2 out of 12 - AWS Certifications - Waiting in suspence

Yesterday, I took the certification exam for AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. As I pressed “End exam,” I was greeted with a message stating that it would take between 24 hours and 5 business days to receive the results.
I had completely forgotten about this, as I’m so used to getting the results immediately after the exam. It was a big surprise for me, so I had to wait in suspense for the results.

I wasn’t feeling fantastic about my performance on the exam, so I was pretty sure I had failed. Probably just by a small margin, which would have been okay. The very first time I attempted this certification (back in september 2020), I failed. The nice thing is that you can retake the exam after 14 days, and you can take it as many times as you want (the bad thing being that you have to pay for it every time.). So, I took it again after 3 months, and that time I passed.

Anyway, today the results were in, and I passed!

I scored 795/1000, and considering that I’m not really working with AWS these days, I’m pretty happy with that.

Thoughts about the SAP-C02 exam

If you’re planning on taking this exam, here are some of my thoughts about it:
The most important thing you can learn is the names of all the AWS products and their use cases.
The exam is very scenario-based, and you need to know which products to use in different scenarios.
Moreover, the questions will often ask about the most “cost-effective” solution or the one with the “least operational overhead.”
Therefore, you need to understand the pricing models for different products and know which products are more managed by AWS and which ones you have to manage yourself.
Additionally, some questions will have trick answers where the option that appears best is missing a key component, so you have to select the one that looks worse but will actually work.

So, read everything carefully and trust your knowledge.

Another thing about AWS certifications - Discounts:

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam is not exactly cheap. It costs $300.
So if you want to take it, there is a trick you can do to get a discount. First go and take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. It costs $100, and it’s a pretty easy exam.
When you pass an exam in the AWS system, you receive a 50% discount voucher that you can use on your next exam.
This way, you can take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam for $150, saving you $50.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back with more when I’ve decided what to do next.