Yet another 'How to' - with a twist !!

How did I crack Azure (AZ-900 – Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, AZ-301 – Microsoft Azure Architect Design), AWS - Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01), AWS - Certified Solution Architect - Associate (SAA-C02) in less than 6 months?

The best time to learn is ‘every day’. The next best time is during a ‘pandemic’!

Background –

First thing first – There will be multiple questions that will pass by you like a gust of wind when you think about appearing in these certification tests.

What is the need for me to appear for these exams after spending close to 25 years in the Industry? I am familiar with the practices, why do I have to spend so much money on certification ? Do I really have the time to do this? Answer to this is - Any investment on education is the best investment and if not today but tomorrow, ROI on education is guaranteed. A certification does provide the recognition and legitimacy to our education.

As, we all know, understand and see things, cloud is the way forward. Organizations are moving their workloads to cloud, and the remote working norm initiated by the pandemic will only expedite this. So, anything on premises will be legacy and things of the past like mainframes of yester years. So, it is now more than relevant to understand how things happen in cloud, so that you become a relevant contributor to the process of migration, development and you only not advise people to do certification on cloud, but you actually Walk the talk. 

Now how do you make sure that you understand cloud, there is no better way than someone like Cloud Service Provider (CSP) like Amazon, Microsoft or Google vouching for your knowledge and understanding through the process of certification.

Gratitude

Before I start, let me take a moment to thank and show my gratitude to the following people

1.      Covid-19 – Pandemic – It was a boon in disguise – lot of time to do self-study along with your day to day project work.

2.      Yash – who relentlessly kept me focused on achieving these certifications by reminding me again and again from time to time

3.      Bibhuti – For helping me to clear my doubts and strengthen my knowledge on Infrastructure, IP and security

4.      Debasis – for giving me the confidence, that If I can do it, you can do it too. He cleared the exam before me on Azure Fundamentals – AZ-900.

Let the journey begin

Process – Define the goal, Measure, Analyze, improve until consistency is achieved.

Goal

To have a fair amount of knowledge on AWS, AZURE and GCP in fixed amount of time with a fixed amount of cost. This means, to complete at least two certifications in 6 months in single attempt there by putting fixed cost. The goal is not far stretched and do able as there are training institute who provides certification on AWS and Azure in 6 months. Hence the goal is achievable, and it is realistic.

Keep reminding the goal - Reaffirming

Once the goal is defined, need to stay focused and choose a date for the exam and stick that date in a sticky note into the Bathroom mirror, so that you see the date and goal multiple times a day.

Start with the fundamentals to get your foundation strong. I started with Azure, based on my working experience with Azure and AWS, Azure was easy to pick up. The knowledge that you gain in project, is good enough to work in Project but appearing for an exam a formal test is different. It is like working in a movie where as an actor you get multiple chance to correct your action where as in Theater, it is one take, which means you have to be extremely confident about your deliverables (your answers), you need to have experience to course correct it and be able to innovate your answers based on the scenarios.

Measure

Creating your baseline – If you have experience in working in any of the cloud, then do take sample test from multiple vendors and sites available for free, to see where you stand. This helps understanding the GAP between the Goal and the reality.

Analyze

Shortening the GAP between your baseline and marks to pass the exam in a quick time frame (Refer to your goal)

When the knowledge grows, the motivation strengthens from within. What did I do to increase my knowledge?

This is three step process – This takes back to my childhood days and piece of advice from my Dad, in order to learn something comprehensively, you need to READ, LISTEN and WRITE.

Looking at the cost factor and based on my experience, it was not needed for me to enroll into any institute as the cost is extremely high for completing the course. You are the best teacher and guide for yourself.

Read – all the study material provided by the respective cloud service provider for each exam chapter wise and it is available for free. Reaffirm your knowledge by taking the practice test after each exam. Yu will not be able to answer all the questions correctly in the 1st attempt, but the results will improve after each try. This reading will give you an opportunity to cover all the breadth of the exam and create a foundation on the exam patterns.

Listen – This can be done by enrolling for courses by the institutes, but this is expensive and beyond the budget. So, listen to all videos related to chapters based on the views from YouTube provided by the CSP as well as enroll for courses in UDEMY, the fees are extremely nominal. I will talk about courses that I completed / referred towards the end of this writings. The courses are usually 15hrs. to 18 hrs. long video nicely led organized chapter wise but be prepared to spend around 50 hours to complete the course. This will help to understand things much quicker as your doubts from your reading will get clarified to an extent. Make sure to complete each exercise provided after end of each chapter.

Write (Practice) – How do you practice and where do you practice your understanding? – Get free accounts provided by CSP and those free accounts are valid for about 1 year and which is good enough for practicing your concepts and understanding. Like Karaoke, sing along, while reading and listening, practice all the exercises, copy and paste the code from the study material provided by the CSP in their course material to the console to understand the outcome. Bring in your experience, bring the projects that you have done earlier and try to develop the project using the services provided by the CSP. While doing that keep Performance, Availability, Scalability, Security, Decoupling, Resiliency, Cost (one-time cost, pay as you go, on demand etc.) and support in mind and all the questions are going to be around these concepts. So usually, when we buy any product, we ask for the cost of the product, the performance of the product, the cost to maintain the product and if there is any issue in the product, how is this going to be supported by the manufacturer , how long will it take to fix the issues ?

Improve

Reaffirmation - Everyday towards the end of your day, keep revising the chapters that you covered and frame questions and answers those questions without referring to content. This should be done and completed in your mind or by writing before going to bed. The answers that you know for the questions will flash immediately. The ones that you are not able to answer, you will struggle but if you would have practiced the conversion of old projects to the respective clouds, you will find multiple ways to answer the questions and all answers may be right but key is to find the answer which is cheapest and confirms to the fundamentals of the CSP on which the services are developed like elasticity, performance, decoupling, turnaround, time to reach the market, speed , security agility, decoupling etc.

Work on your strengths – make sure that all questions that are coming from the topics on which you are master, you should score 100%.

Improve on your weakness – At least get your concepts clear on the topics which you think can be an issue to get higher marks. So, talk to a person who you think is good on that subject. I talked and discussed on Infrastructure, IP addresses, Security with my friend.

Prepare at least 1200 questions for each exam (Ratio 1 exam question is 15 practice question) to understand the pattern and when you take these practice exams, take those in which the questions as well as answers get shuffled every time you attempt.

Art of elimination

Once you read the question, the answer should come to your mind without looking at the multiple option answers provided for the questions. If you do not know the answer, then the art of elimination will come into play, like your Who wants to be a millionaire or KBC, but you do not have liberty to call a friend or audience pooling or computer help for 50:50. You need to do it on your own. So, this can be done, if all the course material at least at 80% level is covered, then the option that you do not know or understand will be the answer to the question.

Practice, Practice, Practice – Once somewhere I had heard, when you want to buy a house look for three things that is location, location and location. So here it is practice, practice, practice that is Read, Listen and Write.

Track your questions and answers

Track of all questions that you answer wrong, then go back and analyze the question and understand where things have gone wrong… Here are the three basic mistakes that we do

1.      Quickly jump into the answer

2.      Thoroughly not reading the questions

3.      Missing the basic key words – like least cost, maximum gain, support at the minimum cost, elasticity, resiliency, availability etc.

Once we start doing it again and again, then you will get used to look for the details, you will learn how to gain patience, stay calm and will start analyzing the questions before answering.

When you read the questions, answer the questions without looking at the options and usually the 1st answer that comes to mind will be the right answer. Overanalyzing the questions may lead to lot of confusions, keep the things simple.

Consistency

You should start scoring more than 93% percent consistently for at least 5 times over a period of one week on your practice exams.

Ownership & Accountability

Put your own money into the certification fees, that is basically having skin in the game. Do not take it from your companies, this way you can bring in lot of ownership and accountability as certifications fees are very high, so there is no second chance. Certifications are all yours to keep.

D – Day – Book your exam date and slot

Once you are prepared and confident, book a slot at a test center. I will advise not to take the test from your home as there may be internet connection issue, power issue and on top of that someone will be watching you through the camera. Many may not feel comfortable. So let the power issue, internet connectivity issue be handled by the test center. If any issue, you are covered. Do not worry for CORONA, now Corona is our part of life, we need to understand how to live with it. There are lot of safety measures are being followed at the institute and when I gave the exam, it was during the 2nd unlock.

Conclusion

1.      My inference – Passing AZ-900 and AWS Cloud practitioner will be easy as these are at fundamental levels.

2.      AWS Solution Architect – Associate was very tough, since new exam patterns came in.

3.      AZ-301 - Case study solving was tough.

4.      Questions will be testing the following concepts

a.      Storage – Cost to store and Cost to fetch (different layers)

b.      Compute – Serverless

c.      Private and Public subnet, understanding IP Address

d.      Architecture – Performance Efficiency, Availability, Resiliency (Selfheal) Scalability (Elasticity), Decoupling (Independence, Microservices), operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization

e.       Whatever case studies that you find, solve them through Azure services as well as through AWS services.

5.      Have two laptops or one Tab/Phone and a laptop – The reason for doing this is in tab/phone/laptop you can follow the course and in the other laptop you can do your exercise, so you do not switch between labs and theory.

6.      You may fail – but hope for the best be prepared for the worst. On a bad day, players like Sachin, Dhoni, Nadal, Roger Federer, Djokovic, Messi, Ronaldo - they all fail, so it may happen to you.

My reference materials

1.      Free tier connection from Azure and AWS

2.      Cover all chapters related to the exam topics

3.      Sequence of examination – AZ-900, AZ-301, AWS Global Practitioner, AWS – Solution Architect Associate

4.      Main Study and Course Material –

a.      Azure – by Alan Rodrigues (I covered AZ-900, AZ-300, AZ-301) in UDEMY

b.      AWS – by Ryan Kroonenburg – A Cloud Guru – in UDEMY

c.      Azure & AWS – from Whizlabs (Free Sample test as well as practice test)

d.      Try Practice question by Jon Bonso on AWS and many other Practice set on– UDEMY (Thumb rule remember for 1 Question in exam – find 15 questions for practice)