First Reddit post,

I have my exam schedule in two weeks and I really just want to know, which set of tutorial dojos exams helped the most with preparation? For example topics, sections so on and so forth.

Just want to make the best use of my study time. Thanks in advance

Having completed 3 associate exams in 3 weeks (https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1ha2nkx/passed_3_associate_exams_in_3_weeks/), I love a good cert speedrun. But they’re not for everyone, nor for every situation.

Let’s start with some reasons to slowwww down 🐌

1. $$$$$

Failed speedruns mean paying twice for the exam (unless it has free retakes).

Have a think about whether the financial risk justifies the benefits.

This is also a reason not to make the deadline too tight even if you do decide to speedrun.

2. Stress

Not everyone performs well under time pressure.

If you learn better with steady progress, speedrunning could do more harm than good.

General rule of thumb: if you hate the process, it’s not a good sign.

3. Practical Skills

Racing through certifications too fast could mean memorising exam answers at the loss of building hands-on AWS expertise.

You might pass quickly but miss crucial hands-on experience; consider your reasons for getting the cert.

----

And now, why you should go fast. 😎

1. Urgency Drives Action

Setting an aggressive timeline creates momentum; it's incredibly helpful in overcoming procrastination.

A tight deadline transforms certification from a vague goal into an immediate priority.

It makes it so much easier to focus while studying, in the same way that it’s easiest to study for a college/school exam the night before.

2. Parkinson's Law

Work expands to fill available time. If you give yourself more time, you’ll take your time.

Deadlines give you a reason to maximise your learning time. This is why setting a deadline, even if it isn’t tight, is a no-brainer.

A compressed schedule forces efficiency.

3. It’s Fun

Fun is big one. You get to turn certification into a challenge rather than a chore.

The rapid knowledge acquisition and clear finish line make learning more engaging and rewarding, and the satisfaction after finishing is fantastic.

----

Hope that helps in your decision-making! I personally enjoy the speedruns enough that I always choose them over dragging it out.

P.S. - If you have your eyes on AWS Associate-level Exams, you can grab the flashcards I used to pass 3 exams in 3 weeks, along with 6 bonus decks, an AWS Associate Exam Prep Checklist, and a free Anki settings calculator—all for a price that you think it’s worth—here: https://store.cloudlaneprep.com/ 🌩️

Just passed the CCP exam, and now I'm hesitating between SAA and DVA

My interests/background (6 month work experience so far has been mostly frontend software development.
I've also been thinking about using AWS for some side projects of mine (which involve coding of course).
However since recently I have become open and interested in other IT-domains (Cloud, DevOps, Big Data, Machine Learning, IT-Sec), so I'm really open for anything.

I've seen someone suggest somewhere to take SAA first, because it's broader and covers all the services. So just like the CCP but a bit more in depth?

I've also seen a video where someone says that SAA & DVA overlap each other 80%, so if I do one, I can easily do the other one as well.

Which one do you think I should take next?

I just signed up for my exam, and I am nervous. I have been using TD practice to study, and I am in the middle of taking all of the practice tests. I will update you guys once I have completed all of them. So far, I have completed the first three tests, and after three attempts, I have an average of 90% for each test. Is there anything I should learn or make sure I know before going into the test?

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share a resource I created for anyone preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam. This course is based on my own experience preparing for certifications and my work in cloud engineering and cybersecurity, and it’s designed to make learning AWS concepts more approachable.

What’s Included: • 3 full-length practice exams (65 questions each) covering all key domains: Cloud Concepts, Security, Technology, and Billing & Pricing. • 2 fill-in-the-blank exams (20 questions each) to test your knowledge of AWS terminology. • Detailed explanations for correct and incorrect answers, helping you learn from every question. • Key term highlights to boost your understanding and confidence.

I’m running a $9.99 promotion with this coupon:

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After the promotion, the course will be available for $12.99, making it an affordable and comprehensive tool for exam preparation.

Why I Made This: With a background in cloud engineering and cybersecurity, I’ve worked extensively with AWS services and understand how overwhelming certification prep can be. When I was preparing for my AWS certifications, I noticed a lack of resources that combined affordability with realistic exam simulations. This inspired me to create a course that bridges that gap, offering a well-rounded preparation experience for students.

So far, the course has received 4.6 stars from over 200 students, and I’ve been continuously refining it based on their feedback.

If you’re studying for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam, feel free to check it out! If you decide to enroll, I’d love to hear your thoughts—feedback helps me improve and keep this resource as valuable as possible.

Thanks for reading, and best of luck on your AWS journey!

Background, IT support/sys admin for about 5 years and took AWS basic level classes in my last couple semesters. Went through EC2 and IAM on console and also played with S3 buckets.

I had been casually going through Stephane’s course on Udemy for about a year but barely made a dent and I just finally decided to just schedule it last month to take in Feb so I stop BS’ing

I rarely studied due to also studying for Sec+ so here I am BS’ing again, and wondering if I should reschedule (or even can reschedule) the exam? Or just put my head down next 3 weeks and just take it.

Any suggestions on to approach?

One area I'm struggling with on the Tutorial Dojo practice tests is the large amount of different ML services/Applications like Comprehend, Polly, SageMaker, Textract, etc. and their overlap

How prominent have these been in the exams? Did you go into the exams knowing details on most of them? So many different ones....

Hey guys, I'm an Ml engineer by profesion and j have hands on experience with ML, DL, GenAi, and I've also worked with AWS services for deployments on one time projects like s3, ec2, elastic beanstalk, light sail.

I've done deployments but I'm not aware of I Am roles, services, security policies etc.

I understand to excel in my field and to have a greater market value i need professional certifications.

I want to ask similar devs/engineers here, with the above context. Which certificate should i go for? I want to avoid Foundational certifications. I will learn them but i want a single certificate which showcases knowledge in my domain and more.

I'm familiar with MLOps and devops to an extent and i have 2 questions: 1- With my background is it better to go for AWS ml specialisation certification or something broader like AWS architect? 2- If i go with any, are there free resouces or courses on coursera or udemy that i can complete and be confident that i am prepared after it + plus some handson practice aswell.

Other than these if you have any certification in mind or if you think Azure or GCP may help me more, please do mention. And if you think there's a certification that i can work for that would help me more in AWS itself for my background then don't hesitate to recommend!

Hey everyone, I just passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam several days ago. Just like what the title says, I am still completing my college degree (on my 3rd year now) but I took the initiative and took the exam.

Cloud and AI are the future but sadly, these 2 core technologies are not extensively being taught in most schools. That’s why I am studying in advance and getting certified. It’s just like any other exam if you ask me, but it has more impact on my upcoming career than any other school exams I am consistently taking.

The CLF-C02 exam. has various questions that revolves in billing, cost management, various AWS support plans, cloud concepts, basic AWS services, AWS CAF and AWS ML services. I also saw lots of. Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, RI Utilization tracking, Standard vs. Reserved Instance, Upfront, Partial & No Upfront payment types and many more.

I’m pretty much taken aback when I saw lots of questions on AWS CAF and its pespectives plus a whole lot of costing question like RI Coverage and RI Types. Also know the different AWS Support Plans.

As a student, I didn’t have lots of budget to work on so I mostly used free exam prep materials. I recommend using the free ones on AWS SkillBuilder and checked the official exam guide. I took the official Cloud Practitioner standard course and Cloud Practitioner Essential course. The latter has a 30-min test assessment that’s really helpful.

I also used the video course and practice exams from Tutorials Dojo (TD). The course has an included AWS hands-on lab that I used for extra practice. Managed to passed all of the TD practice exams too.

Overall, the exam is quite maneagable. Don’t skip the AWS CAF, AWS Support and AWS Shared Responsibiliy topics. Lots of questions in the exam are from these topics.

Lastly, use the official CLF-C02 exam guide to get all the relevant topics for the test. It’s somewhat easy yet still, you need lots of practice to fully understand and sink it in.

I was constantly solving questions from examtopics but when I switched to TD tests my scores fell and found it very difficult.

I cleared associate (except data engineer and machine learning) and professional certs, and the security specialist. What should I go for next? I am thinking Advanced Networking Speciality, what do you guys think?

I am a frontend developer with 2 years of experience but recently I got some advice to learn AWS since it can give much better opportunity in my career in future. I found AWS Cloud Practitioner is good for a newbie in cloud but I also found some posts that say Practitioner is just useless and Developer Associate is much better. So what should I take as a frontend developer who knows almost nothing about cloud?

i want to write aws practitioner exam as a part of it I completed my preparation but now I realized that aws practitioner exam costs a lot for me so i request someone to help me with a coupon please!!!!!

Wish me luck, boys. Please feel free to drop in your tips and tricks.

Hi all! A brief about me I'm a non tech person, I am an international student pursuing his post grad and I have my concentration towards Cloud Computing. Few days back I was acquainted with the job role of a Solution architect and it quite pleased me! correct me if I'm wrong but yah have heard there is not of coding involved in this job role and thus I was preparing now for the AWS cloud practitioner certification and planning for further certifications along with hands on project to get into this job role.

Please lend me your advice if the route that I am visioning is it totally right or need to make some changes. I don't think I can directly get into a job role of Solution Architect as a beginner,so in that way what all job roles should I target for entry level.

Thanks y'all

I feel like I am stuck. I passed the CLF-C02 in April 2023 using Stephane Maarek's course on Udemy. I took all of the key points and put them into an Anki deck and took practice exams along the way and revised my deck with the blind spots from the wrong answers. I passed and then decided to move on to SAA-C03 with the same strategy.

I started SAA-C03 in May 2023. Took the course and created an Anki deck that has over 600-700 cards in it. I run it everyday and then I do a practice exam. I try not to do them too often because I tend to remember the answer easily and there are only 5-6 exams in total. I consistently get 50-60 percent on the practice exams and I am not sure exactly what I am doing wrong. I found out that the way I write the cards has been wrong so I have been reworking them as well.

One thing to note is that I did most of the practical sections of the course but I don't really do any hands-on now for two reasons. One is really expensive if you screw up and Two I don't really know what benefits I would get from it since I would just be fiddling around. Also I have lost a lot of interest in working in an AWS environment but I also told myself that I would see it through to the end. I think I have lost interest mostly out of defeat from studying.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated, even if that means doing hands-on work? Thanks.

I already have the Solutions Associate certification. I think I could get the Professional certification within a month or two, but I'm probably overestimating myself. I understand what the question is trying to ask, but my god the amount of obscure services that pop up randomly is throwing me off. I want to become a solutions/data architect, so it’s understandable I should know a lot. I’m thinking about either grinding for the Professional certification for my resume or pursuing the Data/SysOps certifications to gain more backend knowledge. Although that option would take more time and I’m already starting my junior semester. So time management issues would definitely arise. Any suggestions?

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➡️Azure:

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✅ServiceNow Certified System Administrator

So apparently, after three years and one day your aws cert is worthless. So you have a pretty short window of time. There’s no point in getting a certificate and then walking around saying “hey guys I’m AWS certified look at me”, or just making a post on LinkedIn that gets 1 like and doesn’t really help you with your job or even get you a pay bump.

So how do you maximize value of a certification once you get it? By asking your manager for AWS work or applying for cloud related roles? Because the cert alone isn’t really that useful if it expires after three years I imagine, and work experience is more valuable than just being aws certified but it can open the door to AWS work.

Like, what type of benefits do you get? I hear you get access to AWS related networking events? Like, ok? I can check those out without a certification.

This post is not for people who just learn for the sake of learning. This is for people looking for like, job benefits and opportunities.

You have your cert you spent hours out of work on. Ok, cool. What now?

Hello!, I recently obtained my SAA certificate and I am interested in starting laboratories to improve my level. I have been looking at the different AWS offerings including workshops and skillbuilders. The one I have is, is it worth paying the monthly skillbuilders subscription for the labs or is it better to continue working with the free workshop labs?

This is more a scream into the void than anything else but advice welcome.

I’ve been studying for a few months for DVA-C02. I’ve done TD exams multiple times and made sure I passed them all multiple times before taking the final exam. Out of the 6 practice exams the lowest I scored was 58/60. I’ve been putting off doing the final practice exam (TDs gauge your exam readiness exam) due to fear and pressure I’m putting on myself. I finally took it today and got 62/65 - great.

Yesterday I took the mock 20 question AWS official exam. I got 12/20 (60%). I made a few stupid errors and selected the right answer only to change my mind at the last minute. This has thrown me a bit.

I said if I passed the final TD exam I would book the exam and that I tried to do. The website is down until tomorrow for maintenance. That’s after putting even more doubt in my head as I’ve been putting this off for so long.

How can I convince myself I actually am ready? For some reason, even with the evidence I am, I can’t faithfully convince myself.

TIA

Hi everyone,

after many years as Reddit passive user this is my very first post.

I feel in debt to this community as I searched this Reddit sub for comfort/ inspiration many times while studying for this exam, so I wanted to contribute.

This is a particularly useful post for people like me who have 0 knowledge about cloud/ coding/ computer science and still want/ need to take this exam.

Background before starting:

35years old. I have never worked in tech, I have never developed anything, I have never hosted a website, I have never had a computer science exam done in my life. I have a master in finance. I have a very basic understanding of what cloud computing is.

How much time I had:

- 35 days of which a handful were scheduled with family stuff so make it 30 days net. I was in between jobs so I had a lot of free time.

How I studied:

- I studied pretty much every day for ~6 hours

- For the first 20 days I binged all content (I used Whizlabs I think it´s OK for sure not great). For the most important topics I did the hands-on tutorials (15% of them)

- Printed out the Whizlab PDF "cheatsheet" (it´s 150 pages...) and used it as my main learning source after I watched the video. I took notes there as well.

- For the last 10 days I did one full test a day always timed with 130 minutes. I would then review the questions I failed and wrote on a piece of paper all my weak points/ concepts I missed and reviewed them daily.

Mock test considerations: I found that the best source to be Tutorials Dojo. The questions were fairly similar to the real one and the explanation were mostly (not all them) clear and useful. Whizlab tests are not good at all I did a couple as I ran through all the available ones on Tutorials Dojo.

How did I score: I scored in order (from the oldest test to the one closed to the exam date): 53%, 60%, 63%, 66%, 69%, 58%, 72%, 62%, 78%.

I downloaded a mobile app to have something for some quick questions while travelling, going to the toilet, lying in bed waiting for my daughter to fall asleep. I used an app call SAA-C03 on iPhone. I purchased the premium version.

How I leveraged ChatGTP:

- ChatGTP as been an integral part of my study plan. I think it´s crucial to learn how to leverage it as it can be an incredible booster

- Analogy finder: I would always ask ChatGTP to explain me concepts with analogies. For example I noticed that I made a few mistakes on AWS SQS, how I turned it around was by imaging this service like the counter in a restaurant where waiters would put the customer`sorders so that the chefs would not miss any of them.

- Difference highlighter: some concepts are better understood by comparing them. For example NACLs and security groups. ChatGTP would always create a table with the difference explained clearly. It helped me a lot.

- Exam review: it is crucial to understand why you answer a question incorrectly but sometimes the explanations are just not good (Whizlab terrible, Tutorial Dojo good but not always great). Just copy paste everything in chatgtp and it will explain you better than any of the services out there.

Exam tactics:

- Answering by exclusion: the exam is with multiple choice answers and most of the times incorrect questions propose steps that are per se wrong. Something the likes of ".......and then deploy a NAT instance in a private subnet....." this sentence would be for example incorporate in a much larger answer but by just spotting something wrong you can invalidate the whole answer and cross it out.

- Read the question carefully: every word matter.

- Not all topics are equal: I quickly divided topic into Class A, B, C topic.

Class A: EC2, S3, DBs, Networking. Expect many questions going deep. Own these topics, understand them intimately, know all the details, go crazy.

Class B: SNS, SQS, ECS, EKS, IAM, KMS, Cloudformation. Expect a couple of questions each. Know the most important features.

Class C: Athena, Macie, WAF, Sagemaker, X-ray. Just know one line about that they do. But be sure to know all them! I have listed 60-70 of them. These could be you best friends in the exam, for example everytime I saw this sentence "....and you need to automatically identify all personal private data in an S3 bucket" I would immediately know Macie was involved.

- Apply for the 30 minutes extension: if English is not your mothertoung apply for extra 30 mins. Everyone gets it. It makes a big difference.

- Mock test serious: when you take a mock text, recreate the true exam condition, no break, no notes. Simulate the pressure on yourself. Train your brain to read and think quickly. It makes a difference.

- On test day: emply your bladder just before, don´t trick too much water while taking the exam, have a few sugar snaks with you. Remind yourself of your preparation. If you find questions you don´t know how to answer just skipt them, remember you can miss 15-20 questions and still pass so it´s totally OK to miss/ skip several.

That´s all I hope this helps. This exam is tough but it can be done, remember that I did with 0 technical knowledge so you can do it as well, trust me.

I did the online proctored exam and I got an email with Cradly badge (meaning I passed) about 10 hours after finishing the exam. about 18 hours after completion I was sent details about my score.

I prepared for 3 weeks and mostly followed the materials below:

Stephane Maarek's video course Tutorial Dojo practice tests

Tips:

• Don't assume the answer by reading the question halfway. Read it carefully.
• The answer often lies in keywords in the question, such as "highly scalable" or "ultra-low latency."
• First, try to eliminate options that are clearly inappropriate, so you'll be left with one or two options.

Finally, I would like to thank this community for helping me by sharing their experiences, materials to focus on and tips.

GUYS!!!!!!!!!!!

I JUST CLEARED MY AWS SAP!!!! Toughest exam of my life. I had no hope that I will pass! but yet I did!!!!

Experience: 18 years in software engineering, some professional aws experience (contract work)

Study Material: Cantrill + performing the hands-on

Practise test: TD practise exams

I specifically targeted this exam and prepared for an ENTIRE YEAR (also picked up aws trifecta along the way). Cleared with a 900 score too.

Topics covered: vpc peering, transit gateway, Endpoint Services, private link, direct connect, vpns, global accelerators, cloud front, api gateway and caching, elastic cache, dynamo db, rds, migration, dr, fault tolerance, route 53, cost saving, high availability, organizations, RAM, cloud formation, policies, scps, lambda, S3 and its classes

https://preview.redd.it/g0e2x1h67fge1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=c64a1591b3af4c9159ec18b63946750c09d712fb

Hi Everyone! I am planning on getting AWS associate data engineer certification done. Any of you have idea on what materials to use? Wanted to know if skillcertpro is a good option for mock test sets? Any tips or recommendations are much appreciated!

Has anyone had any experience with this company? https://www.cloudberry.services/

Got an email from them with the subject "Last Chance! Free Python & AWS Training + Job Placement". They thanked me for making my profile on Dice.com, described their 5-week course, and attached an overview of the curriculum. Seems like pretty basic stuff, but if it's free and includes job placement support I'm interested.
I just don't get why a company would offer a course like this for free and makes me think there's an angle to it. What does Reddit think?

Thanks in advance.

Finally did it! Can't overstate the amount of stress that left me when I saw "PASS" on the final exam screen lol.

For background, I'm a CS senior in college with a software engineering background, but no prior experience in cloud. Worked with AWS a tiny bit in an internship but there wasn't any overlap between that and what I learned while studying for this certification.

I studied for 1-2 hours per day for about 3 weeks, and the week of my exam I invested more time to take a ton of practice exams, which helped a lot. In more detail, here's what I did, and some stuff you can expect to see on the exam:

• I used Andrew Brown's free CCP video to start, it was great for explaining the main stuff you need to know, like the basic functionality of services (EC2 is a virtual compute service, AWS Shield protects against DDoS attacks, etc.) and other core stuff like the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. I didn't really go through the walkthrough portions and still did fine. He recites the slides word for word, so you can put it on 1.5-2x speed and copy the slides down - they're of great quality.
• After taking notes on the video, I went to Amazon's official exam guide and made sure I had a notes sheet covering all the main points and in-scope services/terms that were included. I used TutorialsDojo's AWS CLF-02 cheat sheet to fill in gaps the video missed (there weren't very many, honestly a bunch of the services are unlikely to appear on the exam but its good to at least know them at a surface level).
• I made my own flash cards to memorize key services/terms listed on the exam guide, plus some additional details I saw on practice exams. Not much to say here other than that they make studying so much easier, and were a huge contributor to me passing the exam.
• The TutorialsDojo practice exams helped a LOT. The questions were pretty tricky, and I was consistently passing each with around a 75-80%. As you've probably seen elsewhere This is the best test preparation resource you can get for this cert, I highly recommend it.

And for the real thing: I didn't find it to be a cake walk but it was also not incredibly hard (I had ~10 questions flagged at the end). Just make sure you run a ton of practice exams to get a feel for it.

• Make sure you UNDERSTAND cloud, not necessarily how to DO cloud. A bunch of questions brought up scenarios, i.e. "A company wants to do XYZ, what service is best?" Eliminate the obvious choices first then either select the one answer left, or carefully reason between possible ones.
• READ THE EXAM QUESTIONS VERY CAREFULLY. With just a keyword or two in the question you can easily eliminate two or even three answers on the spot. As an example, if a question asks about the best EC2 instance to use for a certain case. If it says the workload is spiky and inconsistent, that eliminates any answers that involve a reserved instance, since those are best for consistent, long-term workloads.
• A good portion of my questions asked about the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, and AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Make sure you know these by heart.

Good luck!