Thursday, December 7, 2017

Studying and passing the AWS Developer Associate Exam

Amazon Web Services has been around for over a decade now and has offerings that continue to grow. They also have over a 35% market share.  Lastly the Developer Associate exam seems to come up on "best programmer certs" type of posts (e.g. here).

So if you're convinced that it's a good idea to get a cert, how do you do it?  What should you study?  No one wants to waste a day and over a hundred dollars to take a test and then fail it.  This post will go over some of the best resources to use to study.

When I studied for the exam and passed it, these were the most useful resources, in order:

  1. ACloudGuru has a fantastic series of videos that covers everything on the test is broad strokes, but is detailed enough to give you a real advantage on the test.  The training isn't free but it is quite reasonable and you literally get hours of content.
  2. The AWS Documentation will have the details you need, but usually in a format geared for your day-to-day developer work instead of in a Q/A format.
  3. On-the-job experience is great too.  However experience will usually have you do a deep-dive on one or two technologies (e.g. migrate something to EC2 and S3) instead of a broad overview of the entire platform.  This overview is what the test is going to be about.
  4. The AWS FAQs have some information and are in a good Q/A format, but rarely mention anything on the test.
  5. The AWS Whitepapers are recommended on Amazon's page of test tips, but was not really useful at all.  You would probably be better prepared by reading the Wikipedia page's list of AWS services.
The test itself was in a bit of an odd location.  When I took it the facility was primarily used for aviation testing.  Needless to say, when you're waiting in line with people needing pilot's licenses you wonder if you got the address wrong.  So don't worry if you get directed to an airport, or near one.  Also, at my location only two other people were taking the test and I was expecting more of a classroom like situation (e.g. 15+ people taking the test at the same time).  Overall, the experience wasn't that bad.  The questions mostly matched up with the preparation questions from ACloudGuru but not entirely.

Lastly, some companies will pay for your tests and training.  If you're really lucky you'll be with a company that needs a certain headcount of certified developers in order to qualify to be some kind of "premium partner" with AWS.

All in all, it required a fair chunk of time to study but you end up with a really good overview of the (now large) AWS ecosystem of services as well as a boost to your resume.

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