This guide contains all the resources I used, plus my recommendations for how to study for the AWS - Solutions Architect Professional Exam. I took and passed the exam in October 2019.
I started by taking the following acloudguru course. This is a great overview of all the material covered in the exam. Allow me to reiterate, this is an OVERVIEW. It is, in no way, a comprehensive of all material needed to pass this exam. I highly recommend starting with this as it is a great guide to give you a sense of the exam.
A Cloud Guru - Solutions Architect Professional Course
I watched the following re:invent videos. Yes, the list is long. I believe this covers I suggest watching them at 1.5x the speed. I found that 1.5x is fast enough to help get through the videos quickly yet slow enough to be able to comprehend the material.
Security Anti-patterns: Mistakes to avoid
Security across Multiple Accounts
Assessing Readiness to Migrate at Scale
Migrating Databases and Data Warehouses to Cloud
Multi-region active-active Architecture
How to Scale to 10 Million Users
These are to all the whitepapers I read, took notes of and reviewed closer to the exam. It is tough to actually read all of these as it is a lot of material. You may skim through them but you must be really attentive/focused as you do so. There is a lot of little details in these whitepapers; details that are crucial to passing the exam.
Multi-Tenant SaaS Storage Strategies
Performance at Scale with Elasticache
Securing Data at Rest with Encryption
Cloud Transformation Maturity Model
Cost Optimization - Automating Elasticity
AWS - Well Architected Framework
Backup and Recovery Approaches on AWS
Continuous Integration and Delivery
I went through this amazing, short, FREE course created by AWS:
Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
This course assumes that you have strong knowledge of the exam material. This course DOES NOT cover exam material. Instead, this course is about how to approach the different questions in the exam. It breaks down the thought process of those who answer these very challenging questions correctly. I highly recommend going through this course after you have gone through the above mentioned videos and whitepapers.
As I was studying for the exam, I came across a lot of terminology. I made a point of noting and researching the ones that I didn't know. I highly suggest you do the same.
Here is a list of the ones that I didn't know when I started studying. I would recommend that you go through this and create one of your own as you're studying for the exam.
- Row-locking
- Contention
- Vault Lock APIs on Glacier
- Large Binary Objects (BLOBs)
- Different DynamoDB Indices (Global secondary index and Local secondary index)
- Views in RDS
- OLAP vs OLTP.
- Ephemeral ports
- Memcached vs Redis
- EFS Shares
- EFS Mount targets
- EFS lifecycle policies and storage classes
- Different types of storage gateways:
- File
- Volume
- Cached
- Stored
- Tape
- Pub/Sub
- Lazy writes
- Cloudfront SNI
- Partition Placement Group
- Perpetual Consistency vs Eventual Consistency
- DynamoDB Accelerator? (DAX)
- What are jumbo frames?
- NFS vs SMB
- iSCSI
- AWS Service Catalog
- FQDN
- Types Route 53 health checks
- Personal health dashboard
- Delete markers on s3
- Canonical data models
- "Brown Field" situation
- IDS/IPS
- Eventbridge
- Fargate
- Hard Cost vs Soft Cost
- IOPS vs Mb/S
- Scalable EBS
- Amazon AppStream 2.0 stacks and fleets
- Consistent hashing
- Route Propagation
- Cloudformation Stackset
- AD Connector
- AWS SSO
- Properties of ELB
- Properties of Auto Scaling and it's terminology
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Properties of Cloudfront
- AWS Step Functions
- Redshift Spectrum
- Cloudfront with dynamic content
- Session Data
- Cost Optimization Monitor
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Instance Scheduler
- AWS data pipeline
- Kinesis Firehose
- Kinesis Streams
- AWS CodePipeline
- AWS CodeStar
- Direct Connect Gateway
- SOAP vs REST APIs