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.

What’s up with interviewers asking about kubernetes experience lately?   Two different interviewers raised the question today.

Kubernetes Is only 4 years old .   GCP has supported it for a while. AWS released it in beta at Re:invent 2017 and it went general release June 5 2018.   Azure went GA June 13, 2018.

So how widely deployed is it?     Also if it is supposed to speed deployments, how complex can it be?   How many hours to learn it?

Next week I will be learning it.  Looking forward to answering these questions.

The pdf provided this:

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (Released February 2018) (SAA-C01) has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 720.

I got a 932….

awsarch went SSL.

Amazon offers free SSL certificates if your domain is hosted on an ELB, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, API Gateway or AWS CloudFormation.

For more information on the Amazon ACM service. 

So basically it required setting up an Application Load Balancer, updating DNS, making updates to .htaccess and a fix to the wp-config file.

Now the site is HTTPS and the weird non-HTTPs browser messages went away.     Come July Chrome will start carrying a warning sign per this Verge Article.

Free SSL certificates can also be acquired here https://letsencrypt.org/ 

I sat the exam for the AWS Certified Developer - Associate this morning.     I felt lucky as the system kept asking questions I knew in depth.   There were only 4 questions I didn’t know the answer to and took an educated guess.

I did the exam in 20 minutes for 55 questions.    I only review questions I flag, and I only flagged about 8 questions.    I felt really lucky as the exam was playing to my knowledge of DynamoDB, S3, EC2, and IAM.   There were other questions about Lambda, CloudFormation, CloudFront, and API calls.   But the majority of the questions focused on 4 areas of AWS, I knew really well.

At the end of the exam, I got the Congratulations have successfully completed the AWS Certified Developer  – Associate exam.

Also within 15 minutes, I got the email confirming my score:

Congratulations again on your achievement!

Overall Score: 90%

I’m still waiting on my score from my Solution Architect - Associate Exam.    In the meantime, I’ll get back to studying my AWS Networking Speciality.

AWS offers practices emails through PSI exams.   Cost $20 and gives you 20 questions for practice.    I did the exam today.   Here is the results email.

That’s a confidence builder going into the exam tomorrow morning.