One of my friends, pursuing to be a cloud engineer, was prepping for the AWS Solutions Architect certificate. That was actually enough for me to get interested. I've heard vaguely about EC2 instances, Fargate, etc, but I never knew them well enough to actually use / talk about them. After it piqued my interest, I researched more about cloud and realize the importance of cloud computing. The more I read articles about cloud, I began to understand that it's actually an advantage for developers to learn cloud computing.


I wanted to get a step in cloud get started with the basics. Many people had mentioned to skip the CCP and go straightfor the Solution Architect role away, but I wanted a slow start and warm up to the available services first. I prepped for around ~2 weeks for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam, took it, and passed. I learned a TON in the process.


I used these materials:

What helped me

Drawing diagrams, connections

My iPad notes + Freeform

Because AWS services have lots of interdependencies, I found drawing the connections extremly helpful in reinforcing the core concepts. For example, drawing the structure of VPC & subnets with NAT Gateways, or visualizing the regions/AZs/outposts/local zones helped the concepts to stick better.

Obsidian

This is kind of related to the previous tip, but Obsidian immensely helped me with reinforcing core services thanks to the linking feature. It helped me to backtrack related concepts/links, and form connections. I'd recommend using Obsidian for almost any learning subject really, personally I find it extremely useful.

My Obsidian notes outline

My Obsidian notes graph

I swear it only looks scary on the surface. The graph view looks cool, but the more useful part are the backlinks when you're taking down notes on a subject.

Using AI

I used a custom Chat GPT available for free, to reinforce a lot of concepts, especially those that were confusing for me. I used it especially to ask about similar services, for example CloudTrail VS GuardDuty or EBS VS EFS. Also, I found it very helpful to ask it different scenarios of fictional companies that pick different pricings for core services like EC2 or S3.

Practice Exams

Classic (and obvious) tip.. Nothing to reiterate. There are tons of resources out there, for example this github repo that contains a lot of practice exams. Unfortunately I knew this resource existed after I took this exam, but it seems to have good reviews.

Testing your environment

Okay so this normally shouldn't be a problem, but even though I had tested my environment the day before I still had tons of issues. For example, the testing system (OnVUE) requires that there should be no running tasks in the background, but on my laptop, there were start up applications that randomly started during check-in. I had to manually disable all of them and restart the whole process, which wasted about 30 minutes of my time.

Other useful links

What's next?

I'm hoping to dive deeper into more hands-on projects with AWS, more likely a personal project. The AWS CPP exam certainly helped me to gain the confidence to use AWS services more efficiently.

Also, I know CPP is just the beginning, but studying cloud computing unexpectedly forced me to think in terms of components and scalability, and modularity. Thinking about connecting different AWS services made me grasp the concept of flow more clearly, like how data moves between services (like API Gateway -> Lambda -> DynamoDB). Now, I have some questions I would ask more often when doing projects:

  • What are the modular components?
  • How do they interact?
  • What are the bottlenecks?

As a result, I now have a better view to think more about systems, which I didn't really expect. Overall, I think it's a really good stepping stone for the next cert Solutions Architect.