How to learn AWS more efficiently?

How to learn more efficiently and get AWS certification?

Studying for the certification is one of the fastest ways to learn AWS. This article covers tips for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam.

How to Learn AWS More Efficiently

If you’re wondering why bother, let’s look at the context.

A Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, wrote:

“The only constant is change”

Heraclitus

This applies especially to technology. With technology, what you learn immediately begins to decay. It starts to get out of date as quickly as you’ve learned it.

Sometimes you learn things that are already out of date.

Your learning must outpace technology change, or you will become irrelevant. Being able to learn efficiently and effectively is your primary skill.

It’s usually even more important than the specific technologies you know because you must keep learning new things.

You will rarely find yourself in a situation where you have all the answers already and never need to learn anything new.

An hour spent addressing the meta-issue of learning skills pays off in reduced time to learn.

Learning how to learn is the core skill.

This is probably the one skill that was never explicitly mentioned in all the years that you’ve spent in school.

But it’s the one where there’s the most reward for the minor investment.

In my own experience, I believe that being able to learn quickly was the primary reason I could study for certifications part-time and achieve a score over 90% in just one month.

Take advantage of Mapping Topics.

When discussing efficient studying, one approach can save you time and is 100% proven to work. It’s using Mind Mapping techniques to help your process. You can learn and memorize more content and understand complex ideas that were hard before.

When you go through complex topics that contain several exceptions, rules, and relationships with other subjects, putting them in a mental model (Mind Map) helps you see the whole picture and learn at a level you never forget.

I did that experiment on my learning journey for the AWS certification.

I got a fantastic result. Here’s one example.

If it’s your first time using one cloud provider and you’ve never heard of something called AWS VPC. For those who know it, you should know that AWS VPC contains several other services around a VPC, and you need to know all of them to build even a simple architecture in the cloud.

How to Start your Mind Map

Start the VPC as the main topic and then add sub-topics like Route Table, Subnet, VPC Endpoint, CloudHub VPN, NAT Gateway, Transit Gateway, ACL, PrivateLink, Security Group, Peerig Connection, Direct Connection.

You can also recursively do that for each of those sub-topics. Keep adding all crucial information as needed.

You can download an example here: AWS VPC Mind Map. We also have 20 Mind Maps available for download.

Click to Download Full Mind Map – AWS VPC

Alright, let’s take a look at the certification path.

Learning Path – AWS

Let’s review what you should know and prepare for the AWS Certification test.

Let’s review crucial topics:

• Different responses you will see in your exam.
• Resilient Architectures.
• High-Performing Architectures.
• Cost-optimized architectures

AWS Learning Kit

Ready to get AWS Certified? Before taking the exam, test your AWS knowledge with a quiz or simulation. These simulations help you identify gaps in your current AWS expertise and give you confidence that you are ready for the AWS certification test. They are effective study tools and give you the motivation you need to keep pushing forward and become AWS-certified. Don’t wait. Start your AWS certification journey today with a quiz or simulation!

Advantages

1. Build your confidence: Practicing with AWS quiz questions helps you build your knowledge and confidence in AWS concepts, which matters for the AWS certification exam.

2. Get familiar with AWS terminology: AWS Learning Kit helps you get familiar and comfortable with AWS terminology and the AWS platform as a whole.

3. Stay motivated: AWS certifications are challenging and sometimes frustrating, so practicing with AWS quiz questions helps you stay motivated and on track to pass the exam.

4. Track your progress: AWS Learning Kit helps you track your learning over time and identify areas of improvement that need work.

5. Test in a real exam-like environment: AWS Learning Kit gives you experience taking a simulated AWS certification test and helps you prepare for the actual exam. Don’t wait. Start your AWS certification journey today with a quiz or simulation!

Response Types

Going into your exam, you will get two different response types.

The first is multiple choice, with one correct response and three incorrect answers.

These three incorrect responses are sometimes called distractors.

Then, the other type is multiple responses, where you have two correct answers out of 5 response options.

Those are the two response types you’ll see in your exam.

Exam Domains

The exam is split into four domains.

Designed resilient architectures is 30%, designed high-performing architectures is 28%, designed secure applications and architectures is 24%, and designed costs to optimize architectures is 18%.

Resilient architectures

You need to know how to create a multi-tier architecture solution.

In addition, you need to understand how to design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures.

You’ll be tested on designing decoupling mechanisms using AWS services. You’ll also be tested on choosing the proper resilience storage.

How to use decoupling and choosing - there’s even a lecture dedicated to different storage options.

High-performing Architectures

You need to identify elastic and scalable computing solutions for a workload.

You need to be able to select high-performing and scalable storage solutions for your workload, high-performing networking solutions for a workload, and high-performing database solutions for a workload.

Secure applications and Architectures

This is where you design secure access to AWS resources, design safe application tiers, and select the appropriate data security options.

That’s it.

Cost-optimized Architectures

You need to identify cost-effective storage solutions and computing and database services.

You need to be able to create cost-optimized network architectures, and that’s it for the four different domains.

Pass Mark

You might wonder what the pass mark is.

Your result from the exam is a score between 100 to 1000, and the minimum pass mark is 720.

You will have 65 questions on your exam, and you will have 130 minutes to complete it.

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