AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam: Field Notes

Background

I was recently fortunate to sit the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam at zero cost through an AWS promotion. I thought it would serve as an excellent indicator to help my new Nasstar colleagues, who are currently onboarding to the AWS platform at scale, while also satisfying my curiosity about the exam scope, content and difficulty.

As an experienced hand at AWS and Azure, with some seven+ years of hands-on experience. This is in addition to top-tier qualifications, including AWS Certified Security – Specialty and Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, and Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert.

I was confident it would require no prior preparation, so I set myself a challenge, scheduled the exam with just 24 hours notice, and promised myself not to look further than the exam guide for readiness as a baseline to entry.

Result

Fortunately, I passed the exam. No pass mark was provided, so I had no idea how successful I had been, although I did only take 15 of the allotted 90 minutes scheduled. I usually recommend revisiting the answers if time permits but felt no obligation to do so on this occasion. 

Observations

I was expecting to find this exam very similar to the Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals exam, a high-level exam covering the cloud platform at a conceptual level while requiring a basic understanding of essential platform services.

With this, I was surprised to find some quite advanced and relatively new AWS services covered in my exam that I would not naturally expect the target audience to understand. Therefore, it made for a much more challenging exam than the Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals exam and my entry-level cloud exam of choice.

Summary

I started off giving the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam little respect with a hit-and-hope mentality and ended up with what was a cheerfully challenging quarter-hour pop quiz on my favourite cloud platform.

I feel this exam deserves credit sitting under the somewhat challenging AWS Associate-level exams. Anyone obtaining the exam should feel credible and accomplished.

I now wait to see if additional benefits carry any fruit of this exercise, such as the count being applied to our AWS partner count and if it gets tagged to my APN Ambassador profile for additional contributor points. These would be a bonus and secondary to the experience learnt through taking the exam and disseminating this knowledge to my new team.

About Me

An accomplished APN ambassador, technical practice lead, principal Cloud architect and builder, with over 25 years of transformational IT experience working with organisations of all sizes and complexity.

I'm a proactive self-starter with great breadth and depth of technical expertise. An SME in AWS, Azure, and security with strong domain knowledge in central government. Extensive knowledge of Cloud, the Internet, and security technologies in addition to heterogeneous systems spanning Windows, *nix, virtualisation, application and systems management, networking, and automation.

I'm an evangelist of innovative technology, best practices, concise operational processes, and quality documentation. With an exceptional work ethic. Professional, diplomatic and approachable, always dependable and striving for customer satisfaction. Able to work well under pressure, independently or within a team, and use own initiative, with excellent communication skills and competence for designing and implementing creative solutions to quality, time and budget.

Outside of work, I'm a published author, digital music producer, and a black belt and instructor in Karate.