Sat the AWS Certified Security - Speciality Exam this morning. The exam is hard, as it scenario based. Most of the exam questions were to pick the best security scenario. It could be renamed the Certified Architect - Security. Every one of those questions had 2 good answers, it came down to which was more correct and more secure. It’s the hardest exam I’ve taken to date. I think it is harder than the Solution Architect - Professional exam. The majority of the exam questions where on KMS, IAM, securing S3, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, multiple AWS account access, Config, VPC, security groups, NACLs, and WAF.
I did the course on acloud.guru and I think the whitepapers and links really helped me in the studying for this exam:
- Security Whitepaper
- S3 Bucket Policies
- AWS Security at Scale
- DDos Whitepaper
- KMS
- AWS Security Best Practices
- AWS Well Architected Framework - Security Pillar
The exam took me about half the allocated time, I read fast and have a tendency to flag questions I don’t know the answer to and come back later and work thru them. This exam, I flagged 20 questions, highest of any AWS exam taken to date. Most of them I could figure out, once I thought about them for a while. Thru the exam, I was unsure of my success or failure.
Upon submission, I got the “Congratulations! You have successfully completed the AWS Certified Security - Specialty exam…”
Unfortunately, I didn’t get my score, I got the email, which says, “Thank you for taking the AWS Certified Security - Specialty exam. Within 5 business days of completing your exam,”
That now makes my 6th AWS Certification.