how to pass AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam

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Background

I passed the AWS solutions architect assciate exam today, and I would like to share some knowledge for people who want to prepare for the examination.
There are already a lot of other blogs talking about how to prepare for the exmaination. Actually there are too much information, and it is difficult to know what is important and what is not important.
Most blogs are only concentrating what are the important parts, and I will also tell you what is not important, so that you can save a lot of time.

This article is mainly for people who don’t have much experience with AWS(for example, you have no idea what is Cloudfront…), and want to know how to prepare for the exam efficiently.

Description of the examination

65 questions.
130 minutes.
I finished the exam within 50 minutes, I think you don’t need to worry about time.

what is important and what is not important

  • Each question is very short, most questions are only 2 or 3 lines. Meaning basicly, you don’t need to do a lot of exercises which are very long.
  • Nearly no question requires you remember the actual number(except for the very very basic one). So you don’t need to remember things such as the limitation of the number of subnets in one vpc is 200.
  • I have seen more than half of the questions from the exercises I have done. So I think doing exercises can be very helpful for passing the exam.
  • There are many questions of AWS solutions associate you can find in the Internet, but most of them contain wrong results. I recommend choosing the places where people can discuss, so even if the answer is wrong, some people will discuss what the correct answer is.
  • The service I meet in the questions are all very common service, EC2, cloudfront, api gateway, vpc, elb, s3, rds, sts, storage gateway, sqs, beanstalk, route53, swf, dynamodb, CloudFormation, Snowball, kinesis, opswork, iam, lambda, redshift, ecs, redis, codedeploy, Cognito, elasticache, Aurora, CloudTrail, sns, directory service. These are important topics.
  • I haven’t seen any questions about devpay, FPS, budget, AppSync, Step Functions, X-Ray, Glue, Systems Manager, Workspace, organizations. So I think these are not important topics.

how I prepared for the exam