AWS SysOps Associate Exam - Tips

I began studying for Sysops in early March, straight after writing Developer Associate.  Similar to what I did with the Developer Associate exam, I took a practise test first, before doing any course or studying, to see how far off I am, and how much work is required. I got 63% (which was higher than the 53% I got with Developer Associate), which gave me a good feel of what topics I need to focus on - CloudFormation, monitoring, and some networking.

I passed the SysOps exam in mid April, during lockdown. This time the experience writing on-line was very slick, and I did not even have to interact with the proctors.

So that brings a close to the completing the three AWS Associate exams. It took me exactly four months, from mid-December to mid-April, to complete all three. I am going to take a break, and resume with the Professional certs in June.

I put up some blog posts and tips for Solution Architect Associate and  Developer Associate.

The material I used:

• AWS official exam guide - which includes the sample exam, and links to white papers. Specifically mentioning Security Best Practices and Overview of Security Processes whitepapers
• A Cloud Guru course on Udemy
• Official practice exam - which is free if you have passed any previous exam.
• Jon Bonso practice exams on Udemy - includes 5 exams
• Whizlabs practice exams - includes over 12 exams
• A Cloud Guru Exam simulator - it needs an active monthly subscription, but the first 7 days are free, so you can cancel with-in 7 days without getting charged.
• Exam readiness on aws.training learning library

• Tutorial Dojos SysOps Study path
• This forum post regarding unexpected questions was very helpfull
• This review, and this review on passing all 3 associate exams, and A Cloud Guru forum posts like this and this, and this
• Some other usefull links, specific to certain questions, was this one regarding S3 ACL vs bucket policies

There was other usefull material, that I did'nt use, just because I ran out of time, but will hopefully still go through. This includes Qwiklabs, Pluralsight (free during lockdown) and the Linux Academy courses, especially those from Adrian Contrill