Passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam

Passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. This was back when the cert was still relatively new and the study materials were mostly whitepapers and re:Invent talk recordings.

The exam tests your ability to design systems on AWS that are available, cost-effective, and fault tolerant. Lots of scenarios: "A company needs X, which architecture would you recommend?" You need to know VPC networking, EC2 instance families, S3 storage classes, RDS multi-AZ, and a dozen other services well enough to pick the right combination under constraints.

What actually helped most wasn't studying — it was building things. I'd been running workloads on AWS for a couple of years before taking the exam, so a lot of the questions mapped to problems I'd already solved (or messed up) in production. The auto-scaling questions were easy because I'd already been paged at 2am when scaling policies weren't aggressive enough.