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In this blog post I will discuss a few things that I did to achieve my AWS developer associate level certification.
My first attempt for AWS certification was way back in 2017, back then I was searching for a new job and thought having an AWS certification would improve my chances of getting hired. In 2017 the role I was working on was not heavily using AWS services, the only thing that I was doing there was serving a static website using s3 buckets, with this real-time experience and some reading from Udemy I gave my first attempt.
After the exam I was 99.9% sure that I am going to fail the exam, all the questions looked so familiar and so confusing at the same time. I got the result and to my surprise, I score around 680 marks and I think we need 720 marks to pass the exam. I failed the exam as I expected but I did not expect that I would get 680 marks so not bad.
After I wrote this exam, I was thinking to prepare more seriously this time and give it another try but life had other plans for me, I transitioned into a new job as a frontend developer at a government agency and they were using .net core not using any cloud-related services. So I continued on this job for almost three and half years and never thought about getting into cloud or cloud certification, I was reading about the new services that AWS was releasing but in these three and half years never worked on any cloud-related services hands-on.
After three and half years in march 2021 I was transitioned into another job, this time a start-up, I was hired as a front-end developer, but you know how startups work, I was given an opportunity to work on everything that the company uses and they use AWS for everything. I thought this is a great opportunity to get some hands-on experience and then start my AWS certification journey that I stop almost 4 years ago.
I started working on AWS services actively for almost 9 months to a year before beginning my prep for the AWS certification again. This time when started my prep I felt like I understood the topics or the AWS service more clearly.
Things I did to get my certification
I got good hands-on understanding of some of the major AWS services. (Lambda, dynamoDB, SQS, SNS, cloudwatch, EC2, S3, codepipeline, codedeploy, ElasticBeanStalk to name a few).
After that, I completed a course on a cloud guru platform https://learn.acloud.guru/course/aws-certified-developer-associate
I completed all the hands-on labs that are part of this course.
After completing this I felt like there are some missing pieces on this course opted for another course from Udemy
Take notes as you study so that, they can be used to review a couple of days before your exam.
There are some good white papers that I read not completely but read as much as you can.
Some of these might be archieved but the lastest white papers can found here
https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers
When i am done with my prep work and felt confident that I can pass my exam, I started taking some mock exams, i took some mock exams on Whizlabs. This was basically my prep work and i passed my exam with good percentage. i cannot stress enough that while it is not mandatory to have hands-on experience using AWS services but it will definitely help you to achieve the certification. So i hope this will help will some one in achieving their certification.