Thursday, August 31, 2017

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam experience and few exam related tips

I sat the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam today and passed, in this post I would share my exam experience and a few exam related tips.


There were 55 questions in this exam and and most of the questions were quite trickier than AWS Solution Architect - Associate exam and I hardly found any definitive question however that doesn't mean you would not read and understand definitions of different services ;) 

There were scenario based questions about changing tenancy of a running instance, placement group, EBS snapshots, Instance/ephemeral storage, ELB, Auto-scaling, Route53 records, Routing policy, IAM policies, S3 storage related backup scenario, network connectivity related questions in VPC, Cloudwatch alarms, health checks, Multi-AZ RDS & Read replica, Elastic beanstalk, Cloud Formation, Opswork and AWS shared responsibility model etc.

Here is my exam score, Overall Score: 83%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Monitoring and Metrics: 87%
2.0 High Availability: 100%
3.0 Analysis: 55%
4.0 Deployment and Provisioning: 87%
5.0 Data Management: 85%
6.0 Security: 75%
7.0 Networking: 100%

About the preparation of this exam, learn ins and out of all the AWS services covered in this exam by heart and the best option to do that is, watch this certification's training CBTs few times and once you are done with that now review the FAQ of these services and read AWS security withe paper once. 

I used Ryan Kroonenburg aka AcloudGuru's ( AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate  online ILVT course and Elias Khnaser's AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate course on Pluralsight however i must say any one of these course is suffice to pass the exam.

I would also suggest going for AWS solution architect course/exam first, as it would give you a better understanding about most of the AWS services and provide a solid base for this SysOps exam.

My Previous post about AWS Certified Solution Architect exam experience and few exam related tips can be found here.

Finally before going for the exam, make sure you also practiced on various sample questions available over web, however don't depend on then them as you would find many wrong answers there (however you will be able to to catch them only if you know the ins and out of different serveries by heart).

Hope this would be helpful in passing you AWS Sysops exam....Best of Luck!

That's it.... :)


4 comments:

  1. Many congratulation to achieve this milestone and hope many more to come. Just one question from my side how much quick time one require to prepare for this certification

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  2. Thanks...about the preparation time for AWS Associate certs...it depends on how much time you can give to study the subject...for me it took ~3 months to get the confidence level to sit and pass the exam...btw i have seen people who said they completed within month so it all depends

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    1. congrats friend. just brief about EXAM registration fees and process.

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    2. For any AWS Associate exam, exam fee is $150 and you can register for the exam by visiting aws training & certification site, https://www.aws.training/Account/LogOnOptions?

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