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AWS Certification – Lessons and tipsAWS Meetup Lehi - April 2016 Erik Swanson & Dan Neff | Digital Marketing
Operations
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Who are these guys?
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Dan
Digital Marketing Operations ArchitectureService/Vendor Liaison, Design Review, M&A
AWS SysOps Administrator – AssociateAWS Architect – AssociateAWS Architect – ProfessionalOctober 2015
Erik
Digital Marketing SREHybrid cloud services
AWS Architect – AssociateMarch 2014
AWS Architect – ProfessionalMarch 2016
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Where do we work?
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© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
How many of these can you explain to a co-worker?
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EC2S3Route53VPCIAMBeanstalkSQSSNSELB
LambdaStorage GatewayDatabase MigrationCloud TrailData PipelineAPI Gateway
CloudFrontRDSElasticCacheCloudFormationDirectory ServiceEMRKinesis
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
How many of these have you deployed and maintained?
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EC2S3Route53VPCIAMBeanstalkSQSSNSELB
LambdaStorage GatewayDatabase MigrationCloud TrailData PipelineAPI Gateway
CloudFrontRDSElasticCacheCloudFormationDirectory ServiceEMRKinesis
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Why get certified?
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People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains.
Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
Justin Kruger and David DunningImage from: http://www.zmescience.com/science/cognitive-biases-list/
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Why get certified?
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The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski, c.1981, photo by Mark Hanauer
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
AWS Certification
Sysops Administrat
or• Associate
• App Migration• Policy-driven
design• Best Practices• Cost control
Developer• Associate
• SDK use• Performant
coding• Application
security
DevOps• Professional
• CI/CD• Monitoring• Logging• Ops tooling
Solutions Architect
• Associate• Professional
• App Migration• Cost efficiency• Hybrid support
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© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
AWS CertificationAssociate $150 – 80 minutesProfessional $300 – 170 minutesRecertification $75 – 80 minutes
Computer-based, instant results, all tests use the same framework/app
Lasts for two years
Upgrade from Associate to Professional in same track
No continuing education units9
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Taking the Test - WhereAt a Testing Center
Not offered in Utah ( nor ID,CO,WY,NM) Closest Testing Center is in Ely, Nevada (Road Trip!) Available in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Bay Area and other major cities
At Re:Invent Get swag! At AWS Summit events
Chicago, Santa Clara, NYC, Washington DC, Dallas, Atlanta, Boston, Toronto
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© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
AWS Certification
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Associate
• Functional competency• “…is designed for…”• “…what could be used…”• “…which will occur…”
Professional
• Application/Optimization• “…which gives best…”• “…which will achieve…”• “…which provides the most…”
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Study Sources
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Exam Guides
• Skills
• Domains
• Test content
• Training material
AWS Docs
• Whitepapers
• Best Practices
• Reference Arch
• FAQs
• SDKs
Re:Invent Talks
• YouTube
• Slideshare
• Podcasts
Qwiklabs
• Intro labs (free)
• Advanced ($15)
• Certification tracks
Practice Tests
• Sample Questions
• $20-$40 for formal practice test
• One version
• Be careful of third-party material
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Study SourcesWhitepapers
AWS Well-Architected Framework (All material supports this foundation. Know it by heart.)AWS Storage Options Security Best PracticesAmazon Virtual Private Cloud Connectivity Options… and the rest of those called out on the exam guides ...
Level 300+ presentations from ye olde reinvents (beware irrelevancy)(ARC403) From One to Many: Evolving VPC Design (Robert Alexander – SA) (BDT310) Big Data Architectural Patterns and Best Practices on AWS (Siva Raghupathy – SA) Hybrid Infrastructure Integration (Paul Nau – Sr Consultant) Encryption and Key Management in AWS (Bill Shinn – SA)
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© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Fuzzy topics of interest (on the test but not on our CV)Network ACLsSecurity Token ServiceOpsworksVPC Gateways (Customer, Hardware, Virtual)Simple Workflow ServiceActive DirectoryRedshift vs DynamoDB
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X.509 Certs (Cloud HSM)CognitoSAML & IDPObject store options (S3 vs RRS vs Glacier) S3 policy types (access, bucket, trust) Kinesis types (firehose vs steams)
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Study insights (jordan@1strategy) Look for AZ names (us-east-1a) instead of regions (us-east-1). Pay attention to Multi-AZ
vs RDS read-replicas. Pay close attention to what a question is asking: cost vs performance vs security Favor decoupling components. Services like DynamoDB, Kinesis and SQS are ways
to decouple and scale. Rarely should EC2 instances take traffic directly. Consider an ASG with an ELB,
and possibly CloudFront. Know the difference between RTO and RPO Understand which services support cross-region replication natively, and which
ones only support cross-AZ replication. To ease read-heavy load on the DB, caching and read-replicas are almost always
the correct answer. EBS IOPS != throughput, also consider I/O size. Prefer IAM roles over just users.
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Taking the Test – Time Management
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Associate Level
80 minutes55 questions
~1.5 min/question
Passing 65%
Professional Level
170 minutes80 questions
2+ min/question
Passing 65%
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Taking the Test – Time Management
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Associate Question – 1.5 minutes average
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Taking the Test – Time Management
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Professional Question – 2.1 minutes average
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Taking the Test – Time Management
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2 minutes does not spend the same
© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Taking the Test – Time Management
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Finish the Test!
Decoding questions quickly is the key.
You can flag questions for review, but don't count on having time to go back.
Grab paper and pencil when offered—save yourself from fetching during the test.
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Post Test insights
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Graduated from answering implementation questions to optimization questions, but now much easier to bring data.
Most conversations are about tradeoffs with occasional quick wins around features.
Always dealing with the same three needs:How do I increase performance?How do I increase reliability?How do I increase security?How do I reduce cost?
These map DIRECTLY to the well-architected whitepaper.
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Post Test insights
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© 2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Post Test insights
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