Preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Certification Exam

Sean Winters, a Solutions Architect at New Relic, shares his experience and tips for preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect—Associate exam, emphasizing the importance of setting a hard deadline for the exam, finding a study buddy for motivation, and balancing theoretical learning with practical labs. He advises against relying solely on rote memorization of sample questions, as the actual exams seldom repeat these questions verbatim, and instead suggests using them to identify knowledge gaps. During the exam, Winters recommends skipping around to answer known questions first and revisiting challenging ones later, highlighting the significance of reading questions and options carefully due to their often similar nature. He also discusses various resources he found helpful, including the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide, Linux Academy, Whizlabs, and A Cloud Guru. Ultimately, Winters encourages those taking the exam to focus on becoming competent cloud architects rather than just obtaining the certification.