I'm like this guy right now. Except I have more hair on my head.
Today I finally achieved a goal which I've been setting out to do for a year, and that is to claim this. And I did it on my first attempt!
Woohoo!
Me as of 8th Nov 2018
I've been studying like mad the last couple of weeks. For 3 weeks straight (8th Oct to 26th Oct) I've been having lessons right after work for 2 hours every weekday. And for the past two weeks it's also been a bit of an interview mania for me. Yesterday and today I had four interviews. If you include two days ago, it's five!
Yesterday went like this, interview in the morning, go to work, come home, interview again.
Today was an interview in the morning, go to work, take the AWS exam, come home, interview again. And then pack for Germany. I'm going to Germany tomorrow for the World of Hans Zimmer concert. And I can feel good about going to it!
Did I also mention I'm doing an MBA, well yes I am, so I've also had to study for that and work on a group project. I barely have enough time to breathe.
But anyway my experience on studying for the AWS certification is in one word, you have to do practical work in order to really understand what is going on.
What happens is that you show up at the certification center, lock up all your things in a cabinet and then you go into this relatively small room where you sit and take the electronic exam. I bought the practise exam the night before, it was just 30 questions and you pay $20, but it helped a bit. I realised I wasn't that great in calculating costs, so I studied a bit more on that last night.
The exam was tough, there were some ridiculously easy questions but there were also hard questions, very trickily worded ones. One of the questions even had Athena as an answer in the question which I have never used. And even asked about IPv6 and how you would route traffic out of instances in an IPv6 subnet out to the Internet. You would have to use the Egress only Internet Gateway and not the NAT gateway in this instance. Quite a few questions asked about cost, which was the most cost effective, or which solution will work for most immediate term, or which solution required the least or no code to deploy. I've taken many exams, and I tell you this really was tough. I would respect anyone who actually passed it. The person next to me actually failed the exam! I only know because before you leave it shows whether or not you passed, and you can't escape from that screen. He left before I finished and I saw his screen. Definitely not a good thing because you have to pay 180 US just to sit for the exam. Not sure how long you have to wait to retake it but I can imagine you have to pay again to take it.
Okay I just went to look it up, you have to wait 2 weeks and only then can you take it again, of course you have to pay the full fee again!
Just read that some people failed it twice. That's a lot of dosh spent for an exam. It's funny how everyone is recommending the website "A Cloud Guru" to learn. I didn't use that as a resource and opted for an instructor based in India for pure classroom assisted learning. It was pretty good, and combined with practical sessions everyday. I did learn a lot from it. Of course using it at work also helps!
Alright I am off to sleep for my flight tomorrow! ✈ Lord knows I need one! I'm also going to Vegas for the AWS reInvent conference later this month, super stoked about that!
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