Passed AWS Certified Developer - Associate

I quit my job before Chinese New Year. Days after that are just plain boring and anxious. It’s basically endless interviews and waiting for the results. I gotta say life like that is not really productive.

It became even more boring when the Chinese New Year vacation started. Almost entire country is not working, let alone interviewing. In order to kill some time, I decided to prepare for AWS certifications. It’s funny becuase the last time I saw someone having AWS certifications is on one of the interviewers’ blog. I wasn’t sure whether it’s useful or not. But it wouldn’t hurt to get one.

Most of AWS services I know today are learned after I joined the previous company, which I worked for ~1.5 year. It will be very helpful to be able to practice on day to day job (and fail on some weird cases). Although I didn’t have chances to try some container-related services like ECS/Fargate or EKS, I am quite familiar with others like EC2/ELB/VPC/SQS/SES/SNS/DynamoDB/Serverless things/etc.

Since I am a backend developer, the first certification I want to get is the deverloper one. The exam preparation lists a lot of whitepapers that seems scary, but in my experience it’s not necessary for this test.

Actually, all the resources I’ve used for this exam are just A Cloud Guru’s courses and a few simulation tests. So I am sorry if someone here is looking for any useful tips or resources. There are not. This is the easy one if you are a developer.

One thing I noticed in real exam is that questions are a little bit more difficult than the ones I did on Udemy, A Cloud Guru’s or other simulation tests. Some questions’ grammar are kind of weird if I recall correctly, and there are a lot of scenario questions. I participated June 2018 version of test (at least that’s what she Examination Guide PDF file name said), and the proportion of Elastic Beanstalk is still very high. Another thing to notice is how to leverage AWS X-Ray.

Again, this is not a difficult one if you are a developer or has experiences on important services. As for other certifications, although I haven’t get others, it seems a lot of parts are overlapped from what I’ve heard.

BTW, if you want to try professional tests now, you don’t have to own an associate level certification first. See: Announcing Updated Professional-Level AWS Certification Exams.