How I passed AWS Cloud practitioner exam in 2020

Amazon allows us to test acquired knowledge in a cloud background, with the help of several degrees. Since I have always been interested in cloud technologies and Amazon clearly dominates regarding percentual market shares, I decided to perform the test in Amazon. I wanted to proceed from the very beginning of the certificate package, and so I opted for the first possible, and many users referred to as the simplest, certificate AWS Cloud Practitioner. I would like to divide my journey into 4 sources, which will guarantee the acquisition of the mentioned certificate during the thorough study.

The first step was to go through the whole course from Stephane Maarek (I add the address https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-new/ ). Stephane is a great instructor, that has a huge amount of the courses on Udemy highly rated by users and every one of his courses costs 1 euro per minute. Regarding the course AWS Cloud Practitioner, Stephane describes the technologies here, which can occur in the test and he draws attention to common student problems and also helps with registration for the certificate. This course contains one practical test with 65 questions, that helped you to reveal the shortcomings I did not catch or I neglected, during the study. Unless I have passed the certificate, I did not understand why Stephane addresses part Shared responsibility model so often, but after the finishing of the test, I already got it. There were 4 questions in my test, asking right on the Shared responsibility model, who is responsible for this characteristic in the cloud, what is the characteristic customer and AWS share between each other, and so on. I definitely recommend focusing on this part.

The second step of successful passing of the test was registration on page https://digitalcloud.training/ . Neal Davis provides the course with 500 questions divided into four sections. The first section is composed of 6 tests simulating real test and after the passing, you will see a percentual score and you also can go through an explanation of right respectively wrong answer in detail. The second section is similar to the first one, but in this part, Neal allows us to control the question during the test, and also there is no counting time in this section, so you are not forced to handle the test until the set time opposite the first section. The third section is great. Personally, I started with it and I recommend it to everyone. In the third section, Neal divided the questions into 4 logical units such as:

• AWS CCP Knowledge Review — Compute
• AWS CCP Knowledge Review — Storage
• AWS CCP Knowledge Review — Database
• And another 12 sections

I made an effort to handle the certificate in the shortest possible time and some definitions started to knit, so I created my own “flashcards” and I repeated them. On my desk it looked like this:

The fourth section is a final test composed of all possible questions, which occurred in the first, the second, and the third section, but I did not even go through this test, because I always had 100% in the previous parts.

The third step to pass the certificate was to go through the course from John Bonso (I add the link for udemy certificate). Except for udemy courses, John has also his own page https://tutorialsdojo.com/, where he has all created courses and he also started to create the certificate notes to help people to prepare for their certificate better. John created 4 sample tests in this course, composed of 65 questions and they are more difficult opposite the question created by Neal in my opinion, so it was the deepening of my knowledge. It is recommended to get at least 85% in every test, even if the limit for the successful passing is 70%. Last days, I passed every certificate at 95%.

The fourth source helping me was the only free from the mentioned 3 sources. I found a direct link to AWS Cloud Practitioner on page https://www.examtopics.com/ and I am glad I found it. There are 454 questions on this page, which are rightly answered at 80% and the rest of the questions is solved in the comment section. I am not sure, but the 6 questions about technologies occurring in the test, did not catch in the previous 3 sources from Stephane Mareek, Neal Davis, and John Bosco. I recommend the fourth source as an additional source because I have a feeling, that I already saw many questions or I learned them from previous sources.

The big problem I had during the preparation was with the questions regarding cloud advantages, reliability and price optimization, and other characteristics, and that is why I created and printed a page, where I listed the characteristics and I often repeated because it was often mixed to me, where which characteristic belongs.

6 cloud benefits:

· Trade capital expense for variable expense,

· Benefit from massive economies of scale,

· Stop guessing about capacity,

· Increase speed and agility,

· Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers,

· Go global in minutes.

6 design principles for cloud security:

· Implement a strong identity foundation,

· Enable traceability,

· Apply security at all layers,

· Automate security best practices,

· Protect data in transit and at rest,

· Prepare for security events.

5 design principles for cost optimisation in cloud:

· Adopt a consumption model,

· Measure overall efficiency,

· Analyze and attribute expenditure,

· Stop spending money on data center operations,

· Use managed services to reduce cost of ownership

5 pillars of well designed AWS architecture is:

· operation excellence,

· security,

· reliability,

· performance efficiency,

· cost optimization.

5 principles for cloud efficiency:

· Democratize advanced technologies,

· Go global in minutes,

· Use serverless architectures,

· Experiment more often,

· Mechanical sympathy.

5 principles for cloud reliability:

· Test recovery procedures,

· Automatically recover from failure,

· Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability,

· Stop guessing capacity,

· Manage change in automation.

I read the notes and repeated some tests the day before the test. I took the test at 7 o’clock in the morning because I am used to absolving the hardest tasks of the day right in the morning. I had 100 minutes for the test and I took it from the comfort of home. I solved 65 questions in 30 minutes, after starting the test and I repeated the test two more times. Be cautious of questions with various options to mark the two right answers. You can see the score I achieved below. According to my opinion, if you go through 4 mentioned sources, there is a minimum chance you will not pass the test successfully. I wish you good luck with writing the test.