. Bigger than what I’d seen in Bonsos exams.
• A good 10 or so incredibly easy questions, like "we need to do x, what service?"
• A few questions proposing a desired scenario and asking you which tech stack is best or cost effective.

My biggest tip would be to make sure you actually play with AWS in a free tier account, memorising answers from mock exams isn’t good enough, you really need to understand it.
Mock results

• ACG Challenge quiz 1 72%
• ACG Challenge quiz 2 70%
• Udemy Bonso 1 66%
• Udemy Bonso 2 72%
• Udemy Bonso 3 80%
• Various review modes on TD, about 85%+

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Test score: 889