AWS Certified, New Year, New Financial Year, New Goals!

Published: 3 minute read

First off, I would like to start off by wishing everyone a Happy (Lunar) New Year. It’s been awhile since I last posted and I thought it would be nice to write about whats been going on the past couple of months. As I mentioned in the previous post, during December I had a short break from work before the New Year starts. Aside from resting, I decided to also take this opportunity to catch up with technologies such as AWS, Dockers and Kubernetes.

So why these technologies? As you probably know by now, over the past year VMware as a company have been putting heavy focus around these areas of technologies. With the recent additions of companies like Pivotal and Hepito, it shows that VMware is serious about providing customers a platform where they can deliver Cloud Native Application with ease. And of course, I am not going to miss out on one of the biggest partnership announcement that VMware made with AWS! This partnership literally changes the way how VMware as a company can provide a full suite of cloud offerings to its customers.

I feel that its only right that I get myself equipped with the right knowledge in order to share with customers on how these technological trends will eventually affect them.

AWS Certified!

A personal goal of mine during the break was that I wanted to at least get myself certificated in AWS. I am glad to say that I am now certified as a AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate. The certification exam itself was not as difficult as I expected it to be. Questions were heavily scenario based as it focuses more on testing your understanding of how AWS solutions can help achieve a particular goal with the given requirements and constraints.

AWS SA Badge
Click on the image to check out my digital badge!

Study Tips

If you are looking for study tips and what not, I personally did not have a study plan that I stuck to before attempting the exam. As one of my prep work, I actually signed up for a 5 day AWS Solution Architect course provided by one of the AWS training partners during my break. This was a live classroom session which gave a crash course on the whole plethora of AWS solutions and how these solutions can come together to help achieve a particular scenario. I use the course materials provided to me as a baseline as to what I need to understand and I personally felt that was sufficient in terms of getting me the ‘PASS’.

In addition to those, here are a few additional study resources that I refer to:

  • Jayendra’s Blog - This blog is simply AMAZING. This gives you a full run down on what is expected of you to know during the exam.
  • ACloud Guru’s Forum - This seems to be one of the larger community forums where people share about their personal experience taking the exam. I found a couple of posts that were extremely helpful in terms of preparing me for the exam. One such example can be seen here. As of today, I would still say that the information provided in that post is still extremely relevant. However, do make an effort to look through the forums a week or so before your exam to check out what other exam candidates are sharing as AWS may update its exam.

New Year, New Financial Year, New Goals!

So now that FY19 has finally come to an end, looking back at the past year I must say it has been pretty amazing. It’s crazy how time flies and now I have officially spent a full Financial Year as a VMware employee. I experience how fast the company grew not only in terms of its profit but also its technology stack with all the different technology acquisitions and collaborations. All I can say is I am simply excited at what is to come this year.

One of my main goal this year is mainly to delve deeper into the Cloud Native Applications side of things. As technology progresses, people are constantly changing the way how applications is being developed and delivered in order to meet business demands. So feel free to join me on this journey as I will definitely be blogging about my experience.

Last not least, I wish everyone a prosperous year ahead!

Gong Xi Fa Cai!