Prepare for your AWS certification with Amazon Q

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Intro

Amazon Q is a generative-AI powered assistant from AWS. This article explains how Amazon Q can be used to prepare for AWS certifications and uses examples for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. I passed this exam in March 2024 and Amazon Q definitely helped me learn the certification topics faster.

Advantages

There are several advantages to using Amazon Q to prepare for an AWS certification:

• Lets you practice removing the “fluff” from the exam questions, to understand the point of the question (which you will have to do during the exam)
• Helps you understand what tasks a solutions architect might encounter in their day-to-day job
• Gives you practice using Amazon Q, which would be a useful AWS service to have in your toolbelt, for your work as solutions architect

Assumptions

The steps in this article require:

1. You have located the exam sample questions provided by AWS. At the time of writing, these are the sample questions.
2. You have access to an AWS account through employer or a personal account. Note that some employers may have disabled Amazon Q for the entire account or specific users.
3. Amazon Q can be used through an IDE (like Visual Studio Code) but all the example here are from Amazon Q at the AWS console

Disclaimers

• Q can make mistakes. Always be skeptical of Q’s responses and verify them.
• Understand the pricing. For these examples, I’m working in my personal AWS account and using the “Amazon Q Developer Free Tier” which might expire in June 30th, 2024. Read latest docs.
• Understand the privacy implications and know what is happening to your data (prompts) when you interact with Q. I know that for these examples, I won’t be including any business sensitive or PII data, but use your best judgment. Read latest docs.

From exam question to Q prompt

Most of the exam questions will not give good responses if they are entered into Q as written. So the first step is to translate the exam question into a promot that Q understands.

Let’s go through some examples.

Example 1

Question 1) from the sample exam questions:

A company runs a public-facing three-tier web application in a VPC across multiple Availability Zones. Amazon EC2 instances for the application tier running in private subnets need to download software patches from the internet. However, the EC2 instances cannot be directly accessible from the internet.

Which actions should be taken to allow the EC2 instances to download the needed patches?

PROMPT 1: The exact question.

RESPONSE 1: Not helpful because it assumes you have the infrastructure setup in the account (which I do not) and the “VPC Reachability Analyzer” can help troubleshoot network connectivity issues.

PROMPT 2: I have EC2 instances that cannot connect to the internet. What are some things I should check?

RESPONSE 2: Same as previous. Still directing me to the network troubleshooting chat, which isn’t what I need.

For this question, the most useful prompts are about each component of the architecture.

PROMPT 3: What is a route table

PROMPT 4: What is a private subnet and when is it used?

Example 2

Question 2) from the sample exam questions:

A solutions architect wants to design a solution to save costs for Amazon EC2 instances that do not need to run during a 2-week company shutdown. The applications running on the EC2 instances store data in instance memory that must be present when the instances resume operation.

Which approach should the solutions architect recommend to shut down and resume the EC2 instances?

PROMPT: What are some approaches to shut down and resume EC2 instances?

RESPONSE: Very helpful. Several shut down approaches with explanations of when to use them.

Example 3

Question 5) from the sample exam questions:

A company’s security team requires that all data stored in the cloud be encrypted at rest at all times using encryption keys stored on premises.

Which encryption options meet these requirements?

PROMPT: How can data stored in the cloud be encrypted at rest at all times using encryption keys stored on premises.

RESPONSE: Surprising, in a good way.

“Sorry, I can’t answer your question because my response could contain advice related to security or compliance. As these topics are sensitive, I didn’t generate an answer. I recommend reviewing the following links or consulting with AWS Support for guidance.”

Example 4

Question 10) from the sample exam questions:

An application running on AWS uses an Amazon Aurora Multi-AZ DB cluster deployment for its database. When evaluating performance metrics, a solutions architect discovered that the database reads are causing high I/O and adding latency to the write requests against the database.

What should the solutions architect do to separate the read requests from the write requests?

PROMPT: What are some way to reduce the I/O for database reads for an Amazon Aurora Multi-AZ DB cluster deployment?

RESPONSE: Very helpful.

Conclusion

I hope this gives you ideas for how to use Amazon Q to prepare for an AWS certification. My experience is that Amazon Q is a wonderful tool to reduce learning time and give you practice for working as a solutions architect.