Brett McLaughlin
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To Andrew Pawloski, easily the best AWS engineer I know. One of these days he’ll realize how good he is and will stop answering my random AWS questions over text. Until then, I’m immeasurably glad to have him on my side.
Writing books seems to require two things: solitude and a sort of rhythm (at least for me). For both of those, I owe my family a great debt. Many, many times I had to shoo away my daughter, Addie, or put off my wife, Leigh, because I was in that rhythm and needed to see a particular question or tricky answer through to its end. I’ve also yelled upstairs more than once to my sons, Dean and Robbie, because I was on a call discussing some arcane bit of AWS knowledge while they were screaming into their headsets about flanking someone (something?) in Call of Duty or laughing hysterically at subverting an intended mission in Red Dead Redemption 2.
In other words, lots of people had to bend so I could get this book completed. I’m grateful for that, especially since most of their reward is these few sentences in a book they’ll likely never crack open! (Well, Robbie might… he’s the budding engineer in the family.)
Another set of thanks goes to the numerous folks at and associated with Wiley who helped see this through: Ken Brown and Amy Sell, who got things started; David Clark, patient and forgiving; Sara Perrot, who was amazing as a technical editor; and several others on additional projects who waited while I finished this one (James Schultz and Adaobi Tulton come to mind).
My qualifications are informed by a lifetime of teaching, even when I didn’t realize it. I started reading at four, and by the time I was in elementary school, I was “writing” instruction manuals. I still recall the carefully illustrated guide to solving the Rubik’s Magic that I put together in fifth grade.
In high school, I taught myself to program. (Turbo Pascal was the first language beyond Basic I learned; anyone remember the book with the Porsche on the cover?) Shortly after, I began teaching the programming class to my peers. Before I graduated, I was teaching two different periods of computer classes’mostly because the actual teacher liked to drink at lunch and showed up loaded most afternoons!
Once I’d knocked out a bachelor of science degree in computer science, I worked in technology, primarily at telecoms. But I never could let go of what I loved most: I was not just a programmer and system administrator. I was the guy who could translate customer requirements into user stories. I was the guy who could talk... and I talked all the time. I also figured out you could talk through writing. I authored the bestselling technology book Java and XML, followed by a number of other books for O’Reilly Media, and eventually joined that company.
More recently, I returned to my developer roots and spent nearly eight years working with NASA’s Earth Science group. Never have I spent more time teaching, translating, and explaining what one group’s words meant to another, and ultimately telling the story of what NASA is doing through a flagship website and eventually a massive, organization-wide cloud platform. And no matter how much I learned about Amazon Web Services (AWS) or EC2 or Lambda, it was always the storytelling that was most interesting; even better, it was always the storytelling that seemed to interest most clients. I could speak to them, in a way that they understood, and that was a good thing (TM).
Now, I teach and tell stories full-time. I record AWS certification courses on video and write exam prep books in a way that’s actually more helpful for passing exams than rote memorization. I build websites and applications, small and large, most often for clients who have their own story to tell to their users. I write books on what I’ve learned and on how to tell stories the way I do.
Congratulations on your purchase of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Practice Tests. This book will serve as a preparation tool for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect (CSA) – Associate exam as well as help you in the development of your career as an AWS Solutions Architect.
The objective of this book is to prepare you for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam by explaining the terminology and technology that will be tested on the exam. The main focus of this book is to help you pass the exam. Because of this focus, there are times when not every aspect of a piece of AWS technology is covered and other times when particularly unusual edge cases or details are emphasized. These are an effort to prepare you for the exam, which at times is not always perfectly aligned with the practicality of a real-world cloud architect.
That said, learning these odd details and edge cases will still come in handy in your career. The exam is largely use-case based, and often the answer bank has lots of “good” answers and one “best” answer. Additionally, these answers commonly have invalid or made-up terms. Learning the odd details about AWS will help you weed through these inaccuracies and throw out invalid answers.
AWS has become one of the most common requirements for job applicants. However, with many organizations moving to AWS for the first time or hiring their first AWS cloud engineers or solution architects, it’s not easy to figure out to whom it’s worth paying those large engineering salaries. A certification from AWS can often be the credential that helps your resume, application, and experience rise above competitors. This is particularly true when you are being interviewed and evaluated by management, where certification is an easy distinguisher.
Additionally, certification makes you more competitive and employable in general. Research has shown that people who study technology get hired. In the competition for entry-level jobs, applicants with high school diplomas or college degrees who included IT coursework in their academic load fared consistently better in job interviews and were hired in significantly higher numbers.
Review the candidate overview and exam goals. AWS provides a lot of detail on the exam, and in particular what qualifications a candidate for the exam should have:
https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/
Review the exam guide. AWS provides an exam guide with the domains covered by the exam and the question breakdown:
https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-sa-assoc/ AWS_Certified_Solutions_Architect_Associate_Feb_2018_%20Exam_Guide_v1.5.2.pdf
This URL changes at times. You can always visit the candidate overview (the URL is listed earlier) and find links to the latest exam guide.
Practice for the exam. After you have studied for the certification, review and answer as many sample questions as you can to prepare for the exam.
Schedule your voucher. When you’re ready, you can schedule and pay for your exam:
https://www.aws.training/certification?src=arc-assoc
Take the exam! You’ll take your exam at a testing center in a controlled environment.
Get an instant result. You’ll receive notification of whether you pass or fail immediately after completing the exam. You’ll only receive that level of detail, though: PASS or FAIL.
Wait for your official results. Within a few days, you’ll receive email confirmation of your results as well as a more detailed breakdown of your scores organized by domain. You will not receive details about which questions you missed, though.
Go get a job! (And stay certified too). Once you’ve passed, you’ll receive a certificate and digital badges and you can include your certification on your resume. You can also download certification transcripts from AWS. You’ll need to take the exam again every two years, but that should leave you plenty of time to add significant practical experience to your certification.
Once you are fully prepared to take the exam, you can visit the AWS certification site to schedule and pay for your exam:
https://www.aws.training/certification?src=arc-assoc
AWS partners with PSI Exams (https://candidate.psiexams.com), so when you schedule your exam, you’ll locate a testing center for taking the exam as well as a time block. Exams typically take two hours, so you’ll need to plan accordingly.
On the day of the test, make sure you arrive 10 minutes early in case there are any hiccups or a long line of folks waiting to take the exam. You’ll need two forms of identification too. Remember that you will not be able to take your notes, electronic devices (including smartphones and watches), or other materials in with you.
The testing center will provide you with some scratch paper, and most centers will supply headphones or earplugs if you find it helpful to block out the minimal noise of the testing center. The test itself is taken on a computer and is fairly straightforward.
Make sure you double-check that you complete the exam before leaving; as silly as it sounds, it’s rather easy to get nervous or anxious and not click through all the prompts at the end of the exam.
This book includes 1,000 practice test questions, which will help you get ready to pass the CSA Associate exam. The interactive online learning environment that accompanies the CSA Associate practice tests provides a large and varied test bank to help you prepare for the certification exam and increase your chances of passing the first time. There’s a tremendous value in taking practice questions as often as possible, even leading up to your actual test. Don’t worry if you start to recognize questions from earlier practice runs… that just means you’re learning the material and committing it to memory.
The test bank also includes a practice exam. Take the practice exams just as if you were taking the actual exam (without any reference material). As a general rule, you should be consistently making 85% or better before taking the exam.
You can access the AWS CSA Interactive Online Test Bank at www.wiley.com/go/sybextestprep.
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam validates your technical expertise in two key areas:
While the exam guide suggests a year of AWS experience, you’ll most benefit from working extensively with the AWS console and setting up new infrastructure, especially related to compute (EC2), storage (RDS, DynamoDB, and S3), and networking (VPCs).
The actual exam is organized into five different domains, each focusing on a specific objective, with each domain broken up further into subobjectives:
Chapter 1, Design Resilient Architectures (Domain 1) Choose reliable and resilient storage; determine how to design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services; determine how to design a multi-tier architecture solution; determine how to design high availability and/or fault tolerant architectures.
Chapter 2, Define Performant Architectures (Domain 2) Choose performance storage and databases; apply caching to improve performance; design solutions for elasticity and scalability.
Chapter 3, Specify Secure Applications and Architectures (Domain 3) Determine how to secure application tiers; determine how to secure data; define the networking infrastructure for a single VPC application.
Chapter 4, Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (Domain 4) Determine how to design cost-optimized storage; determine how to design cost-optimized compute.
Chapter 5, Define Operationally Excellent Architectures (Domain 5) Choose design features in solutions that enable operational excellence.
The following table lists each of the five domains and how much of the exam each domain affects. The subdomains are also listed for each domain. Because each chapter of this book focuses on a specific domain, the mapping is easy: for Domain 1, refer to Chapter 1. For Domain 2, flip to Chapter 2, and so on.
| Domain | Percentage of Exam | Chapter |
| Domain 1. Design Resilient Architectures | 34% | 1 |
| 1.1 Choose reliable/resilient storage. | ||
| 1.2 Determine how to design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services. | ||
| 1.3 Determine how to design a multi-tier architecture solution. | ||
| 1.4 Determine how to design high availability and/or fault tolerant architectures. | ||
| Domain 2. Define Performant Architectures | 24% | 2 |
| 2.1 Choose performant storage and databases. | ||
| 2.2 Apply caching to improve performance. | ||
| 2.3 Design solutions for elasticity and scalability. | ||
| Domain 3. Specify Secure Applications and Architectures | 26% | 3 |
| 3.1 Determine how to secure application tiers. | ||
| 3.2 Determine how to secure data. | ||
| 3.3 Define the networking infrastructure for a single VPC application. | ||
| Domain 4. Design Cost-Optimized Architectures | 10% | 4 |
| 4.1 Determine how to design cost-optimized storage. | ||
| 4.2 Determine how to design cost-optimized compute. | ||
| Domain 5. Define Operationally Excellent Architectures | 6% | 5 |
| 5.1 Choose design features in solutions that enable operational excellence. |