A Note on AWS Certification

What are AWS Certifications?

If you're reading this I assume you already have some idea of what an AWS Certification is. If not, you can find detailed information here. In summary, AWS has created a collection of exams which assess an individual's knowledge of core AWS services, at foundational, associate and professional levels. Passing an exam earns you the certification, which proves that you are capable of working with the services assessed. As AWS services are constantly being updated and new services are constantly being released there are new versions of the exams every six months or so, and certifications are only valid for 3 years, after which you have to retake the latest exam to retain the certification status.

Having obtained the Developer Associate, and more recently the DevOps Engineer Professional cert I often get questions about them. The most common one over the years by far is: "How do I get certified?". I've found that when people ask this, they generally want to know about one or both of these two key aspects:

• firstly, how does one practically prepare for an AWS cert exam?
• secondly, what specific resources or learning paths should one use to prepare for a specific AWS cert exam?

I'll try to answer both of these as best as I can, as well as explain a bit around how I prepared and the resources I referred to. However, studying is something that is highly subjective. What worked for me and what I recommend may not work for you. AWS certs are difficult to obtain because the exam content can be complex and the exams themselves are lengthy (2-3 hours) and intentionally convoluted. The last thing you want to do is add to this difficultly by using a study method that you personally find challenging. The foundational level certs however, are very easy to obtain, but in my view are not useful.

Exam Prep

There are too many different study techniques to choose from, so instead of discussing specific techniques I'm going to dive into two specific groups of techniques which I'll call theory based study and practical study. Theory based study would be any form of preparation where you are studying the documentation alone, for example the AWS developer guidelines or articles, lectures and tutorials from third party courses and example exam questions. Practical study would be any form of preparation involving working with the AWS services themselves, for example creating and destroying AWS resources using the aws-cli, aws-sdk or the AWS console, or deploying infrastructure for an example web application.

It is possible to effectively prepare for any AWS cert exam by using either approach exclusively or alternately a combination of the two. To be more explicit, it is possible for someone to revise the documentation and then pass an exam without ever having logged into the AWS console. This is where I believe your reasons for wanting to become certified should guide your approach.

If your goal is to become more employable and you simply want to have the certification to check a box on a future employers checklist then I'd recommend going with a purely theory based approach. If an employer uses AWS certification in their hiring checklist then their technical hiring process is probably not mature enough to distinguish between someone with a theoretical understanding and someone with a practical understanding of AWS services anyway. The theoretical knowledge will be enough for you to onboard and you can start learning how to practically do what the company requires once you join.

If your goal is to become proficient with AWS, then I'd recommend going with a heavily practical approach. Actually deploying and managing infrastructure resources gives you a much better feel for how they work. You still need to familiarise yourself with a bit of the theory, on topics such as the limits of the services and how to estimate costs and so on, but you can focus solely on the content relevant to the services you are working with. The benefit here is that you become more comfortable actually using the services.

The theoretical approach is usually quicker for most people. This is because most people find the practical work quite daunting. You have to create your own AWS account and start messing around in it. We've all heard the stories of friends, family or colleagues completing a tutorial and waking up to a several thousand dollar AWS bill the next day due to a minor mistake in the config. Removing that daunting step makes the whole experience less anxiety inducing which leads people to complete preparation sooner. However, in my experience the practical approach is superior. Execution is underrated, as they say.

As an aside, AWS has a discretionary policy whereby they will refund credits into your AWS account if you make a mistake and use way more resources than intended. They will do this only once for every AWS account, provided that you enable or configure preventative measures within the account to stop the issue from happening in the future. It's essentially a one-time "get out of jail free" card. Refunds of approximately $2000 or less do not require escalation on the AWS side and can be approved fairly quickly by a support agent. Anything above that requires investigation and sign off from their billing team, which takes much longer and requires much more convincing from your side.

Back to the certs, regarding how I prepared, for both certifications I had been working with the services for some time before deciding to take the exam. I wanted to get certified to add more credibility to my recommendations when dealing with corporate clients. For the Developer Associate cert I procrastinated until my cert voucher was about to expire and then finally booked an exam date with only a week to prepare. I realised I wouldn't have enough time to go through all the documentation so I resorted to what worked well for me at university, which was to just do practice exams.

Thereafter, I procrastinated again until my Developer Associate cert was about to expire before booking the DevOps Engineer Profession exam (you need an active associate level cert in order to book a professional level cert exam), and since the practice exams worked well before I used the same approach again. I could only take this approach because I had been working with the services, on almost a daily basis, for many years by this point. All I had to learn to pass the exam was the missing theory pieces that I hadn't needed in practice and how to understand the exam question patterns.

The exam questions are difficult to understand by design. They are multiple choice style where one or more options could be correct. In most cases, you have to choose the 'most correct' answer, meaning that there will be multiple correct answers and you have to apply a trade-off, based on what the question prioritises or what AWS conventions apply, to figure out which answer is most appropriate. The options also tend to use the same sentences with only two or three keywords being different, so it is necessary to read every question and answer option in its entirety before submitting a choice.

Resources and Learning Paths

My view is that the only valid sources of learning content for AWS certs are the official AWS service docs themselves. AWS provides official learning plans that you can access via the skill builder, some free and some paid. I would consider these learning plans as part of the official documentation. Any resources outside of these, such as courses from third party learning platforms and 10+ hour video courses online, although probably accurate, are not valid or official, regardless of whether they are free or paid. Additionally, the content covered by these third party resources has to be regularly updated with the latest exam content for each cert as AWS releases updates, and this needs to be verified without direct assistance from AWS.

The practice exams I used were from Tutorials Dojo and it's important to note that I took a risk consulting resources that weren't official, but I had enough knowledge from using the services to discern what information was accurate and what I needed to verify. What I found useful about these practice exams was that each question had an explanation for each multiple choice option stating why the correct answer was correct and why the others were incorrect. I could then verify that against the AWS docs.

These days, it would be relatively straightforward to use AI chat to generate an example exam in a similar format, and have it record your results and identify areas where your knowledge is lacking so that it can give you more questions in those areas. Again, you would still have to verify that the information you get from the AI is accurate.

To put it plainly, any learning content or plan that works for you is great, but if it's not managed by AWS then you have to be prepared to verify its accuracy on your own.

Final Thoughts

AWS certifications aren’t a golden ticket, but they can be a valuable tool if used correctly. They help validate knowledge, open doors to new opportunities, and provide structure for learning. However, they don’t replace real-world experience. If you're just starting with AWS or looking to stand out in a competitive job market, certification can be a smart move. But if you already work hands-on with AWS daily, your time might be better spent on deepening your expertise through real projects.

Actually building things > just knowing how to build things.