The next one on the list – back to AWS with the AWS Certified Advanced Networking certification. This is a good exam to get some real networking core understanding out of AWS services, which fit in well with my background of infrastructure networking.
The test contained 65 questions, and you are given 3 hours to complete (which I think is more that you need – 2 hrs would be enough for most people. 3 hr is more like the SA Pro test with lots of reading for each question). I took advantage of the test from home proctoring that AWS and PearsonVue are now doing, making it comfortable to sit it from my home office. I’m not sure what the pass mark is – I have ready about people getting in the low 70% and passing, mine was over 80% so a pass. It may be scaled as well on some questions (and I think some of the questions are trial questions they are including to see if they can use them – they really don’t tell you much at the start of the test).
In terms of study – I did:
The AWS Guru course (2019 edition) – link [ HERE ]. This was a very good course to cover a large part of the subject matter. I don’t think its enough to get over the line with just doing the course, but it will get you close.
Reference the official guide (this is a good book to have) – link [ HERE ]. It was good to be able to look up small sections when I wanted to see what was needed to be known.
Read blogs – especially this one by Jayendra – link [ HERE ]. I found this a good place to do final study with hints on some questions and links to posts that explained some topics that I didn’t get or understand from the other areas.
Built VPCs, Subnets, EC2, DHCP options, ACLs, Security Groups and Route 53 public/private DNS in my AWS console. Nothing beats actually doing it live – and its so cheap to run up some servers and systems and test how things all work. Its hard to test all technologies, but play with as many as you can as part of the learning.
One of the AWS posts that I studied was on ELB – which is a tough topic since an ALB and NLB (and CLB) can do such similar things now (e.g. sticky sessions – you can’t just say that’s ALB as the std answer). I’m not sure if the test is based on when it was written on knowing the latest updates that AWS has done to include more features in its product ranges, so its good to just be across all the different things each ELB does.
This is the ELB post – [ HERE ].
Another good post is VPC limits – [ HERE ].
I had already done the AWS SA Associate in 2018 and have used AWS for a few years now, so that helped. But dive in and get started with the tutorials and get some hands on – you will gain lots of AWS Cloud knowledge and be ready to move on in the Cloud Networking world !
Good luck, any questions feel free to contact me via this blog or linkedin.
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