I recently received my Professional level certification with AWS (Certified Solutions Architect – Professional) and thought to share some tips how I managed to get it. In the end it is not that hard, it just requires some time and practice.

First of all it really helps to have some hands-on experience with various AWS services. I for example did some hands-on tutorials and testing in the AWS console with some of the services which I hadn’t used before.

TIP #1: Get your hands dirty with AWS console and command line interface

Secondly I found A Cloud Guru courses really helpful. They are made exactly for the certification tests and don’t bother with stuff that’s irrelevant for the test. Watching through all the videos takes +20 hours per course, but it is all worth it. The practice exams/questions they have are not so useful, because they are not in the same format as the actual tests.

TIP #2: Buy A Cloud Guru or similar online course

Last but not least I would say reading FAQs of different services and white papers related to various topics was also very useful. Especially in the FAQs you can find very detailed information about each service (e.g. if EC2 spot instance is terminated by AWS during first hour cost for you is $0). White papers also cover more in-depth situations like what kind of policies do AWS personnel follow related to data at rest.

TIP #3: Read FAQs and white papers

Good luck with your test!