Amazon AWS SysOps – Preparing for the Exam + Practice Exam – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator A…Section 17: Preparing for the Exam + Practice Exam – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Asso

1. Exam Preparation – Section Introduction

Okay, so congratulations on making it this far. You’ve probably learned a lot of things by now. I just want to take a step back and make sure we have covered everything we need to know for the exam. So let’s look how far we’ve gone on the learning journey. And for this, we’ll explore this AWS link, which describes what the exam is about. So we are on the Certified Sys Ups Administrator Associate web page, and this is where we can just look at the exam guide, look at sample questions, and make sure we’re ready for the exam. Okay, so what I want you to look at is really the recommended AWS knowledge. So at least one year of hands on experience with AWS. For this you need to practice, practice, practice.

Make sure you do understand how to manage and operate AWS systems and make sure you understand all the security concepts in the networking. There’s some recommended general It knowledge that comes with It. So super important is, for example, understanding, monitoring and auditing systems, maybe understanding networking concepts that we’ve seen in Vpc and Route 53, such as DNS, TCP, IP, and Firewalls, et cetera. What I want you to look at is actually the exam blueprint. So we’ll click on it, and this contains everything the exam is about. So it will evaluate all these things. And there is no prerequisite, although there is recommended knowledge, as we just saw and recommended It knowledge. So this was in the page right here.

But let’s have a look at the exam prep. So the exam prep, you’ve been doing this course, which is great. I do recommend this course. And then we have white papers. So you should have a look and skim through these white papers. They’re very interesting to read and also important to understand. Usually with all the knowledge you have through this course, you should be able to understand all these white papers. So have a look. They’re really helpful into preparing the exam and then exam content. So let’s have a look. We either have MultiChoice and there’s one correct response and three incorrect responses, or MultiChoice, there’s two or more correct responses out of five or more options.

Okay, so some options may be distractors, but overall, one of these options is a perfect fit. And so you should start ruling out basically the answers you don’t think are fit. You don’t get penalized for not answering a question. So you should definitely answer every single question, even if you’re guessing. Okay, now it’s a pass or fail exam. You need to have a minimum score of 720. You’ll be scored between 101,000. I do wish you have 1000, but I do hope you have at least 720. But you should be all right. Okay, now for the content, we do get these domains, and they’re very spread between different things. So the first one is monitoring and reporting. And this is 22% of the examination in here.

We look at metrics and alarms and we’ll basically want to understand performance and availability metrics. And in case we do see a metrics going up, we want to understand what’s necessary to improve this metric. So we’ve seen this in and out with Cloud Watch. We see. Cloud Watch metrics for EC. Two for Elb, for EBS, for RDS. I mean, we’ve seen Cloud Watch metrics in and out, and we’ve seen definitely how we can remediate. Usually if you see something like CPU television is high, you may want to have an odor scaling group to increase the number of instances that can reply to request, that kind of things. If you have a disk that’s performing too many iOS, maybe you want to improve the disk, or add other disk, or change even the disk type.

Okay, so we’ve seen this in and out. We know what how Cloud Watch works now, high availability, so this is how we implement scalability and elasticity based on our use case. And so we’ve seen this in and out as well. We’ve seen beanstalk, we’ve seen load balancers, we’ve seen auto scaling groups, all these things. We’ve even seen Aurora on the database side. So we know how to be highly available for deployment and provisioning. This is how do we provision in the cloud. So we’ve seen cloud formation, we have seen Upsworks so for Chef and Puppet type of deployments, and we’ve seen absurd just at a high level. And there’s also elastic beanstalk which allows us to provision all the things at once. And we’ve seen how to optimize beanstalk for storage and data management.

I’ve seen, we’ve seen EBS in and out, we’ve seen S Three, we’ve seen Efs, and we even know how to set up data protection, encryption and capacity planning needs. So we know for S three, for example, we have S Three bucket policies which allow us to enable encryption, data protection, et cetera, et cetera, for security and compliance. We’ve seen all the tools we need to look at to make sure that we have rules in place. So for example, AWS config, but we’ve seen also Trusted Advisor and so many other tools that do help us do security and compliance and networking. We’ve seen Vpc and Route 53 in and out. So we know how these things work. Basically, we can also look at Vpc flow logs and do network troubleshooting based on what the flow log is telling us.

So this is more of us thinking how does eight of us work and what does the flow log test? And then automation and optimization. So we’ve seen about how we can automate, maybe using Cloud Watch alarms, cloud Watch events, cloud formation and optimization, maybe using Trusted Advisor. There’s also cost optimization strategies, maybe using reserved instances, and maybe looking at Cost Explorer to get recommendations around how we can optimize our cost, et cetera, et cetera. So all these things I think are covered as part of this course, so I think you should be ready. But thankfully, there is a practice exam in this section, so you’ll be able to see whether or not you are ready. All right. I will see you in the next lecture.

2. State of Learning Checkpoint – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate

Alright? So just a few exam tips just to make sure that you have the maximum chances to pass your exam. So number one, practice makes Perfect so if you’re new to AWS, maybe you’re overwhelmed with this course. So take a bit of a list practice thanks to this course. And don’t rush to go to the exam. Take your time, okay? This is not a race. This is a challenge to you to know that you know AWS, okay? This exam recommends you to have one or more years of hands on experience on the AWS. You can’t fake that. Now you should to be able to answer all the questions, exam questions. But hands on experience is really how I learn AWS. And this is how you should learn AWS is too. Practice makes perfect. So give it a go.

Now if you feel overwhelmed by this course because you learn a lot of knowledge right now, go through it one more time. It is fine to take your time, okay? There is so much new knowledge. Even me, I need to go back to it sometime. So take your time. Now, when you do have questions, proceed by elimination. So most questions are going to be scenario based. They’re going to be a bit long giving you hints and stuff. And so for all the questions, first, rule out answers that you know for sure are going to be wrong. This is a really good way for you to maybe come back to one or two answers and then just know which one is right, right away, okay? So understand which one makes the most sense. Okay? Sometimes they’re not that complicated, so there’s very few trick questions.

Maybe in the scenario they will try to lead you into thinking something else because they’ll be EBS, ASG SSM, all these kind of technologies. But there are very few trick questions. And don’t overthink your answers, okay? If an answer seems feasible but it’s too complicated, it’s probably wrong. So think about it. Think about it real hard and then if you don’t know the answer of a question right away, answer it. And then you can flag it for review later using a little flag feature in the exam. And so you can come back to it later and maybe you’ll have the response then because you have time to think about it. I would still recommend that you skim through the AWS white papers and they’re all defined in the document we saw before, but it’s architecture for the Cloud AWS Best Practices security best Practices so we’ve seen all of them, but it’s good to read them as well.

Overview of Security Processes so they’re very similar white papers. The well architected framework. You have to read it nonetheless. Development Test on AWS Backup and Recovery Strategy Approaches using AWS so this is all around snapshots and how do we recover? How do we put stuff into s three, glacier, etc. At Vpc connectivity options. So the Vpc section was huge in this course, so it’s nice to read about it and understand all these components one more time. And then you need to understand how Amazon’s pricing work because it can be quite complicated sometimes for certain infrastructure. So overall, in this course, we’ve explored all the most important concepts. So this is sort of optional, but it’s good if you just look through these.

It’s never bad to look at the white papers that you think are going to be interesting. Also, if you don’t know the service very well or you have doubts, look at the service FAQ. This is where most of the questions of the exam will be. FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions. For example, if you look at Vpc, this will be the URL amazon. Comvc FAQs. FAQ, as I said, cover a lot of questions that are going to be asked of the exam, and it’s really helpful to look at it just to make sure that you understand the service really, really well. And finally, I think if you are really serious about AWS, you need to get into the AWS community. So do participate in this course.

Answer other people’s q and a Help other review questions that are asked by other people just to make sure that you may be having the same questions and maybe you have the same doubts. Maybe the answers will help you clear out your doubts and then do the practice test. In this section, you have to do it just to make sure you’re ready. Finally, there’s some forums online, there’s online blogs, and there’s even local meetups in pretty much every city in the world to discuss with other areas engineers. And then if you’re really into AWS, you can also watch the reinvent videos. This is the Amazon conference on YouTube, and they’re really, really great to get started. So that’s it for my tips. I hope you’re excited to pass the exam, and I will see you in the next lecture.

3. Exam Tips – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate

So now is the time to sign up for your certification. And for this, you go to this website, AWS training certification. And then you click on sign in. You have to create an account for Amazon or sending user accounts. But as you mentioned, it’s not for AWS. It is an Amazon account. So make sure you have one. But you can just create one. It’s fairly easy. After you’re signing, you’re redirected to the screen and then to get your certification, you click on go to your account. Okay, so I’m going to show you how to schedule your exam. But first, just know that in the next lecture, I go over the benefits tabs. And this tab is that if you have already passed an exam in AWS, you can get 50% discount on your next exam.

So please make sure to watch the next lecture to see how to do this. Now, to set up an exam, you have two options. You can either use Pearson View or PSI, and both have their own network of testing centers that are physical. So you need to go into a testing center so you can see if Pearson View or PSI is better. But one of them, Pearson View, allows you to get your exam online. Okay, so someone is going to watch you on camera and actually make you pass your examination directly from your home office if you’re alone in your room. So we are going to see both. So in case you want to schedule on your exam, you can just click on schedule new exam.

Now there’s a big note here that says that if you are requesting an exam accommodation to get an extra 30 minutes on your test because you’re not an English native, then you cannot schedule an exam with Pearson’s View online. You have to call them on your phone. So this is also something I show you in the next lecture, how to request an exam accommodation. So please make sure to watch the next lecture. But also please make sure that if you do enable to get an exam accommodation, you will need to schedule an exam with Pearson View via phone. And Pearson View are now the only examination center that is allowing you to get online exams. So that may be a problem for you.

Okay, so now we can have a look at how to schedule an exam. So if you scroll down on this page, you see the list of all the examinations available to you. And for example, if you look at certified Developer associate, you can click here to schedule a PSI. And then from this page, you can find your exam you want. So we said certified developer, which is right here. You would click on scheduled exam English and then you can find a test location in your area and finally get to the checkouts. So PSI is for your in person on site exam centers. And due to COVID-19 it may be a problem for you to schedule an exam in person. So the other alternative is to go with Pearson View.

So, for example, I’m going to do solutions architects associate with Pearson View. So I click here and I can go ahead and schedule it on their website. Now, Pearson View allows you to get both in person or at home for a test center. So you can see here, you can take at a local test center or at home or office. So this is in person again. So exam centers may be closed due to COVID-19, but this is at home, which is a popular option. So then you click on Run precheck to make sure that your computer is ready. Then you click on Next and you would be able to go ahead with scheduling your exam. So, fairly simple, you just have to accept just a bunch of clauses, choose your language for your exam, and then you would be able to select a time and a date for your exam. Now, please note that this is going to be at home.

So if you schedule it, make sure to show up maybe 30 minutes in advance just to make sure your computer is ready. And to make sure that you are ready to start your exam, you would have to go directly into the Pearson View website to get your exam. So here I can schedule other exams, but I think I’ll be good. One is enough. Find your date and found your time, and then you’re good to go to go ahead and pay. And then when you are ready to take your exam, you would go to upcoming exams and you click on Manage Pearson View exam. And this would allow you to find where your exam is and to start it online. You would see it here in this UI. Okay, so that’s it. I hope you liked this lecture and I will see you in the next lecture.

4. Exam Walkthrough and Signup

So I want to show you a little trick that not many people know and that will allow you to save up to 50% on your exam cost if you have done an exam before. So in case you have already passed an AWS certification and you go to the benefits tab, you can see a lot of benefits. And in there, at the very bottom, there is an AWS exam discount benefit, which gives you 50% discount on your next exam. And to claim a benefit, you just click on Claim Benefit. And what this will do is that it will create a code for you. And that code you can use to get 50% off your next exam. So let me claim a benefit right now.

And as you can see now, the code has been here, so now I need to use this code. So for this, let me go back to my metrics and I’m going to schedule a new exam. I’m going to use C PSI and go directly to the exam I want to schedule. And this works on any exam as far as I can tell. So, for example, I’ll go ahead and book the DevOps exam. So here is my exam, and as you can see, it’s €270 for me. So in the Voucher discount coupon, I’m going to enter the discount code I got from before. So from the benefits and this token right here. And as you can see now, I got 50% off, so it became €135 afterwards.

So I just saved €135 just by doing this little trick. And so many people don’t know about this, and so they end up spending more for the exam. That what they need. So remember, once you pass an exam successfully, you will get access to these discount benefits and then use them accordingly on the exam. You want to save up to 50% on your exam costs. So hopefully it just saves you a lot of money, and hopefully that’s helpful for you to do more elite certifications. So if you like this tip, just let me know and I will see you in the next lecture.

5. Save 50% on your AWS Exam Cost!

One thing that I think is really cool and worth doing is that if you’re not a native English speaker like me, I’m French, then you can request a special exam accommodation that will allow you to get an extra 30 minutes on your A list certification exams. So I’m going to click on Request accommodation, and for the request type, I can say what I want. And what I want is ESL plus 30 minutes. This is available only to nonnative English speakers while taking an exam in English. Okay? And you only need to apply once, and it will apply for all future exam registrations. So we have ESL plus 30 minutes. This is great.

And then I click on create and here we go. I have requested my extra 30 minutes from exams, so it will go ahead and be approved directly. So here we go. And it doesn’t expire. And so this is only for future exam. So if you have somehow booked an exam before applying for this exam accommodation, please make sure to cancel your request. This is free. And then rebook your exam afterwards. And this will get applied to 30 minutes extra to your exam as well. All right, so that’s it for this lecture. I hope you liked it. And good luck for your exam. I will see you in the next lecture.