AWS Solution Architect is not the exam you should take

Often I see people who are starting their AWS journey are looking for AWS Solution Architect as their first certification and stepping stone in the Amazon cloud world, these are primarily because all the famous training companies tell the below reasons

1. It gives a high-level idea about all the major services
2. It's more generic from a cloud computing perspective
3. It requires the least amount of hands-on practice in comparison to the other Associate level exams
4. Its gives you a foundation of other services and a cloud platform as a whole
5. It's definitely the easiest of all the associate exam

we will see how this does not justify to the people who are giving the AWS certification

The demography to people looking for AWS certification

Demography of AWS Certification candidates

Disclaimer: AWS does not provide data this stats are derived from Stackover flow survey and different channels where we find the certification number posted by people (its a very rough extrapolation)

From above we can derive very fewer people actually are going to architect the solution they will be either Developer or SysOps engineers at least in their early days

Comparison of AWS solution architect associate, Developer and SysOps

if we look in the AWS official certification guide we see all three requires 1 to 2 level of hands-on expertise and modules in the certification exams are as follows

Now if we take the demographical analysis SysOps engineers or Developer are not going to

1. Define performant application
2. Define the resilience
3. work in cost optimization

All these are very senior-level jobs and takes place well above the paygrade of the engineers

Each and every module of Developers and SysOps modules are very specific and closely resemblances to the actual job of the engineers in an enterprise eniornment

New trends of AWS Developer and SysOps associate exam

From 2019 or to be more specific form 2018 onwards this certification has changed significantly it is nowadays

1.much harder ( yeas but you learn more)

2. Focused on actual developer tools in greate details (Lambda, API gateway, Xray, entire CI/CD pipeline CodeDeploy, Beanstalk e.t.c)

3. Calls for specific hands-on knowledge

4. Devoid of the limit based, knowledge-based cramming questions with the overemphasis of AWS services are greatest (ex: DynamoDB is greatest in the earth with global index questions

Hands-on exercise on these topics will give you much more specific knowledge in greater details than high level service description is a solution architect associate exam

AWS solution architect associate gives you a high-level understanding of all the major services — — “Let’s be real if I do hands-on in Lambda or elastic beanstalk I will know what is a VPC or S3 or EC2”

Anti-pattern of AWS Solution Architect Associate in Interview

1. You don't create VPCs and Subnets at a junior level in an enterprise environment daily — In an interview, if you tell these you will be mostly screwed
2. Those IAM and security best practices are mostly used with AD connect or SSO and unless you know those (These are more of professional-level stuff)
3. Let's face it in today's time if I see in CV anyone write he is solution architect associate with 2 years experience …well it’s a gate away certificate

I have passed AWS Solution architect associate, so I am a cloud Architect and let's go solution architect professional — Please don’t go this way

Enter Speciality certification

AWS has long ego started specialty tracks and it can be taken without passing any AWS exam.

AWS Speciality exam

There are some significant advantages of these exams

1. Very few people have does these and these are well respected
2. You will be looked like a person who has niche skills
3. There are very few dumps and proper training available so if you start most likely you will learn a lot more as you will want to cover yourself with wider and deeper knowledge with $300 at stake
4. Very closely related to enterprise-level business problems

Conclusion

My take after taking multiple AWS certifications that you deepen your knowledge in some specific areas like CI/CD, Big data, AI ML and look for the best of breed solutions both cloud and native and be hands-on all of these rather than only going for set pieces of training.

I have written another post on What Linux Academy and A cloud guru is not solving

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