Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam > The Exam
Exam Registration fee is USD 150
You have 80 minutes to complete a 40 quizzes exam. Most of the questions are up to 3 lines long in the multiple choice format. You should consider no more than 1.5/2 minutes per question if you want to read each question carefully and answer to all of them correctly.
It's possible to set a question for review and skip, you can get back to what you marked in this way at the end.
Now you're ready to go. Here's where you book your exam!
Passing the AWS solutions architect - Professional Exam > Exam Overview
You will find you make less errors when you don’t feel rushed on time.
Exam Overview
1. Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
2. 170 minutes to complete the exam It's all multiple choice on a PC
3. Exam available in English and Japanese
4. Practice Exam Registration fee is USD 40
5. The exam blueprint specified that there would be 100+ questions given in a 180 minute period and did not specify a pass grade.
6. The exam will test your knowledge with 180 questions
7. In terms of question complexity, it is at about the level I expected and required a good understanding of all available AWS services.
8. AWS Certification passing scores are set by using statistical analysis and are subject to change. AWS does not publish exam passing scores because exam questions and passing scores are subject to change without notice.
9. Exam Registration fee is USD 300
10. Recommend taking Advanced Architecting on AWS
11. Sample questions for the exam are available here.
What should I bring to an AWS Certification exam?
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Candidates must show two forms of personal identification (ID). Primary form must be a valid, government-issued ID containing both a photo and signature. The secondary form of ID needs to be valid and contain a signature.
Acceptable Forms of Primary ID (name, photograph, signature, valid/current):
- Government-issued Driver’s license
- U.S. Department of State Driver’s License
- National/State/Country Identification Card
- Passport
- Passport cards
- Military ID
- Alien Registration Card (Green Card, Permanent Resident Visa)
Note: Irish natives may use a Public Services Card as a primary form of identification, in Ireland only.
- Acceptable forms of Secondary ID (name, signature, valid/current):
- U.S. Social Security Card
- Debit/(ATM) Card
- Credit Card
- School ID (without a signature for minors is acceptable) any form of ID on the primary list
Note: In Japan, the blue colored (not pink) Health Insurance Card is an acceptable form of secondary identification.
However, the paper form of the Health Insurance is not acceptable.
You can NOT bring food, laptops, backpacks, notepads, or other personal equipment to the test area. For all exams, you can request a whiteboard and marker (some centers may hand out paper and pencil), which must be returned before you leave. During check in you’ll be asked to turn out your pockets (on jackets, pants, etc.) to verify they’re empty and free of prohibited items. Eyewear will also be inspected to ensure that it’s not technology-enabled.
Passing the AWS solutions architect - Professional exam > Prerequisites & Requirements
To be eligible for this exam, you must already be certified at the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level. You should have multiple years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS, along with the ability to evaluate cloud application requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementation, deployment, and provisioning applications on AWS. Additionally, you should have the experience and the capability to provide best practices guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications, projects, or the enterprise.
Note that in the event that you fail to pass an AWS certification exam, you may retake the exam subject to the following conditions:
a. You must wait 14 days from the day you fail to take the exam again.
b. You can take an exam up to three times in one year from the date of your first attempt.
This is valid for any AWS Certifiation Exam.
To pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam, you have to master advanced and technical skills, not to mention the experience in designing distributed applications and systems using AWS. Check the short list below to understand you need to master in order to pass the exam.
Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:
1. Designing and deploying dynamically scalable, highly available, fault tolerant, and reliable applications on AWS
2. Selecting appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements
3. Migrating complex, multi-tier applications on AWS
4. Designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS
5. Implementing cost control strategies
Candidate Overview
This exam tests your knowledge of advanced AWS use cases. Eligible candidates for this exam have:
1. Achieved AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
2. Two or more years hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS.
3. Abilities to evaluate cloud application requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementation, deployment, and provisioning applications on AWS.
4. Capabilities to provide best practices guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications, projects, or the enterprise.
You also have to:
Demonstrate ability to architect the appropriate level of availability based on stakeholder requirements
1. Stakeholder requirements is key phrase here – look at what the requirements are first before deciding the best way to architect the solution
2. What is availability? Basically up time. Does the customer need 99.99% up time or less? Which products may need to be used to meet this requirement?
3. Look at products which are single AZ, multi AZ and multi region. It may be the case that a couple of instances in a single AZ will suffice if cost is a factor
4. CloudWatch can be used to perform EC2 or auto scaling actions when status checks fail or metrics are exceeded (alarms, etc)
Demonstrate ability to implement DR for systems based on RPO and RTO
1. What is DR? It is the recovery of systems, services and applications after an unplanned period of downtime.
2. What is RPO? Recovery Point Objective. At which point in time do we need to get back to when DR processes are invoked? 3. 3. This would come from a customer requirement – when systems are recovered, data is consistent from 30 minutes prior to the outage, or 1 hour, or 4 hours etc. What is acceptable to the stakeholder?
4. What is RTO? Recovery Time Objective. How quickly must systems and services be recovered after invoking DR processes? It may be that all critical systems must be back online within a maximum of four hours.
5. RTO and RPO are often paired together to provide an SLA to end users as to when services will be fully restored and how much data may be lost. For example, an RTO of 2 hours and an RPO of 15 minutes would mean all systems would be recovered in two hours or less and consistent to within 15 minutes of the failure.
6. How can low RTO be achieved? This can be done by using elastic scaling, for example or using monitoring scripts to power up new instances using the AWS API. You may also use multi AZ services such as EBS and RDS to provide additional resilience
7. How can low RPO be achieved? This can be done by using application aware and consistent backup tools, usually native ones such as VSS aware ones from Microsoft or RMAN for Oracle, for example. Databases and real time systems may need to be acquiesced to obtain a crash consistent backup. Standard snapshot tools may not provide this. RMAN can backup to S3 or use point in time snapshots using RDS. RMAN is supported on EC2. Use data dump to move large databases.
8. AWS has multi AZ, multi region and services like S3 which has 11 nines of durability with cross region replication
9. Glacier – long term archive storage. Cheap but not appropriate for fast recovery (several hours retrieval SLA)
19. Storage Gateway is a software appliance that sits on premises that can operate in three modes – gateway cached (hot data kept locally but most data stored in S3), gateway stored (all data kept locally but also replicated to S3) and VTL-Tape Library (virtual disk tapes stored in S3, virtual tape shelf stored in Glacier)
11. You should use gateway cached when the requirement is for low cost primary storage with hot data stored locally
12. Gateway stored keeps all data locally but takes asynchronous snapshots to S3
13. Gateway cached volumes can store 32TB of data, 32 volumes are supported (32 x 32, 1PB)
14. Gateway stored volumes are 16TB in size, 12 volumes are supported (16 x 12, 192TB)
15. Virtual tape library supports 1500 virtual tapes in S3 (150 TB total)
16. Virtual tape shelf is unlimited tapes (uses Glacier)
17. Storage Gateway can be on premises or EC2. Can also schedule snapshots, supports Direct Connect and also bandwidth throttling.
18. Storage Gateway supports ESXi or Hyper-V, 7.5GB RAM, 75GB storage, 4 or 8 vCPU for installation. To use the Marketplace appliance, you must choose xlarge instance or bigger and m3, i2, c3, c4, r3, d2, or m4 instance types
19. Gateway cached requires a separate volume as a buffer upload area and caching area
20. Gateway stored requires enough space to hold your full data set and also an upload buffer
VTL also requires an upload buffer and cache area
21. Ports required for Storage Gateway include 443 (HTTPS) to AWS, port 80 for initial activation only, port 3260 for iSCSI internally and port 53 for DNS (internal)
22. Gateway stored snapshots are stored in S3 and can be used to recover data quickly. EBS snapshots can also be used to create a volume to attach to new EC2 instances
23. Can also use gateway snapshots to create a new volume on the gateway itself
24. Snapshots can also be used to migrate cached volumes into stored volumes, stored volumes into cached volumes and also snapshot a volume to create a new EBS volume to attach to an instance
25. Use System Resource Check from the appliance menu to ensure the appliance has enough virtual resources to run (RAM, vCPU, etc.)
26. VTL virtual tape retrieval is instantaneous, whereas Tape Shelf (Glacier) can take up to 24 hours
27. VTL supports Backup Exec 2012-15, Veeam 7 and 8, NetBackup 7, System Center Data Protection 2012, Dell NetVault 10
28. Snapshots can either be scheduled or done ad hoc
29. Writes to S3 get throttled as the write buffer gets close to capacity – you can monitor this with CloudWatch
30. EBS – Elastic Block Store – block based storage replicated across hosts in a single AZ in a region
31. Direct Connect – connection directly into AWS’s data centre via a trusted third party. This can be backed up with standby Direct Connect links or even software VPN
32. Route53 also has 100% uptime SLA, Elastic Load Balancing and VPC can also provide a level of resilience if required
32. DynamoDB has three copies per region and also can perform multi-region replication
33. RDS also supports multi-AZ deployments and read only replicas of data. 5 read only replicas for MySQL, MariaDB and PostGres, 15 for Aurora
34. There are four DR models in the AWS white paper:-
