I passed the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty Exam this morning. The exam is hard. My career started with a networking as I had multiple Nortel and Cisco Certifications and was studying to the CCIE Lab back then. But over the last 12 years, I got away from networking. Doing this exam was going back to something I loved for a long time, as BGP, Networking, Load Balancers, WAF makes me excited.
My exam results
Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Design and implement hybrid IT network architectures at scale: 75%
2.0 Design and implement AWS networks: 57%
3.0 Automate AWS tasks: 100%
4.0 Configure network integration with application services: 85%
5.0 Design and implement for security and compliance: 83%
6.0 Manage, optimize, and troubleshoot the network: 57%
I have limited experience with AWS networking prior to this exam. I had the standard things likes load balancers, VPCs, Elastic IPs and Route 53. This exam tests your knowledge of these areas and more. To prepare I used the acloud.guru course, also the book AWS Certified Advanced Networking Official Study Guide: Specialty Exam and the Udemy Practice Tests. With the course and book, I set up VPC peers, Endpoints, nat instances, gateways, CloudFront distributions. I put about 50 hours into doing the course, reading the book, doing various exercise, and studying etc.
Based on my experience the acloud.guru course is lacking the details on the ELBs, the WAF, private DNS, and implementation within CloudFormation. The book comes closer to the exam, but also doesn’t cover CloudFormation, WAF or ELBs as deep as the exam. The Udemy practice tests were close to the exam, but lack some of the more complex scenario questions.
I plan to sit the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam later this week.