Preparing for AWS Certified SysOps Administrator– Associate Level Exam

AWS announced its SysOps Administrator Certification at Associate level sometime back. I recently appeared for the exam & sharing my experiences.

– Exam is 80 mins long – 55 Questions

– Majorly covering core services like EC2, RDS, VPC, ELB, Auto-Scaing, CloudWatch

– Few questions from SQS, OpsWorks, Elastic Beanstalk,

– Scenario based questions- Lot of scenarios with typical web application architecture – elb / ec2 – auto scaling / rds

* more towards maininng infrastructure & finding bottlenecks

Exam is divided into 7 major sections

1.0 Monitoring and Metrics:

2.0 High Availability

3.0 Analysis:

4.0 Deployment and Provisioning:

5.0 Data Management:

6.0 Security:

7.0 Networking
* cloudwatch to be properly studied – understand different metrices & their role
* troubleshooting – these 4 things are working fine in VPC, where will you look next
* Multi-AZ & Multi-Region sync
* opsworks events & elastic beanstalk – though questions were less
* questions regarding compliance / audits
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* Which services allow instance level access
* instance type for high io
* performance optimization – s3 bandwidth – parallel upload
* cost optimization – learn about use of reserved instances
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I will soon be posting some sample questions to give you an idea about the exam