AWS Renewal
with tags AWS -So it had been over two years since I’d last sat my AWS SysOps Associate exam and it should have expired … but heres my experiences of renewing it.
Prep
Pluralsight
- Sat through a couple of hours of training videos before deciding things weren’t quite right
- Took practice exam got 70% but wasn’t happy with the quality of some of the questions
Started looking for alternate training someone had recommended ACloudGuru, I’d previously used LinuxAcademy but i settled on ACG due to pricing ($29 vs $50 monthly)
ACloudGuru
- Signed Up, Entered in card details but was hoping to have the exam completed before the free trial was up
- Sat practice exam, 89% which identified gaps my knowledge of High Availability and Networking.
- Spent the odd hour on an evening watching the course videos
- regularly retook the practice exam to try and get a feel for timings. It recommends spending 2mins per question.
Taking the Exam
- Rock up to testing center
- Empty pockets of Everything bare in mind lockers are tiny
- Sit exam in tiny room with 7 other test takers all hammering away at their keyboards (pearsonvue provide earplugs)
- Remember to flag questions that your uncertain about as you go, the exam will highlight them once you get to the end allowing you revisit them at the end
- Fill in the post exam survey
- Receive Pass/Fail instantly
- Exit to pub
Exam contents
- No questions on ElastiCache
- Lots of questions on Organizations
- Lots of questions on Billing/Cost Explorer
- AWS Artifact now where compliance related info can be found
- Only 2 questions on RDS covering read replicas and how to enable encryption on an existing RDS database
- IAM need to know how to evaluate a policy and how to spot the mistake in the policy
- AWS Shield & WAF need to know what each service is and when to use vs just using CloudFront
- NACLs are used to DENY traffic and for OUTBOUND rules
- How to write a VPC Route Table
- Opsworks questions were limited to does this use chef/puppet
Post exam
- Cancel ACG subscription (till next exam)
- It takes a day or two for your transcript and certifications to update, DON’T PANIC this is normal
- Your transcript will show the percentage breakdown of marks were available from the 7 subject areas and if any area were not up to scratch
- Discover that AWS had recently extended the Exam validity to 3 years meaning that my previous exam was still valid for another 6 months 🤦