My preparation for AWS SAA-C02(Feb-2022)

Hello Friends, phew..... I passed my AWS SAA-C02, feeling proud, relieved, celebrating, and excited to start the next step( my eyes are on AWS ML specialty) 

Would like to share my story and some tips that helped me sail through this certification. 



My journey with cloud computing started with a one-day training last year ~April-May 2021. Frankly, it didn't make any sense to me, I was able to use my credit card and log in to the AWS console :) 

As the days passed I forgot almost everything. What re-ignited my interest was working with some cloud-native applications developed by my team. 

I did some groundwork during the new year holidays and made a plan to do a certification. On 2nd January bought Cloud Practitioner and Associate courses from Udemy( year-end sale, it was cheap 😉)

I joined an online program in January with weekends classes( ~ 8hrs), the classes forced me to stay connected, I must admit it was difficult. 

Interestingly I didn't start with the Udemy courses but rather youtube videos. I checked videos from folks who completed their exam and how much time and resources they tried. Many of them exerted on VPC and warned about its complexity, so I started with VPC. 

I was pleasantly surprised to learn about VPC, being from a networking background it just pulled me into AWS.  

I made a habit to listen to 1-2 hours of youtube videos every day with my tea(stretched tea time 😁), my online program forced me to do hands-on almost 3 to 4 hrs over the weekend and for the last 4 weeks (before the exam) I tried different configuration using AWS console, almost 1hr/day on average. 

To keep my effort time-bound after 3-4 weeks of self-study I scheduled my exam after 3 weeks after( in total ~ 7 weeks from the start). I completed a ~10hr youtube video from freecodecamp and turned to solve free exam questions on youtube (will share the resources in the next post) to understand my strength and weakness. 

I realized that there were many more AWS services that I have never heard of like Kinesis, Gaurd duty, Macie, Gaurdduty, Redshift spectrum, and many more. My exam was 2 weeks away and I realized there was a good portion of services outside (VPC, EC2, ALB, RDS, S3) that needs to be dealt with.

Instead of going back to learn about all the services I continued cracking sample tests and any services that I didn't know I will do deep dive and take notes.  This strategy helped since trying to learn everything would have been a terrible mistake. 

I had to postpone my exam by 5 days but finally, I took the faith of leap(backed up with my preparation) and PASSED the exam. 



This is the schedule I followed and I will publish the resources I utilized for the preparation in a separate post. 

Have a great day !


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