Cloud on mhemeryck

AWS SAA-C03

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Certification

At the beginning of 2026, I worked towards my AWS certification. Earlier, I did my GCP certification, as you can read in my GCP ACE blog post.

The reason to consider the AWS certification as well started from a change at work: the decision had been taken somewhere in 2025 to shift the company from GCP to AWS as the main cloud platform. As part of that, the idea was that all devs would join in a weekly routine where we would try to follow an online learning path by Pluralsight¹. Ideally, some of us would then also take the AWS certification exam, since it would be a tangible goal to work towards. Naturally, I followed along in all those sessions.

At the end of those sessions, I didn’t immediately take the exam, since I didn’t feel well-prepared (I was basically too involved with another side project). For the beginning of 2026, I figured the time was right to pick up the pace again and focus solely on the exam.

The AWS certification levels follow a similar reasoning as those for GCP. There are basically again 3 + 1 levels:

foundational: entrance levels, also for non-technical levels
associate: technical level, all-round fundamental skills
professional: advanced role-based certifications
specialty: specific technical domains

Compared to GCP, there is also an associate developer certification, but quite early on, we decided to go in the direction of the Solutions Architect certification. This certification focuses more on the holistic picture, getting to know the different services, whereas the developer is really more tailored towards work as an application developer.

Having done the GCP certification before and just having practical day-to-day hands-on experience with GCP meant that a lot of the concepts were already quite familiar to me. For a great deal of services that GCP provides, AWS almost always has an equivalent.

My general feeling though is that AWS for some things has more managed services and that they also integrate better than what I was used to in GCP. I particularly find the serverless offering in AWS a lot better, certainly when thinking e.g. about AWS lambda.

How did I prepare?

As mentioned in the intro, my main first focus point in 2025 was the Pluralsight AWS learning paths. It was a sequence of 5 learning paths, i.e. sequence of courses all centered around a specific portion of AWS (e.g compute, storage, scaling, …) Each of those also contained what were called Labs, which are essentially guided exercises to carry out in a managed AWS on-the-fly sandbox accounts. For each of those courses, I had also taken the time to summarize basically each of the course wrap-sessions. New now was that I could use LLMs to assist me in building this set of course notes.

By the time I started my reboot of 2026, the 2025 course had been revamped by Pluralsight. Even though perhaps not completely necessary, I also took the full 2026 version of the updated course in the end.

Apart from the Pluralsight material, I also looked into the AWS official exam guide. It clearly lists the 4 main sections and focus points of the exam. Another source that AWS provides is AWS Skill Builder. Skill Builder is a very broad platform put forward by AWS itself and also has courses, practice exams and overviews, both paid and free. I found it useful in the sense that it contained a video overview of the official exam guide. Additionally, it also featured some practice exams. Two whitepapers the exam guide also recommends you to look into are the AWS well-architected framework and AWS security. I’ve found the well-architected framework follows the exam structure (or the other way around) quite well. It’s also generally an interesting document since it communicates the spirit of working with AWS, beyond any certification.

The key way to prepare however are practice exams. They give you a good insight on how the exam is structured and doing a lot of those typically reveals recurring themes and things to look out for. The Pluralsight platform provided a large selection of practice questions to go through. Next to those, there are also other practice resources out there, though I would be careful to stick to legitimate material. In this instance as well, I really leveraged LLMs to help me solve questions and get more in-depth details in case of follow-up questions.

I also looked into finding a proper book as a study guide, e.g. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA-C03 Exam by Ben Piper. The reviews for those weren’t too good though, so I didn’t further look into this one.

One advantage of leaving a year between my first run through the Pluralsight courses and the second one was that I also had the time to gain more hands-on experience at work on AWS. Additionally, I also already had some experience with GCP, which I feel was quite transferable to some extent.

What’s the exam like?

The exam consists of 65 questions, of which 50 are scored and 15 are unscored. The unscored questions are new test questions which are added. Obviously, you are not told which question is scored or unscored …

There’s a possibility to do the exam online or on-site in an exam center. I chose to do the exam on-site, since that means I didn’t need to bother myself to comply with all exam regulations (it’s basically handled by the exam center).

Question types include multiple choice and multiple response.

The exam covers 4 domains:

secure architectures
resilient architectures
high-performing architectures
cost-optimized architectures

Important to know is that each question is linked to one domain and the scores are weighed across the domains.

The passing score is 720 / 1000 of the weighted score.

How did I do on the exam?

I passed!

Unlike the GCP exam, I now also got a score, being 856 / 1000.

I think I was overall well prepared, but the main struggle I still found at times that this format of exam is at some point really about guessing the intent of it. Depending on said intent, different answers can be valid at the same time.

Practical advice for preparing

Practical experience with cloud-based environments helps a great deal. The fact I already had hands-on experience through my job with GCP and AWS means I already knew most of the technologies. From my point of view though, I don’t really use all of those services. Additionally, if I do, it’s also through some infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), which is a different premise than what the exam presupposes.

Understanding what’s on the exam also helps, so be sure to e.g. look up the AWS official exam guide. The whitepapers, even though interesting, I don’t think were really that relevant.

The Pluralsight learning paths were also interesting to get a good overview on the theoretical part. Regarding theory, I would say that it’s quite important to know some numbers / orders of magnitude. Good examples of these are the different kinds of block storage, object storage, compute, … and their related pricing.

Compared to the GCP exam, I did not prepare with a book this time. I would say that the Pluralsight courses basically took that function this time.

The key ingredient I would still say though is to do a lot of practice questions. Generally, learning by heart is discouraged, but my personal feeling is that doing the questions just prepares you well for the format of the exam. Additionally, after doing a lot of those, you would typically see a lot of recurring themes, which then makes it easier to spot it on the exam.

Conclusions

How do I think about having achieved this certification as well? Well, overall, I have to admit I feel a bit mixed about it in hindsight.

There are the clear advantages in that it aids me in my day-to-day job, potentially my longer-term career. Another reason I started again on this was to prove to myself that I could commit to this and reach a tangible goal.

After having achieved it though, I wonder if there’s that much added value to it. My experience with GCP is to a large extent transferable to AWS as well, so doing another certification was likely less necessary. Additionally, I don’t really feel it’s the main direction I want to evolve into anyway for my career, since I’m more interested in application development.

I do believe in this notion of DevOps – the original one, where application developers can handle their own infra – not the one with Ops people reinventing themselves with a new term. But that topic is perhaps something for a different post …

formerly known as ACloudGuru ↩︎

GCP ACE

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Google Cloud Platform Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

The past few months, I did spend quite some of my leisure time getting my Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certification.

I have always been interested in understanding infrastructure and doing operational work. In my current job, we do use GCP quite extensively for our infrastructure needs and consequently I was given the opportunity there to train on GCP.

One of the approaches of learning for a cloud platform turned out to be registering for GCP certification. Certification entails that you take an exam to show the knowledge attained.

At first, I was a bit hesitant for the need of certification since I had no intention of really needing to prove my knowledge. In hindsight, I would say that the certification was a good way to steer my learning of GCP and afterwards as a proof mainly to myself of my level of knowledge.

GCP provides 3 tiers of certification:

foundational: the bare minimum, mainly targeted at non-technical levels
associate: technical level, all-round fundamental skills to work with GCP
professional: targeted technical functions, such as architects, data analysts etc.

I did skip the foundational level since I felt it is mainly for non-technical roles and went straight for the associate level; Associate Cloud Engineer or ACE.

How did I prepare?

The first place to start from really is the official GCP ACE start page. It clearly lists all the different steps, including what is expected on the exam, where to look for training, links to sample questions up to actually where to practically register and take the exam.

One of the training options shown on that page is the Cloud Skills Boost platform. Cloud Skills Boost is a platform affiliated with Google and provides multiple ways of learning about GCP. There are theoretical lessons in video format, explaining in practical terms all the different components GCP has to offer, why they’re there and how you are supposed to use them. An important part of the training is not just cramming all there is to know about GCP, but getting a feeling of best practices. Apart from that, there are the lab sessions, which do give the ability to do actual work in a sandbox GCP environment, purposely set up around a given topic. Personally, I found this the biggest advantage of the Cloud Skills Boost platform, since it really gives you the possibility to interact with GCP in a meaningful manner. The platform has multiple of these training sessions consisting of a combination of lessons and labs. Training sessions can subsequently be part of one or multiple learning paths. I specifically took all training sessions of the GCP ACE learning path as part of my path to certification.

For me personally, I felt the Cloud Skills Boost platform was excellent for getting a lot of the basics right and getting proper hands-on experience in a multitude of environment through the labs. However, I did not really feel I did have a proper exhaustive view of what GCP all entails. To close that gap, I also did read the GCP official study guide by Dan Sullivan. The book closely follows the outline of the required knowledge for the certification. It details all of the products and features of GCP to a reasonable level of detail. Interesting for the exam is that each chapter concludes with a set of example questions (and answers), not necessarily tailored towards the exam, but it does give an interesting way to test your knowledge. For the sake of the exam, I read through the entire book and did all the practice questions.

Finally, I also read through a number of blog posts such as this blog post from devoteam or this blog post containing exam notes essentially summarizing a bit of the same information I have here myself. Additionally, I also did take the example exam online. The intent of the actual exam is not to learn each individual service or feature of GCP by heart. However, in some cases, certain practice exam questions really pointed out some specific kinds of questions which seemed to come back a lot of the time, which prompted me to review certain aspects.

What’s the exam like?

The exam I took consisted of 50 questions. Each question is a multiple choice question, with each 4 possible answers. Only 1 answer is deemed the correct answer. During the taking of the test, it is possible to mark a question to review later on.

A time limit of 2 hours is given; I think I did a first pass through all questions in about 1 hour, which gave me enough time to review all my questions a couple of times.

The exam can be taken both online or in an exam center. I did opt for an exam in a center, just to avoid any potential technical issues from my (linux-based) computer.

The passing score is 70% of all questions, i.e. 35 correct answers.

How did I do on the exam?

I passed!

I did feel the exam was hard enough though. In some cases, despite all preparation I still felt I was questioned about certain GCP features I had not learned about before.

I cannot tell how well I really did, since the exam results are only presented in a single pass-or-fail score.

Some generic tips

Learning-by-doing really helps and is also considered essential by Google themselves. Apart from my day-to-day experience in my current job, the Cloud Skills Boost labs were a really great way of attaining this.

Even though “cramming” for the exam is discouraged, I think it is possible to some extent to focus on that as well. The official study guide gives in that sense a much more exhaustive overview – be sure though to use an up-to-date version. The practice exam also pointed to some knowledge gaps in my case.

Be aware that you cannot and also should not know everything. The point is more to understand and pick up on the logical structure built into GCP allowing you to reason about specific issues. Example: you cannot know every possible gcloud command, but there is usually some logical structure to it.

Understand the intent and use cases of each GCP service and focus on best practices.

Conclusions

Starting my training somewhere beginning of December 2023, I did take my exam on February 22 2024. In less than a week, I did get my online certificate.

I would not say that I have become a full expert on GCP, but I also don’t believe that is really the intent. I certainly would say I feel more confident in using GCP and devops works in general since it helped me to get a more exhaustive overview.