TL;DR Link to heading

YEP! Today is the day after 2 months of grinding on SkillBuilder solving N number of Builder Labs / Digital Courses / Learning Plans I have enrolled and completed just to over-prepare for the Associate exam (more on this later) coz I was nervous 😅… I finally cleared AWS Certified Developer Associate examination today with a whopping score of 839.

Exam went really smooth, I encountered some tricky questions in the examination but most were just a read-through. Some questions were a bummer with very long context, then asked, “How would you debug microservices performance in production?”

Even though, exam was easy it took me 90 (something) minutes to get done with all the questions and had 30 some minutes on the clock to review the flagged questions. Make sure you also manage your time well 😉

BeforeInstall (What happened before the exam day?) Link to heading

So my employer sponsored my certification by providing me a voucher back in Jan something. Initially, I had scheduled my exam for 28th February, but due to some family emergency (also work) I couldn’t get enough time to prepare properly and I chickened out the last minute and re-scheduled it to a month later.

Why I chickened out? Link to heading

Well, I gave this mock test on Udemy (Udemy Pro was also sponsored by my employer) which was very hard (filled with numericals / limits / quotas and SAM-heavy deep questions on writing toml templates). I HATED THAT COURSE… THE ACTUAL EXAM WAS NOTHING LIKE IT… THERE WAS ONLY 1 NUMBERICAL (calculating RCUs for an eventually consistent read on a DDB table) WHICH WAS ALSO VERY STRAIGHT FORWARD.

I wouldn’t talk shit about the tutor of the “Best Seller” course for “Developer Associate” exam (who also released “6 practice exams” in a separate course), coz the actual course is filled with good information (some still felt outdated).

I started prepping hard on the serverless since March, did a lot of hands-on with SAM CLI and DDB GSIs and global tables.

However, my exam only had 1 question related to SAM. THAT TOO, had a straight forward option “Use AWS Serverless Application Model to automate provisioning” (or something like this, can’t remember the actual option). Even though, exam was filled with questions related to Lambda / API Gateway questions, SAM was mentioned only once.

THIS FELT LIKE SUCH A WASTE OF MY TIME 😭 😭

Skillbuilder helped a lot in my prep totally worth the 29$… I just LOVE the way AWS provides their learning experience with SkillBuilder cloud quests and AWS CardClash (available for web, mobile and iOS; MP just doesn’t work). In AWS Card clash, I completed Cloud Practitioner and Serverless Developer islands. I mean at one point I was just playing with it (instead of actually learning, lol) while traveling between home and the office on the metro. Tho, I definitely learned a lot about the services and how architectures scale through some real-world examples.

Back in February, I wasn’t able to complete the entire of Serverless Cloud Quest modules but atleast came half-way through it. You see, lectures can become boring, but Simulearn and all the interactive ways there are, it just makes learning and getting hands-on VERRYYY EASSYYY. Checkout more about Immersive Learning Experiences by AWS here.

I’ve been working as a DevOps Engineer in my day job and have gotten real hands-on experience with EKS, S3, and CloudWatch. Still, I wanted to play it safe since it was sponsored, and I didn’t want to give my colleagues any excuse to call it a “skill issue” 😅 (which became another reason for re-schedule).

…and if you’re wondering why I rescheduled it for, “Like a month later” - honestly, I got scared and decided to replan my entire preparation to cover the gaps I had left earlier (FROM SCRATCH). A month felt like enough time to make sure I wouldn’t have to reschedule it again.

The March Prep Link to heading

Week 1: I started off getting in-depth hands on with configuring VPCs and EC2 configurations which included playing manually with the Instance Roles and EC2 IMDS endpoints just to get a feel of how things work.

Week 2: Then I shifted onto CloudFormation and later SAM Apps configurations to get in-depth working with serverless and provisioning stacks. Built a short project in Go, a typical TODO API using lambda, API gateway and DynamoDB built with SAM CLI. Checkout the project here. If you’re looking more into CFN… There is this amazing HANDS-ON workshop on AWS Workshop Catalog.

Week 3: I started tweaking with Cloudwatch Log Insights. Tried writing queries manually with PPL and OpenSearch SQL. Defined custom log groups for iRedMail logs, set custom cloudwatch alarms by subscribing +admin / +developer email aliases to the SNS topics and tested metrics with stress command.

YEAA! I clearly over-prepped for an Associate level exam, but it gave me a good boost to my confidence while giving the exam!!

Week 4: I WFH the entire week so I could save myself from the travelling time and fatigue to easily resume prepping after office-hours with a Monster next to me. I re-watched the Domain lectures in the Exam Prep Learning Plan on SkillBuilder, and was confident with a lot of topics. I gave the Official Practice Exam again after nearly a month and got a score of 856 this time 👍

Install (The Exam Day) Link to heading

Luckily, the test center I booked was near my home, so I didn’t had any issues while travelling via the metro—hardly 30 minutes away from my doorstep. I reached the center a bit early to complete the pre-exam formalities. The center was neat and tidy, and the invigilator was helpful and clear with the instructions.

The EXAM and The Strategy Link to heading

The starting was… not very nice, got some tricky questions in the start which got me worried if the rest of the exam is gonna go like that. SPOILER ALERT Most were easy ones only. At one point during the exam (i guess), from questions 30-40 became so easy, I skipped reading the questions and scanned through the keywords and selecting answers by first glimpse of text only. I realized this was where I f*cked-up in my mock tests and I shouldn’t do this 😅 and then I continued cruising…

I also had a strategy in place, which was to give atleast 30 minutes for reviewing the flagged questions in the end, and rest of the time I had distributed equally among all of the available 65 questions.

Total time available for 65 questions: 130 - 30 = 100 minutes

Time available for each question: 100 / 65 >= 1.5 minutes ~= 90 seconds.

To track my progress, I decided to go in the groups of 10 questions each. So say if I was on question 27 and to see whether I am on time, I had to just do the following math:

27 (((Round off to upper 10s place))) ~= 30 x 1.5 = 45 minutes.

So to be on target, I must be having about 130 - 45 = 85 minutes of time remaining, by the time I should mark my option for the 30th question.

Why the groups of 10? Link to heading

Coz to be honest, based on the question description it could be lengthy or straight forward… You might need to brainstorm on some numericals. In actual, some questions I attempted took less than 20 seconds to mark and some due to the elimination tactic in multi-choice took longer than 3-4 minutes (even then I had to flag for review lol).

About the questions Link to heading

The questions were mostly from a serverless point of view and like 90% of them were scenario based. I will be honest, a lot of questions were testing whether I know a particular feature / application of a given AWS service. So questions included, everything from Elasticache clusters / replicas to RDS Proxy and Parameter Groups were there.

Again, if you know what these concepts are, you are good for the exam. I didn’t have any hands-on experience with elasticache (for RDS I had done a few SkillBuilder labs), but knew the difference between cluster vs replicas.

A good number of questions came for securing credentials with Secrets manager / KMS / Parameter store, so it’s good to have their applications and use-cases (especially DIFFERENCES in their use-cases) with you.

There were also questions on Cognito which I found a little extra tricky. I mean I personally got issues with Cognito’s working coz I couldn’t get proper hands-on with it, so a lot of the concepts in Cognito are still hazy to me. Due to which, the questions became tricky for me. My personal recommendation to you is, if you got time to prioritize on Cognito… it’s a service you must get proper hands-on to truly understand. I guess there were some 6-7 questions referencing Cognito’s functionality.

From Domain 3, there were questions based on deployment strategies, Blue-green / scenarios for rolling-with-additional-batches etc. Overall they were very easy for me nothing too deep from AppSpec and BuildSpec template formats.

In Domain 4, I had questions regarding tracing with XRAY, RUM, CloudWatch metrics. They weren’t standalone, but rather mixed with options like “Why Lambda is not able to write to the log group in Cloudwatch…” etc. I didn’t personally find anything difficult and this was overall easy as well.

Likewise, I was able to finish all 65 questions near the 30 minute mark during the exam (STRATEGY WORKED!), and flagged about 17 questions for review. I went over the questions again one by one… I was able to solve some with correct reasoning this time and was left with only 12 questions as flagged… For which I made best possible guess and submitted the exam for good. There is no negative marking, so I wasn’t afraid ✌️

AfterInstall (PESD - Post Exam Stress Disorder) Link to heading

I was satisfied with my performance but I really wanted to know my score just so I could be sure. I also didn’t get any communication on the screen or by the mail after I walked out of the center. On screen it only mentioned that the scores will take maximum 5 days to be available in the portal. I couldn’t help but feel a little restless at this point.

On my way home, I checked some reddit posts mentioning this is the new system, the score is communicated about 4 hours later in most cases rather than 5 days. As soon as I reached home, I went straight to sleep around 1:30ish PM because DAMN IT.. I slept like 6 hours in the past 48 hours due to a critical issue requiring submission on the Friday morning at in my office and had to travel. I also couldn’t sleep on the Friday night due to racing thoughts (I get anxious as I prepped a lot, had more than usual coffee during the day to stay up).

I would like to thank Monster Energy for the late night hustles in these past few days. As a matter of fact I had 350ml just before giving the exam (On an empty stomach 🤣) so I could stay alert throughout the exam (it worked). This is how I felt walking into the exam center.

Thanks for reading along Link to heading

If you’ve read till here, either you are a stalker or a person prepping for their Developer Associate exam. Well, if you are the later, I wish you all the best, and hope you pass the certification yourself with flying colors 🎉. If you have any questions, or wanna congratulate me further… I am available on X✌️

Until you read again 😉 👋