Passing AWS Certified Solutions Architect

3 years of AWS hands on experience, two months of preparation, 30 hours of course learning, 300+ exam practices, this was the work I’ve done to pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, my exam result is below:

Overall Score: 81%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Designing highly available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, scalable systems: 81%
2.0 Implementation/Deployment: 83%
3.0 Security: 72%
4.0 Troubleshooting: 100%

Frankly speaking, it was below my own expectation (> 90%), I wish I can do better two years later ^_^.

My tips and experience are summarized below:

1. Solid understanding on these fundamental pillar services: IAM, EC2, S3, RDS and VPC, I feel these covered more than 60% of the quiz (just a rough number IMHO, correct me if i am wrong).
2. Good overall understanding on CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Route53, SQS, SWF, Storage Gateway, CloudFront, doing practice exam and reading their FAQs would be sufficient.
3. #1 + #2 above should’ve secure 80%+, spend 80% of your exam preparation on them should be a right strategy to pass the final exam. However, please do not assume you can smash every single question which belongs to #1+#2, questions can be really tricky (even Ryan couldn’t make it 100% ^_^)
4. For some numbers/limits that may come up in the exam, but they are not easy to remember and very easy to got messed up, you can list them on a small paper, read them 5 minutes before getting into the final exam, I posted mine below FYI:) 

Note:  I wouldn’t bother referring any detailed knowledge points for #1/#2 above or other services like Kinesis, SNS, Server Migration service, etc because Ryan had done an outstanding job in his course, thank you, Ryan! Hat off to you!

I shared my learning notes and small paper for “last-5-minutes quick catching” before starting, hope it can help you a little bit:

Complete learning notes: https://www.evernote.com/l/AAGRf3_SHGdA068R-d-YzKpsmHAodYtV-kk

last-5-minutes small paper: https://www.evernote.com/l/AAEEv-F5bLhEgpL9Chi90FDu3XLnVSmCpZU