aws certification lessons and tips, aws meetup lehi - april 2016

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AWS Certification – Lessons and tipsAWS Meetup Lehi - April 2016 Erik Swanson & Dan Neff | Digital Marketing

Operations


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


Where do we work?

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How many of these can you explain to a co-worker?

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EC2S3Route53VPCIAMBeanstalkSQSSNSELB

LambdaStorage GatewayDatabase MigrationCloud TrailData PipelineAPI Gateway

CloudFrontRDSElasticCacheCloudFormationDirectory ServiceEMRKinesis


How many of these have you deployed and maintained?

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EC2S3Route53VPCIAMBeanstalkSQSSNSELB

LambdaStorage GatewayDatabase MigrationCloud TrailData PipelineAPI Gateway

CloudFrontRDSElasticCacheCloudFormationDirectory ServiceEMRKinesis


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/


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


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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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


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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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…”


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


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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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)


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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Associate Question – 1.5 minutes average



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Professional Question – 2.1 minutes average



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2 minutes does not spend the same



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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.


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.

Erik Swanson

Great start. I found a few memes to add if you are into that kind of thing. and I'll make a few edits as well.


Post Test insights

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Erik Swanson



Post Test insights

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Erik Swanson


aws certification lessons and tips, aws meetup lehi - april 2016

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