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How I prepared

I used several techniques to study for this exam.

AWS study/preparation guide

My first stop was to review the official AWS guide because it listed all the services covered and included practice questions.

Learning at work

My day-to-day job involved building AWS infrastructure, so I took advantage of every opportunity to learn at work. I offered to complete stories that were out of my comfort zone, reviewed existing code, and asked my teammates for clarification as needed.

Official AWS preparation course

Since my employer is an AWS partner, I was able to take a course taught by AWS instructors. Learned exam tips and strategies.

Udemy course

Stephane Maarek’s Udemy course has amazing hands-on demos and practical examples.

Practice Questions

I also purchased WhizLab practice questions. I love WhizLab’s practice mode and detailed explanations for each right and wrong answer.

Now for how GenAI helped me learn.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Tool on AWS PartyRock

Viktoria Semaan created a fabulous tool to generate practice questions over at AWS PartyRock.

Amazon Q

Amazon Q can give summaries for prompts like the ones below. For all the fact-checking I did of the responses, I did not find any wrong responses.

Sample Prompts:

  1. What the most common services used in hybrid environments
  2. What are some ways to optimize RDS databases
  3. What are some ways to connect VPCs
  4. What are some ways you can improve the performance of an S3-hosted website for a global audience
  5. What are some different types of gateways and when should they be used

Google Gemini

Gemini helped me remember the details and use cases for services that were similar.

For example, I was out of practice on networking concepts and needed help remembering the different types of gateways. So I asked Gemini to “generate metaphors based on the ocean to help me remember the AWS gateways” and included the gateway summaries from Q in the prompt.

Gemini generated very helpful responses like “An Internet Gateway is the harbor where ships (your VPC instances) can come and go from the open ocean (internet).”

Conclusion

It took me several months to prepare for this exam and I need several approaches to get ready. I hope this information helps you in your learning journey,

  1. Image created by Heather Woods ↩