My journey towards AWS certification

I've cleared the AWS solutions architect - Associate certification last week and would like to share the reference materials which I used for the preparation. Entire exam was focused towards Elastic compute cloud, VPC, IAM and auto scaling. For any one who is trying to get the certification following reading materials will help. As a pre-requisite register for free trial in AWS which will give you 750 hours of EC2, 5 GB in S3 and 750 hours of RDS

Ryan Kroonenberg's Udemy course

Good to get your feet in AWS environment. The purpose of this course is just to get ready for certification but not to get in to the depths of AWS concepts. Every video provides a hands on exercise which will make you understand the concepts by working through it.
Tip : This course is always on a sale and available for $10, if it is not then try in a different browser or browse in incognito mode.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide

This is the official study guide penned by technical bigwigs at Amazon. It provides in-depth knowledge on each areas of AWS. Every chapter provides a sample quiz and exercise to practice the hands on. If you've done the Udemy course above then most of the exercise is already covered, you can complete the rest of the exercise with your reading on this book.

The only drawback is, this book is bit obsolete, atleast of two re-invent events. So there are new features which will be missing in this book like Enhanced networking, revamped S3 UI, NAT gateway, licensing, few capacity related concepts etc

Wiley test bank

This study guide offers 300+ quiz questions for you to practice. The drawback of the book follows here, some of the question and answer are obsolete. you have to double check with the product FAQ page for the latest changes.

Qwiklabs

This is a paid version of doing hands on exercise, but if you've a free trial in AWS then you can read the instruction provide in here and execute most of the steps in your AWS account. If you are willing to pay, they'll offer points and they create dynamic AWS account every time you invoke a new lab.

Whitepapers and FAQs

Go through the recommended whitepapers(8 whitepapers) and FAQ's (6 faqs) to understand the most recent updates.

Cloudacademy

Cloudacademy has around 300+ quizzes to practice around. They offer time bound quizzes where you will be forced to answer the questions in pre-determined time based on the complexity of the question. Good thing is they offer seven day trial period. So I picked this as the last step in my preparation just to benchmark my reading. They'll charge your credit card $30 per month, if you forget to cancel the trial subscription after seven days.