Antonio Angelino
@AntoAngelino
Founder at @pulseasync, building the next comm platform to help people discuss, align, and collaborate asynchronously. AWS magician since 2012.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional: 2016 vs 2022
I got all available AWS certifications in 2016 (3 associate and 2 professional) and the 2 specialties available in 2017.
I retook the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam yesterday, and I passed it again 🎉 credly.com/badges/421c23e6-a472-4d71-b5e9-392fe9a26b67
My thoughts about AWS and the exam
The AWS garden was quite smaller when I got my pro cert. Amazon Step Functions, AWS Organizations, AWS Config, AWS Secrets Manager, EKS, Fargate, AWS SSO, Lex, Polly, Systems Manager, and many more services I daily use didn't exist. ECS, ACM, and EFS were brand-new toys!
Architecting and doing Ops / DevOps on AWS was quite different. Serverless was not a thing. Splitting the workload across many AWS accounts was a nightmare, and you basically relied on foundation services like Cloudformation (no YAML yet, sorry!) or OpsWorks.
Short digression: I clearly remember when AWS Lambda was launched in 2016. I was a bit skeptical, but my friend and (ex)colleague @alex_casalboni immediately recognized the upcoming paradigm shift that Lambda has brought. He was right 👏
Since many services didn't even exist, the exam I took in 2016 was way different. It was more on architecting using the AWS "foundational" blocks and the most complex questions were the AWS VPC-related ones. I think the current exam is more enterprise-grade.
Along with questions regarding how to design architectures with EC2, Lambda, RDS, Dynamo, ECS, etc, there are a lot of questions about AWS Organizations in combination with AWS Config, Systems Manager, and Trusted Advisor.
Network-related questions are about designing and interconnecting hybrid infrastructures (on-premise + cloud) using several regions and workloads distributed on dozens of VPCs. It's definitely not the normal use case you come across every day using AWS in a startup environment.😉
I don't know if it is due to my many years of experience, but I think that the questions related to the design of new solutions, their improvement, and the migration of infrastructures are the easiest to answer and, fortunately, also those that have the most weight in the exam.
It was a very intense and tiring 3 hours given the amount of text to process in order to answer correctly, but I enjoyed it. I will recertify for the AWS DevOps Professional in a few weeks and am curious to see what questions await me.
AWS has grown a lot in recent years and has removed a lot of barriers even for junior developers that want to launch a new service without thinking about "weird stuff" like VPC or AS groups or EKS clusters. And, when they're ready to...
And, when they're ready to get their hands dirty, tools like AWS CDK can hide a lot of complexity and offer a smooth experience to roll into the rabbit hole 😄