My #1 Resource To Pass Your AWS Certification

There are basically two types of people looking to become Amazon Certified:

1. Those who work on AWS at their job already and are looking to get certified with it
2. Those who have NOT worked with AWS at all and are looking to get certified with it (most likely the AWS Certified Solutions Architect).

This video deals mainly with #2 of which category I, myself, fall into. However, if you are of #1, then there will be a recommendation for you as well.

So if you are looking to pass your AWS certification or just need a path to begin on, then this video is for you.

#1 Resource to Pass Your AWS Certification

Links

Linux Academy – http://bit.ly/32PywTg
ACloudGuru Udemy Course – http://bit.ly/2OyF1aj

Update 2021

A lot has happened since creating this post and the above video. Linux Academy was bought by A Cloud Guru and then A Cloud Guru was bought by Pluralsight.

Also, I’ve since passed the certification myself and have put together the exact resources and steps needed for you to do the same.

Check out this video for a more updated blueprint:

Video Transcript

Hey everyone Travis here from Travis.Media with a new video for you.

So look here; in about a week I'm going to be scheduling my AWS certification exam. Now it's not one of the big ones it's just the initial Solutions Architect Associate exam, but to me it's a big deal. I'm excited about it.

But in this video I want to tell you how I went about preparing for that, what course or courses that I took and what I found to be the number one resource in feeling confident going into this exam so stay tuned.

Hey everyone. So again as always be sure to click that subscribe button below. Lots of great videos are on the way. So unless you live under a rock you know that there are lots and lots of companies going to the cloud. They want all of their infrastructure in the cloud and it's a big thing today. So naturally as developers we should be learning that. We should be learning cloud computing and cloud development.

Now there's a number of services out there that do this but Amazon Web Services is a big one and it gives you a number of certifications that you can pick up.

So if you go to LinkedIn or you go to any of these job sites and you type in software engineer, you're going to see probably 50% of them either require or would like you to have some knowledge of Amazon Web Services or cloud computing.

Now that would be great if you had knowledge of it. It'd be even better if you had a certification in it okay. That would raise your chances of getting that job and so for me I wanted to add that to my resume and I just find cloud computing fascinating and wanted to get certified.

So if you're in the same boat I'm gonna show you two resources that I used and really one resource that you need to use to be completely confident in going into this so let's take a look.

Alright, so before we get into that let's talk about the certification. So there are really three levels: Foundational, associate and professional. So a lot of people say skip the foundational cloud practitioner certification and just go up to the associate solutions architect. So a lot of people said that and that's what I did. I'm studying for that currently.

So on the associate level you have the Solutions Architect, the SysOps and the developer certifications Then on professional you have also the architect and then it combines this SysOps and developer into a DevOps professional engineer. So those are the certifications I'm starting out right here on Solutions Architect. That's what I'm going for and that's what I'm going to show you how to prepare for in this video.

Okay, so if you've looked at all into AWS training I'm sure you've heard of ACloudGuru. It's a company that teaches this stuff. They teach all different levels. This guy Ryan Krunenberg, he's like an expert, and that kept coming up when I was looking for somewhere to learn it. So I checked out his website. His courses were kind of expensive on there and so I looked on Udemy and there it is. All of his courses are on Udemy or a lot of his courses are on Udemy, and so I found this one AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2019.

It has great reviews, this guy's an expert, it's got to be the best course. So I bought it and I worked through from first to last. I worked through the whole thing and here's my take on it. It was good. It taught me a lot but I think it's catered more to teaching you the questions and answers that are gonna be on the exam. So as one goes through the course you'll be taking notes and stuff and he'll be pointing out stuff that's definitely gonna be on the exam. So this topic is gonna be on the exam and so at the end of every lecture he's like, this, this, this, this, so he teaches you kind of what you need to know to pass the exam and for a lot of people that's exactly what they're looking for.

For me I thought that's what I was looking for but if you think about it, if you get your certification and you get put on a project where you need to bring that expertise, you got to be able to know, I mean you got to know the platform. Your certification is good but you also have to know it so if you're just learning the answers to pass the exam that's really not enough and it's not a wise thing to do. So of course he teaches you everything. He goes through all of these topics here, so you got ec2 you got VPC's, you got high availability and all of this stuff. He goes through it all. Lambdas, etc. But he does it kind of quick and he shows you a bunch of notes and there's some hands-on stuff and it's really good but it didn't work for me. I wanted more of what is really going on, show me a diagram of these parts and not so much note-taking and whatever.

So this may work for you if you're looking how to pass the exam and that's what you want then this course is for you. But me, after I finished I wasn't quite prepared so I still had a couple of weeks before I wanted to schedule my exam so I said look I'm gonna find another platform to kind of go through it again just kind of a high level overview to prep me for this exam.

So I went over to Reddit and I went on a couple of other sites and there was a lot of mention of Linux Academy. I've never heard of Linux Academy before but I checked it out and they have a path here called the Jr. AWS Cloud Engineer Entry Level. That's a learning path. They have a ton of courses but I was looking for some kind of path and it has a lot of stuff to learn and I don't need all of it. I don't need Linux essentials or CompTIA's. I don't need any of that stuff. I don't need an Intro to Python, I know Python pretty good.

But down here it said AWS Essentials and then it said AWS Certified Solutions Architect associate level so I thought hey I could kind of sweep through these two in the next couple of weeks and by that time I should feel confident to take this exam and just to sum it all up this is the site you want to be at to prepare for your AWS certification. I don't know why I didn't come to this sooner, well I didn't know about it but I wish I woulda came to this sooner so I'm taking this AWS essentials just to kind of go through it again and I have learned on a broad overview more about AWS than I did with the other course. The other course gave me the answers for the test, this course is actually explaining to me how this system works and it has just been really neat.

So let me show you a couple of things. They use this thing called Project Omega and so it's like this interactive web page okay. So here's your parts of AWS. You have your identity access manager, network services, compute services, storage database, SNS, all of this stuff. So you get this diagram and what you do is you start out with this account creator. You click on him and it gives you all of the notes you need for that section of the course then you move on to like Internet Gateway. You click on that in this diagram and it is interactive. So you click on the parts and it gives you notes teaching you what it is and in the end it gives you, you know, everything laid out here for you. So that was really neat. First of all that was really neat but on top of that they have these hands-on labs that I've found invaluable okay and what's neat about it … let me click start lab just so I can show you. What's neat about it is they give you an account on AWS to log into …… all right so this is loading but anyway they give you an account to login to on AWS and they give you a couple videos and they walk you through how you would do this professionally.

So like the VPC they walk you through it all. They say hey um let's create a VPC, now let's add some subnets, now let's create an Internet Gateway, let's add some routes, let's add a network access control list and they just show you all of these things and for me that's exactly what I needed. Things started to click and like right now if I had to create a VPC from scratch I could do it when I couldn't do it on the other course and I remember Ryan saying if you want to be confident on the exam at least be able to create a VPC from scratch which I couldn't do it finishing his VPC section. I could do it here within just you know five or six lessons, so I'm not saying his course is bad, I'm not saying he's a bad teacher. Ryan you're awesome but if you're looking for more interaction and not so much teaching to the test but more let's learn this thing, let's become good at this thing then I would suggest Linux Academy.

So it has other certifications. It has the professionals, I think it has the SysOps associate and the Developer associate. It also has a lot of Linux stuff and the CompTIA's, some Python stuff, it's great. I don't know why I didn't know about it before but it's wonderful and once this comes up I'll show you what this lab looks like. Do you see how long this is taking? Yeah so the reason it did that is because I'm running like 50 things at one time and my Internet's being slow. So anyway yeah AWS accounts, so you can open the console here which opens up the page to login you use these credentials and you can just kind of do what you want there. These videos walk you through a lot of the stuff, it gives you learning objectives and it's really really helpful so I just wanted to kind of give you a path if you were like where do I start? Do I need a book? Do I need the actual Amazon stuff. You don't need it okay. You can take this udemy course if you want but my suggestion would be to come to Linux Academy here and just work through these two.

So go through AWS essentials and AWS certified Solutions Architect Associate level on Linux Academy. It's seven days free and then it's 50 bucks a month but you can knock it out in a month. So 50 bucks and you get the best training. Go take your exam and become Amazon certified.

So hopefully that was helpful. If you have any questions please ask below and as always be sure to subscribe because I'm gonna be doing some follow-up videos as I get closer to my exam and as I take my exam and I'm gonna let you know how it goes and so that would be helpful to you hopefully too. So be sure to subscribe and I'll see you soon.