Three AWS Associate Certifications in Six Months: My SysOps Admin Experience and Beyond

Introduction

After 6 months of smart and hard work, always with a clear goal, I can say that I have achieved the AWS associate-level certifications I was interested in. These are: Solutions Architect, Developer, and SysOps Admin. In this article, I will share my experience so far and what my next goal related to my professional growth is.

Journey

In this article I talked about my journey up to the point where I had achieved the first two certifications and I mentioned that my next goal was to achieve the associate-level SysOps, which is the main topic of this article. This was the first certification I did entirely through the Tutorials Dojo platform, including the content course, which is the first time I’ve taken it on this platform, and the practice exams coure, which I recommend to everyone who wants to get certified in the world of AWS, as they are the most complete practice exams I’ve seen for these certifications. Honestly, due to the similarity in the content of this certification with the Solutions Architect, I didn’t make much use of the content course, as they share many topics that I have a good grasp of, either because I use them daily or because I learned them in the previous certifications.

Experience with the SysOps Admin Associate

This exam was very focused on Operations, that is, how to act quickly in the face of a problem, either to detect the cause or to solve the problem. In the exam, there were many questions related to permissions, mainly AWS Organizations, something that I don’t really master because I’ve never used this AWS feature, although I understand the basics from a theoretical point of view. In addition to AWS Organizations, they place a lot of emphasis on situations for granting access to resources from other AWS accounts, for example, access to write to an S3 bucket from another account. There are also many questions focused on databases, mainly on how to improve performance, where in most cases the answer was to use RDS Proxy. For this, I recommend that you study the differences between RDS and Aurora, the differences between using Multi-AZ or Read Replicas for RDS, and in general everything related to these services. Another important topic in this certification was related to monitoring, where as you can imagine there are many questions related to CloudWatch. As a recommendation, you should understand everything related to the CloudWatch agent, that is, when you need it and when you don’t, and the difference between basic and detailed monitoring. It is very common for the answers to these questions to mix these concepts, so you must have it clear. Also, understand CloudWatch Dashboards and when you need them. There are many questions on the exam related to EC2, specifically related to what type of instances to use in a specific situation or how to execute a command on many instances, where the solution is usually to use Systems Manager. Likewise, concepts like AMIs, and what type of EBS volume to use will be very useful for this exam.

Why these three certifications?

As you may know, there are five associate-level AWS certifications, the three I already mentioned, plus Data Engineering and Machine Learning. Not counting these last two, the other three are often known as the AWS associate-level core. In general, these three certifications share a lot of content, perhaps the Developer one is the one that deviates a bit, as it puts a lot of emphasis on serverless architecture. But the idea is that after these three certifications you have a fairly broad idea of the different AWS services from different points of view:

• Solutions Architect emphasizes solution design
• Developer emphasizes the serverless world, deployments, and services that can help you in the AWS ecosystem
• SysOps Admin prepares you from an operations point of view, that is, how to identify problems, react to them, and solve them

Next steps

From an AWS point of view, my goal is to have the DevOps Professional, but for that certification, I still want to have more experience, so it is not an option right now. I am considering whether to prepare for the Terraform Associate or the AWS AI Practitioner, but it is something I have not decided on right now.

See you soon

I hope you found this article useful. I will continue to document each of the actions I take on my professional journey here. See you in the next article.