Preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional-Level Certification Exam

This blog article is written by Salim Masani. It will share my exam experience and strategies that helped me pass the AWS Certification Exam. This blog article was originally written in English by BhaveshGoswami. I have updated it to reflect the latest exam trends.
AWS Certification Exam Levels
Below is an illustration of the AWS Certification tracks that are currently available for professionals.
Source: aws.amazon.com
AWS offers 9 certifications. These include 3 Associate, 3 Specialty, and 1 Cloud Essential certification.
Amazon recently introduced AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials, which is a foundation-level program. This program covers important Cloud concepts and AWS services, including EC2, VPC & RDS as well as security model, pricing, support plans, pricing, and architecture. This certification provides an overview of AWS Cloud and is intended to educate sales, marketing, project managers and other IT professionals.
AWS offers 3 certification tracks for associate level:
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Level
AWS Certified Developer – Associate Level
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate Level
AWS offers 2 tracks of certification for professionals:
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Level (Architect Associate Certification required)
AWS Certified DevOps Engineering Professional Level (Developer, SysOps Associate Certification are prerequisites)
AWS offers the following Specialty Certifications that can be obtained after clearing any Associate Certifications.
Advanced Networking
Big Data
Security
About Professional Level Certification Exam
Amazon states that the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Level exam validates advanced technical skill and experience in designing distributed systems and applications on AWS platform.” It was an extremely comprehensive exam that covered many real-world scenarios. Exam questions were based on these cases. It might be difficult to answer some questions if you haven’t worked on projects that involve architecting infrastructure on AWS. Below are the objectives of the certification exam and the types of questions you can expect to see.
Pre-requisites
These are the pre-requisites to take this certification exam.
Cleared AWS Certified Solutions Administrator – Associate Level certification. Click here to learn more about AWS Solutions Architect – Associate Level Certification.
This certification is not a prerequisite, but you will need to have some training and hands-on experience using AWS. Experience in architecting solutions that involve multiple services on AWS is required.
Exam Overview
The certification exam costs $300
There are approximately 80 multiple-choice questions. The exam does not require any writing or hands-on tasks. The exam lasts 170 minutes. It is a long exam so you should be well rested in order to be able continue for three hours.
The passing percentage isn’t disclosed. AWS states that it is derived from statistical analysis and is subject to change. Many LinkedIn discussions believe it is around 65%. However, nobody can be certain.
The exam results are available immediately and the certification is valid up to two years.
If you fail, you can retake the exam after one month. Maximum three attempts are allowed per year. Each attempt is subject to a separate charge.
Exam Contents
Below are the exam domains along with the extent they are represented in this exam.
1.0 High Availability (15%)
This section focuses on the ability to create high availability solutions using AWS infrastructure. First, one must understand.