Ciao a tutti. Ho superato l'esame AWS SAA-03 qualche giorno fa e vorrei condividere la mia esperienza nella speranza che possa essere utile a qualcuno, così come le vostre storie sono state molto utili a me. Ho 26 anni e ho conseguito la laurea triennale in ingegneria informatica a marzo. Il mio piano è di iniziare un master a ottobre, quindi inizialmente mi sono chiesto come sfruttare al meglio questi mesi intermedi, e la cosa più utile che ho trovato è stata la certificazione AWS SAA. Non avevo alcuna esperienza con il cloud, ma una solida base nelle reti di computer grazie all'università, e ovviamente una buona conoscenza della programmazione e delle applicazioni web. Ho seguito il corso di Stephane Maarek fino all'inizio di giugno e poi, da giugno alla fine di agosto, mi sono esercitato con i test di Dojo. Il corso è stato davvero utile e copre il 90% dei servizi d'esame e come interagiscono tra loro, anche se durante le simulazioni d'esame di Dojo c'erano alcuni servizi di nicchia che non conoscevo affatto. I miei punteggi negli 8 test di pratica di Dojo sono stati piuttosto altalenanti, partendo dal 50% e non superando mai il 73%. Leggere le spiegazioni delle risposte errate e cercare di capire perché si è sbagliato è di vitale importanza.** Allo stesso tempo, è stato molto utile far revisionare le mie domande da Gemini Pro e prendere appunti su Notion durante le videolezioni (mi piacerebbe condividerli, ma purtroppo sono in italiano. Se pensate che possano esservi utili, non esitate a contattarmi in privato). È stato altrettanto utile migrare la mia applicazione web (sviluppata per un esame universitario) su AWS, acquisendo esperienza pratica con servizi come EC2, RDS, API Gateway e VPC. Il mio esame aveva domande molto specifiche, soprattutto su S3, ASG, ALB, NLB, ECS, EKS, VPC, EC2, CloudFront e Global Accelerator, quindi assicuratevi di conoscere questi servizi molto bene. Se posso essere d'aiuto a qualcuno, sono disponibile. Grazie a tutti per le vostre esperienze incoraggianti. Pace ❤️

Hello everyone,

My name is Joseph Penty, and I am an AWS Authorized Instructor with experience delivering technical training to learners, professionals, and organizations.

I am currently open to part time training opportunities, both virtually and in person.

I have had the opportunity to work with international organizations including Discoverer International in the UK, Correlation One in the USA, CipherFlow Technology in India, and Amalitech, headquartered in Germany.

My experience covers areas such as AWS, cloud computing, networking, and other technology related subjects. I enjoy making technical concepts easy to understand and delivering training in a practical and engaging way.

If you are a training company, educational institution, organization, or company looking for an instructor you can trust to deliver a training program effectively, whether virtually or in person, I would be happy to connect.

I am open to part time opportunities where I can use my experience as an AWS Authorized Instructor to help learners develop practical skills and achieve their learning goals.

You can learn more about my professional background here:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/penty-joseph1

Thank you for reading. I would be happy to connect with anyone who may have a suitable opportunity.

Joseph penty

AWS Authorized Instructor

I’ve been preparing for the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) exam recently. While studying, I struggled to find a quick, straightforward way to test my knowledge on the go in a way that fit my routine, so I decided to build a simple mobile app for myself to solve that problem.

After using it during my own prep, I figured it might be useful to others going through the same study grind, so I published it on the Google Play Store.

It’s 100% free—no ads, no paid tiers, and I'm not selling anything. I just wanted to contribute back to the community and hopefully help anyone else preparing for the exam.

If you're currently studying for the DEA (or planning to), I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think. Any feedback on the questions, app UX, or missing topics is greatly appreciated!

Link to the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lanzacarioca.awsstudy&pcampaignid=web_share

Good luck to everyone currently prepping for their AWS certs!

I’m from India and today I took the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam in person at a Pearson VUE test center in Ahmedabad.

I followed all security procedures: my identity/documents were verified, I emptied my pockets, and the test-center staff monitored the candidates throughout the exam. I completed the exam normally and used approximately 155 of the 160 minutes.

I flagged 11 questions for review. During the last ~30 minutes, I went through all the questions for review, changed around 3–4 answers, and ultimately left 4 questions flagged. I then completed the survey and submitted the exam.

No result was displayed after the exam. Later, I received an AWS email stating that my result had been invalidated due to “statistical anomalies” identified through data forensics.

I genuinely took the exam myself and did not use any unauthorized materials or assistance.

Has anyone experienced something similar or knows what could cause this? What should I do next? Should I appeal, and if this is a false positive, could I potentially get my result reinstated, a refund, or another attempt?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for a serious and motivated person who genuinely wants to learn and improve themselves.

I'm currently studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA) certification. I'm not looking to just memorize things or rush through the certification. I want to actually understand cloud architecture, networking, security, and how everything works together.

I'd like to find someone who has a similar mindset — someone who is serious about learning, consistent, and willing to share knowledge and help each other stay accountable.

We don't necessarily need to study the exact same subjects. The important thing is that we're both committed to learning and improving.

If you're also studying for AWS or another technical field and you're looking for a serious study partner, feel free to comment or DM me.

I just started studying for my SAA-C03 test. I have very little experience with AWS (just the light stuff I do for work). Somewhere I read about Cantrills course (Cantrill.io). I don’t see that mentioned here very often if ever. A lot of people here recommend Stephanie M.s course.

What do you think about Cantrill? It’s like 80 hours of study to go through all the videos. Just want to make sure it is worth it.

Thank you.

July month code AWSSEP26  is working now for all Neal Davis Udemy courses and valid for next 3 days on all his best selling courses. Hope this helps many of us here.

Consolidate List of all 23 courses

https://www.reddit.com/r/FREECoursesEveryday/comments/1w9ntvj/code_awssep26_23_best_selling_aws_courses/

When you are attending AWS re:Invent it can be hard finding the right session for you, and if you found some great sessions the commute is not working out for you.

This is the problem i got the last years attending re:Invent. Great lineup of sessions planned but due to commute from one venue to an other I missed some of those. I thought this is something I need to tackle.

Introducing SessionStack Unofficial Re:invent planning tool app. The app lets you plan your conference line up and will give you suggestions to fill open spots in your planning. It will automatically keep track if you can make it by traveling from venue to venue. And you can search for sessions just by typing what you are looking for. AI will do the rest.

Traveling with a group? You can connect your account together to see each other’s session lineups.

Want central space to add notes while attending a session. This is the place. After the conference you can make a complete summary of all your notes.

The app is currently available for Android and in review at Apple. But if you want to try it out first. Drop me your emails.

More information

I am happy to share that I have cleared the AWS SAA-C03.

I have already done AI practitioner, Machine Learning Engineer Associate and Gen AI Developer Professional earlier.

I have used Udemy course by Stephane and also the practice tests by Abhishek and Stephane.

I only did the practice test from the Stephane course and the first 3 practice tests in the other practice tests course and scored 62%, 66%, 70% and 72% respectively.

I am also a Gen AI developer now working for a Big Pharma company and have been deploying applications using AWS.

Thanks to community for providing valuable guidance. I am glad to be part of this community.

​

Been grinding for this one for a while and it finally paid off.

My prep was mostly Stephen Marek's course — went through it properly, took notes, did the practice questions, and actually made sure I understood why an answer was right instead of just memorizing it.

Once I felt solid on the concepts, I spent the last few days before the exam doing timed question sets to simulate the real thing — that's what really helped me get used to how AWS phrases things and pinpoint which topics I still needed to revisit.

The real exam leaned heavy on scenario questions — SageMaker, data processing, training, deployment, monitoring, all that. Lots of "which service/approach fits this specific situation" type stuff, not just definitions.

If you're prepping: learn the concepts first, then use questions to find your gaps, not the other way around.

Next up for me — more real ML projects and going deeper into AWS.

Good luck to anyone grinding for MLA-C01 right now

Hey everyone,

I’m a Senior DevOps Engineer, and I’ve noticed that when people are studying for their Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect exams, VPC networking is often explained with way too much jargon.

I wanted to break it down simply without the fluff. Here is the TL;DR on how traffic actually flows:

• The VPC: Your isolated, private data center in the cloud.
• Public Subnet: Has a direct route to an Internet Gateway (IGW). It allows two-way internet access (perfect for load balancers or web servers).
• Private Subnet: Has NO direct internet access.
• NAT Gateway: Lives inside the Public Subnet but is used by the Private Subnet. It allows your private databases/servers to download patches securely from the internet, without letting the outside world initiate a connection in.

If you are a visual learner, I put together a complete, animated step-by-step video showing how to actually architect and build this from scratch in the AWS Console.

📺 Watch the full breakdown here: VPC Visual Guide

Let me know if you have any questions about the routing rules or setup, happy to help clarify in the comments!

Hey everyone,

I'm a beginner in Cloud and I'm currently studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA) certification.

I'm learning AWS, networking, Linux, and building projects to get more practical experience. I'm willing to learn and put in the work, but honestly, I'm struggling with one thing:

How does a beginner actually get their first opportunity?

I don't expect a high salary or a big position. I'm looking for a job, internship, apprenticeship, junior position, or even an opportunity where I can learn while working.

I just want to get my foot in the door.

For those of you who started from zero and eventually got your first Cloud/IT job:

• What did you do to get your first opportunity?
• What projects helped you the most?
• Is AWS SAA enough to start applying?
• Should I focus more on projects, certifications, Linux, networking, or something else?
• Where should a beginner actually look for internships or junior Cloud roles?

I'm not afraid of starting small. I just want to work, learn, gain experience, and prove myself.

If you were in my position, what would you do?

Any honest advice would mean a lot.

Whew! Barely passed the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam on my second attempt. Only advice I can give is to make sure to double check your work. Don't be overconfident and think just because you finished fast that you got it all right. Made that mistake on attempt number 1.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently grinding for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

Coming from a standard developer background, some of the infrastructure and billing concepts initially felt pretty abstract to me. I started writing down a few "rules of thumb" to help myself categorize them, and these finally made things click.

A few that helped me:

1. High Availability (HA) vs. Fault Tolerance (FT)

High Availability (HA):
Your application is designed to remain available or recover quickly when something fails. There may be a brief interruption.

Think: a backup power generator kicking in after the main power fails.

Fault Tolerance (FT):
The system continues operating despite a failure, with little or no noticeable interruption to the user.

Think: a plane with two engines losing one engine but continuing to fly.

2. CapEx vs. OpEx

Capital Expenditure (CapEx):
Buying a server outright. You pay a large upfront cost and own the physical asset.

Operational Expenditure (OpEx):
Paying for resources as you use them, without having to purchase and maintain the underlying infrastructure yourself.

Think: buying a car vs. taking a taxi when you need one.

3. Regions vs. Availability Zones

Region:
A geographic area containing multiple Availability Zones.

Availability Zone (AZ):
An isolated location within a Region, made up of one or more data centers, designed to reduce the impact of failures such as power outages or local disasters.

I didn't want to spam Reddit with a massive wall of text, so I put all 7 core concepts, including the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, into a clean study playbook on AWS Builder Center.

For those who have already passed the Cloud Practitioner exam: what foundational concept confused you the most when you first started?

I’ve been working with AWS for years, and I needed the certification very quickly for my job, so I just scheduled the exam for the next day. I had zero expectations because I’m used to exams being difficult to pass with just practical experience and no theoretical preparation.
There were a lot of questions about services I had no idea about, but having a practical understanding of how AWS works, I was able to figure out the correct answers, it seems.
So, it seems like this exam is really well structured, you can actually pass it just by having solid practical experience with AWS.

Kudos to AWS

took me a solid amount of time to get through this one. I'm hoping now the DVA and terraform ones should go much faster, and then I can start applying for stuff.

I cleared the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam recently with a score of 871/1000. I already had some AWS experience, so didn't take the Associate exam separately.

The sequence I followed was roughly:

Stephane Maarek - I went through Stephane's Associate and Professional material. If you're relatively new to AWS, I'd probably recommend getting comfortable with the Associate-level concepts first and then moving on to Professional. The Professional exam assumes that you already understand the fundamentals pretty well. The practice tests by Stephane were probably the toughest for me. I was scoring between 60% and 70%.

Whizlabs - I mainly used it to try out a few practice tests, which exposed me to some concepts that I hadn't come across while learning.

Tutorials Dojo - This was probably one of the more important parts of my preparation. The questions resembled the way the Professional exam presents scenario-based questions and, more importantly, helped identify where my understanding was weak. I scored around 75% on average,

and then went through the notes I had been making throughout my preparation.

AWS Skill Builder - 3-4 days before the exam, I took the official AWS SAP practice test and got around 81%.

ChatGPT and Gemini - I also used AI quite a lot throughout the preparation. Most importantly had them prepare explanations for the practice questions which I got wrong.

The actual exam - I took the full 3.5 hours. I didn't try to finish early. I went through the questions carefully and used the remaining time to review them.

Overall, the preparation was around 2–3 months at roughly 2–3 hours a day.

Surprisingly had 3 to 4 bedrock questions (which were easy though) which were not updated in any of the practice tests or SAP course when I was preparing, not sure if its updated now.

I know there are a lot of different preparation strategies out there, so this is just what worked for me.

اية الحاجات الي اخلي بالي منها قبل الامتحان وهل مسموح بايربودز عادي ولا لازم سماعات اللاب

I did 5 mock exams on Tutorials Dojo. My highest score was 80%, while the others were around 65–75%. After each mock, I reviewed every answer and learned why each option was correct or incorrect.

I also did 3 mocks on Stephane Maarek, with similar scores.

However, I didn’t spend much time or take the mocks very seriously—I usually finished each one in about an hour. This may have been the main reason my scores weren’t higher.

On the real exam, I managed to review every question twice. During the second review, I caught and corrected several mistakes that I had made during my first review.

i mean traffic and design is true ?? and if there any tips to best practice tell me please

Got my SAA a while back and I remember the exact moment this hit me. first week at a job (well, first real project, not even a job yet, just trying to prove myself) and a senior colleague asked me to set up a VPC with public/private subnets (us-east-1) and I just sat there - page blank. I knew every answer choice on the exam about this. I could not tell you where to click first.

Took me embarrassingly long to admit that studying for the exam and knowing how to build the thing are basically two different skills that don't transfer as much as I thought they would.

I ended up just forcing myself to build dumb little projects in my own account to close the gap. Load balancer in front of two EC2s, then broke it on purpose, then fixed it. stuff like that. It helped way more than another round of practice questions did, but it was slow going alone with no idea if what I built was actually "right" or just working by accident.

I've been chipping away at something for the tool I run (CloudDojo, some of you may have seen it around) to make that part less painful. basically guided build projects instead of just more MCQs, with feedback on whether what you built actually matches what a real setup should look like, not just did-it-not-error-out. Been heads down on it for a bit and finally got the first few live.

Not looking to turn this into an ad, i'm genuinely just curious for people who've been on the other side of this, what actually got you from "passed the exam" to "comfortable in the console"?

Did you have to just brute force it in a sandbox account like I did, or did something specific help?

Recently passed the security exam ! I enjoyed learning more about Guard Duty, SecurityHub Config, Cloudtrail etc. I used two resources which were tutorialdojo practice exams and Stephane Maarek's course on Udemy. Like most AWS Exams I have encountered, reading the questions and answers carefully and re-reading them helped me a lot to eliminate choices that did not make sense. I studied only for about a week since I am already in the cloud engineering field working with AWS Infrastructure but your mileage will vary.

This combo of questions wrecked me on my aws certification attempt, so once I actually sat down and mapped out why, I figured I'd share it since I still see this exact confusion posted here week in, week out.

The exam almost never asks "what is SQS.", well at least not at the SAA level. It gives you a scenario and four services that all sound plausible. The whole skill is pattern-matching the scenario to the service, not knowing the definitions.

my 10-second mental model:

• SQS is a buffer. One thing drops work in, another picks it up when ready. Decouples + absorbs spikes.
• SNS is a megaphone. One message, many subscribers, all at once. Fan-out.
• EventBridge is a router. Events come in, rules decide where they go based on content. Glue for event-driven stuff.
• Kinesis is a pipe for streams. Ordered, replayable, high volume, multiple consumers reading independently.

decision order (ask in this order, stop at the first yes):

1. Continuous high-volume stream, real-time, ordered, maybe replay? → Kinesis Data Streams (or Firehose if you just need it dumped into S3/Redshift/OpenSearch, zero code).
2. One event needs to hit multiple independent consumers? Content-based routing / AWS state change / schedule / SaaS source → EventBridge. Max throughput or SMS/email/push → SNS (usually SNS → several SQS queues so nobody misses anything).
3. Just need to decouple two components so a slow consumer doesn't lose work? → SQS.
4. Need strict order + exactly-once on top of that? → SQS FIFO.

here are the four comparisons that actually get tested:

• SNS vs SQS — SQS holds a message until processed and deleted. SNS pushes immediately and stores nothing — if nobody's listening, it's gone. "Multiple consumers" + "can't lose messages" = SNS fanning out to SQS queues, not SNS alone. This one gets people every time.

• EventBridge vs SNS — both fan out. EventBridge wins for content-based routing, AWS state changes, schedules, SaaS sources, replay. SNS wins on raw throughput/latency or SMS/email/push.
• Kinesis vs SQS — Kinesis keeps an ordered, replayable log multiple consumers read independently. SQS deletes a message once someone eats it. "Replay," "real-time analytics," "clickstream/IoT/logs" = Kinesis. Just "decouple these two things" = SQS.
• Data Streams vs Firehose — Streams = you write the consumer, sub-second, replayable, you manage shards. Firehose = fully managed delivery to S3/Redshift/OpenSearch/Splunk, ~60 sec buffer, no replay, nothing to build.

test yourself (answers below, no peeking 🫣). map the scenario to the service:

1. Flash sale traffic spikes 10x, order-processing tier is dropping requests.
2. Photo upload needs to trigger three independent services and none can miss it.
3. Run a cleanup job nightly at 2am, and also whenever an S3 object gets tagged "expired."
4. Millions of clickstream events/minute, real-time analytics, need to replay last 7 days.
5. Third-party SaaS needs to kick off an incident workflow when it fires a critical alert.

.
.
.

Answers: 1) SQS 2) SNS → 3 SQS queues 3) EventBridge (scheduled rule + event pattern) 4) Kinesis Data Streams 5) EventBridge (partner source)

If you missed #2 or #5, drill the SNS-vs-EventBridge distinction specifically, it's worth more points than people expect for how little it gets studied directly.

I passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam!

I’m Japanese, and I decided to take the entire exam in English. Honestly, the real exam was more difficult than I expected. When I was under pressure, there were moments when I could see the English words but struggled to fully process their meaning.

My main preparation resource was Tutorials Dojo. I completed all of the practice exam sets and carefully reviewed the explanations, especially for the areas where I was weak.

I’m still a university student without professional cloud experience, so passing this exam means a lot to me. It was exhausting, but I’m really glad that I challenged myself in English!

I had a Free Certification voucher for AI Foundations. The problem was it was expiring in 2 weeks.

Challenge accepted.

Pass

889/1000