Reflections on where the desire to pass certification comes from AWS Solutions Architect Associate.
Motive one: "Axes"
One of the most useful principles for any professional is “Know your tools” (or in one of the variations “").
We have been in the clouds for a long time, but for the time being, these were just monolithic applications with databases deployed on EC2 instances - cheap and cheerful.
But gradually it became crowded within the framework of the monolith. They set a course for cutting in a good sense - for modularization, and then microservices that are now fashionable. And very quickly a hundred flowers bloom on this soil.
Yes, there is no need to go far - the activity logging project that I am currently running includes:
- Clients in the form of a variety of applications of our product - from the backwoods of the dense legacy to trendy microservices on .Net Core.
- Amazon SQS queues that store logs about what happens to clients.
- Microservice on .Net Core that retrieves messages from the queue and sends them to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (KDS). It also has a Web API interface and swagger UI as a backup channel and for manual testing. Wrapped in a docker linux container and hosted under Amazon ECS. Autoscaling is provided in case of a large stream of logs.
- From KDS, data is sent by fire hoses to Amazon Redshift with intermediate warehouses in Amazon S3.
- Operational logs for developers (debug information, error messages, etc.) are formatted in nice looking JSON and sent to Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Working with such a zoo of AWS services, you want to know what is in the arsenal and how to use it better.
Just imagine - you have an old proven ax that cuts trees well and hammers nails well. Over the years of work, you have learned to treat him well, put together a doghouse, a couple of sheds and maybe even a hut. Sometimes difficulties arise, for example, tightening a screw with an ax does not always work out quickly, but usually it can be solved with the help of patience and such and such a mother.
And then a wealthy neighbor appears next to him, who has a damn cloud of a variety of tools: electric saws, nail guns, screwdrivers and God knows what else. He is ready to rent all this wealth around the clock. What to do? We reject the option to take an ax and dispossess kulaks as politically illiterate. It would be most reasonable to study what kind of tools are there, how they can complement each other in different jobs and on what conditions they are rented.
Since this was the main motive for me, the preparation was structured accordingly - to find a fundamental guide and study it carefully. And such guidance . The book is written rather dryly, but this is unlikely to scare away people who have learned matan according to Fikhtengolts.
I read it from cover to cover and I think that it fully meets the goal - it gives a good overview of both the services themselves and more general concepts that may be encountered on the exam. In addition, a nice bonus is the ability to go through a somewhat strange registration procedure on Sybex and answer all the test questions and mock exams from the book online.
An important point: I studied using a book published in 2016, but everything changes quite dynamically in AWS, so look for the latest edition, which will be at the time of preparation. For example, questions about the availability and durability of various S3 and Glacier classes often come up in test runs, but some of the numbers have changed since 2016. In addition, new ones have been added (for example, INTELLIGENT_TIERING or ONEZONE_IA).
Motive two: "65 shades of orange"
Tense thinking requires some effort. But it's no secret that many programmers take masochistic pleasure from puzzles, questions, and sometimes even exams.
I think it's a lot like playing "What? Where? When?" or, say, a good game of chess.
In that sense, the current AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam is very good. Although during the preparation among the test questions from time to time there were “crammed”, such as “How many maximum elastic IP addresses can you have in a VPC" or "What is the availability of S3 IA?”, on the exam itself, such did not come across. In fact, almost every one of the 65 questions was a mini design problem. Here is a fairly typical example from the official documentation:
A web application allows customers to upload orders to an S3 bucket. The resulting Amazon S3 events trigger a Lambda function that inserts a message to an SQS queue. A single EC2 instance reads messages from the queue, processes them, and stores them in an DynamoDB table partitioned by unique order ID. Next month traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 10 and a Solutions Architect is reviewing the architecture for possible scaling problems. Which component is MOST likely to need re-architecting to be able to scale to accommodate the new traffic?
A. Lambda function B. SQS queue C. EC2 instance D. DynamoDB table
As far as I know, the last version of the exam contained 55 questions and 80 minutes were allocated for it. Apparently, they did a good job on it: now there are 65 questions and 130 minutes for them. The time per question has increased, but there are practically no passing questions. I had to think about each one, sometimes for more than two minutes.
By the way, here is a practical conclusion. It is usually a winning tactic to quickly go over all the questions and answer what is answered immediately. In the case of SAA-C01, this generally does not work, almost every question will have to be flagged, otherwise there is a risk of not noticing some detail and answering incorrectly. I ended up answering by spending a minute or two on each question, and then I went back to the flagged ones and spent the remaining 20 minutes on them.
Motive three: "If youth knew, if old age could"
As you know, one of the most common reasons for failures that programmers over 40 receive is a reduced ability to learn compared to young people.
Meanwhile, there is a feeling that in some areas my ability to learn has even increased compared to my student years - due to greater perseverance and experience, which allows me to use familiar analogies for unfamiliar questions.
But the feeling can be deceptive, an objective criterion is needed. Prepare for the exam and pass it - why not?
I think the test was successful. I prepared myself and the preparation went quite smoothly. Well, yes, a couple of times I fell asleep in a hammock reading a manual - but this can happen to anyone.
Now there is a certificate and decent points for the exam as a sign of gunpowder in the powder flasks.
Well, a little about what could be motivation, but it was unlikely in my case.
Not the first motive: "Cabbage"
There are curious about which specialists with which certificates are the most paid in the world, and AWS SAA is in the honorable 4th place there
But, firstly, what is the cause, and what is the effect? I bet the guys are making good money.
because of certain abilities, and these same abilities help pass the certification. Secondly, there are vague doubts that someone will be paid $130K a year outside the US, even if he is certified from head to toe.
And in general, as you know, after satisfying the lower levels of the pyramid, salary ceases to be the main factor.
Not second motive: "Company requirements"
Companies may encourage or even require certifications (especially if they are needed for partnerships, such as joining AWS APN in the case of Amazon).
But in our case, an independent product is produced, in addition, we try to avoid vendor lock-in. So no certificates are required. They will praise and pay for the exam in recognition of certain efforts - that's the whole officialdom.
Not the third motive: "Employment"
Perhaps the presence of certificates will be a definite plus for getting a job, all other things being equal. But I have no plans to change jobs. It is interesting to work on a complex product that actively uses many newfangled approaches and AWS services. All this is enough at the current place.
No, of course, there are different cases: in 23 years in IT, I changed jobs 5 times. It’s not a fact that I won’t have to change again if I last another 20 years. But if they beat me, we’ll cry.
Useful
In conclusion, I will mention a few more materials that I used in the process of preparing for the exam and just as a “saw sharpener”:
- Video courses и . The latter, they say, are especially good if you buy a subscription with access to all trial exams. But for me, as one of the conditions of the game, it was not to spend a single cent on preparation, buying a subscription did not go well with this. In addition, I generally consider the video format to be less dense in terms of the amount of information per unit of time. However, when they are preparing for SA Professional, I will most likely sign up for a subscription.
- Tons of Amazonian official documentation, including FAQs and WhitePapers.
- And last but not least, . I found them a couple of days before the exam and had a good workout. Nothing to read there, but the online interface and the comments on the answers are good.
Source: habr.com