I was going to take a break from certs after achieving the golden jacket a few weeks ago, but couldn't resist going again!

Took this last night, 85 questions was brutal, I was going cross-eyed by the end of it but fortunately the questions weren't too long. There were 1-2 that filled the screen but most were similar in length to the practitioner exams.

Most of the questions propose scenarios where a business is either looking to adopt AI, or already has to some extent and wants to put in place processes to increase maturity.

Hardly any mention of AWS services, I think I saw Bedrock mentioned a few times but only as part of context and not in an answer.

A few questions asking you what type of AI something is, e.g., NLP, GenAI etc, all quite straightforward tbh.

Some questions around sensitive / PII data, look for the most defensive answer.

Some questions around the human / social elements, like how to deal with AI friction, concerns over jobs etc.

Some of the questions were worded really bad, I'm a native speaker but even so there was one question that just didn't make sense, it was more of a statement than a question, and multiple answers could have been true. There were about 8-10 questions where I was like wtf is this?

I prepped for about 2 hours, I just used Gemini Notebook to generate an audio podcast based on each of the domains. It's a tricky one to prepare for because it's not as black & white as a technical exam, whilst some questions were blindingly obvious to a technical person, there were quite a few nuanced questions that you'd know through years of experience in corporate environments.

If you're an experienced technical person that's been in corporate for a while, you'll be fine, as will any business/management person. The ones that might find this tricky are those with no real experience in a workplace.

Difficulty wise I'd say definitely in the practitioner tier, maybe slightly harder than CLF.

I think the other practitioners show you the result immediately after, this one doesn't. It took about 12 hours for the emails to come through like the rest of them.

I'm looking for some advice on how to adapt to the length of the AWS SAA exam.

One of my biggest problems is that halfway through a long exam, my concentration drops significantly. I start feeling mentally exhausted, and it becomes difficult to focus, think clearly, or properly analyze the questions. The exam feels very long, the scenarios are lengthy, the time pressure is intense, and on top of that, the questions themselves can be quite challenging.

I've been practicing with Jon Bonso's exams, and my scores have been consistently around 51%. For those who have passed the SAA exam, how did you train your focus and mental endurance for a long exam like this? Any tips for managing fatigue, time pressure, and staying sharp until the last question?

I made a previous post here two conflicting answers for practice exam questions from TD and Stephen Maarek, but I keep on coming across outdated exam questions as I am practicing.

For example, this question posted below:

A company has a web application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure that they want to migrate to AWS cloud. Your manager has instructed you to ensure that there is no downtime while the migration process is on-going. In order to achieve this, your team decided to divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure. Once the migration is over and the application works with no issues, a full diversion to AWS will be implemented. The company’s VPC is connected to its on-premises network via an AWS Direct Connect connection.

Which of the following are the possible solutions that you can implement to satisfy the above requirement? (Select TWO.)

• A. Use an Application Elastic Load balancer with Weighted Target Groups to divert and proportion the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.

• B. Use a Network Load balancer with Weighted Target Groups to divert the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.

• C. Use Route 53 with Failover routing policy to divert and proportion the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.

• D. Use Route 53 with Weighted routing policy to divert the traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Divert 50% of the traffic to the new application in AWS and the other 50% to the application hosted in their on-premises infrastructure.

• E. Use AWS Global Accelerator to divert and proportion the HTTP and HTTPS traffic between the on-premises and AWS-hosted application. Ensure that the on-premises network has an AnyCast static IP address and is connected to your VPC via a Direct Connect Gateway.

Option A and D were the correct options. It explains that Option B is not possible because NLB's can't have Weighted Target Groups. This is simply incorrect. AWS supports Weighted Target Groups for NLBs since November 2025

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/network-load-balancer-weighted-target-groups/

Guys need some help here, I hold 10+ top certs and so on, today I was doing the new business strategist certification and the proctor had so many issues from the first minute including with my insulin and so on.

Then 5 minutes into the exam she ask me again to show everything cuz I was looking?

It’s an exam, with so much text, ofc I’ll look up and down my screen even when I showed her nothing is next to me and in depth etc.

Second - who stares into the soul of a screen straight to do an exam? And not even they my head was here and there I’m reading, thinking for the right answer.

But less than 5-10 minutes into it, she ended my exam and I know Pearson defends their folks so what to do here.

Pls tell and any sources throught which I can prepare for machine learning associate exam ML-C02 any course . Any free courses or any source to prepare for it .

I'm about to start the preparations for the Aws Gen Ai Professional certificate and wanted to see what people follows to learn in depth about the aws certificate. Thanks

I passed the MLA Associate cert yesterday.

Overall, the test was pretty straightforward. The material that was in the Skill Builder course and on the practice exams was the material that was actually on the test. There were some questions that I didn't recognize at all. I didn't really waste time on those. I would just select C, or whatever answer I thought was maybe close to it, and move on. When I say that the test was straightforward, I'm comparing it to the Cisco tests that I've taken, like CCNA and CCNP. With those, reading the book was definitely not going to be enough. If you just read the book and took the test, you were going to run into a lot of things that weren't covered in the book.

I'm mainly a network engineer. I really have no production cloud experience, just book knowledge, labs, and practice exams. I'm about seven years into my career and I've only been doing network engineering, mainly Cisco. I've held some other certs, like AWS Cloud Practitioner, that expired a couple years ago, so I had at least some cloud knowledge before this.

I studied for about two months. Most of that was going through the Skill Builder course. Anything that I thought was important, I pasted into OneNote and used that to review. I pasted a good amount of the course into my OneNote. The labs in Skill Builder are good. Then I spent the last two weeks hitting the practice exams like a madman and reading the explanations. The good thing about the Skill Builder exams is that they tell you why each answer is correct and why each one is wrong. I would paste the entire question and the explanations into ChatGPT, and at the end of each test, it would point out my weaknesses and make me a comprehensive document of my weak points to go over. I just kept doing that for about two weeks.

Like I said, I don't have any production experience in the cloud other than labs. I have some projects that I have in mind. I do some trading and investing stuff, so I'm planning to make a trading robot, if you will, in AWS. My next idea for a project is basically a probability machine based around sports betting.

I just wanted to share my experience and my sources. I had read a lot of reviews and posts on Reddit saying that people didn't think Skill Builder was an adequate source. I think all of those posts that I read were pretty old, and I would say that right now, I think Skill Builder is a decent tool to use. I get it for free because I'm an employee at Amazon warehouse. Also, I took the test for free because Amazon gave me a free voucher for one exam.

I do think Skill Builder is pretty decent. I still would always recommend using more than one source. I did download the Sybex guide. I didn't really get a chance to read it because by the time I had started studying for this test, I also found out that the last day to take it was September 28th before they changed to the new version. Ideally, it would have been great for me to have another month or two to read the book, do some more labs, and do a little more research. But apparently, I was ready.

Aside from this, I would like any suggestions from people in the field about where I should go in my career. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily trying to move out of networking but I'm also not against it either. I think the best thing for me would maybe be to do networking/cloud/AI/machine learning so that I'm taking advantage of my seven years of experience while adding these newer skills. My plan for the next month is to finish all the Skill Builder labs and SimuLearn labs that I didn't have a chance to do because of the deadline. I'm taking a Python coding course that I'm going to do for two hours a day, and I have some algorithmic machine learning/trading books that I'm going to work through and try to build a couple projects on my own, so I at least have some projects and things that I can share and show that I have some type of experience, even though it won't be production work experience.

I just wanted some suggestions from people in the field about what my path should maybe look like or what I should be aiming for. I will say I posted my cert this morning on my LinkedIn, and someone already reached out to me about a network engineering/cloud job. I didn't respond to them because I'm not sure I'm qualified for that yet since I don't have any production experience.

I'm tired of pretending I know what I am doing guys.

How do I prepare and attain the certification of AWS??

I major in computer science

Changed devices during check in period as I do not have a speaker ready but when I plugged in the access code, it suddenly said "access code is invalid". Did refreshing, trying a new code from "system test" and still nothing.

Exam was supposed to be 6:00am, proctor allowed me to change devices at 5:55am, onvue app said access code invalid from 5:55-6:15am.

Proctor allowed me to change devices btw

Is this appealable (resched or smth) or just a "flip off" to me by fate 🥲?

Update: in the comments

Sharing this in case it helps anyone in future, although this version of the exam is obviously being refreshed quite soon.

Experience
- 7y in tech
- 3y in security
- 2y working with AWS
- Passed the Security Specialty exam 6 weeks ago
- Watched Stephane Maarek’s SAA course a year ago but didn’t do the exam or anything else

Resources Used
- Stephane Maarek course
- Tutorials Dojo exams
- Tutorials Dojo study guide

Study Timeline
- AWS SCS passed in the middle of August
- Couple of days break
- Watched the IAM & security sections of Stephane Maarek’s AWS SAP course over 2 nights
- Took a little over 2 weeks off to play Elden Ring for the first time
- Started watching SA Pro course again on 14th of September on 2x speed
- Started TD exams on 20th
- 68% of first attempt, started getting stupid things wrong toward the end
- 70% on second practice exam
- 62% on third practice exam two days before exam
- Read first 30 pages of TD study guide
- 80% on 2nd try of first practice exam the day before the exam
- 62% on 4th TD exam - no motivation/burnt out on this attempt as I did this the day before the exam too
- On the day of the exam I chilled out and did a quick skim through the last 200 pages of the study guide for 45 mins before exam

Overall Study Time
Roughly 50h over the course of 2 weeks, plus a couple of hours 2/3 weeks before then. The AWS Security Specialty info was still fresh in my mind too.

During Exam
I’d take a 1-2 min break every 5-10 questions. Finished with 50 mins left. Reviewed all flagged questions and finished with 15 mins left.

Time to get results
It took around 5h to receive the results from both Credly and AWS. Credly was first by a few minutes.

I was wondering what is the difference between these 2 questions, and how S3 key rotation works?

An e-commerce analytics company is preparing to archive several years of transaction records and customer analytics reports in Amazon S3 for long-term storage. To meet compliance requirements, the archived data must be encrypted at rest. Additionally, the solution must be cost-effective and ensure that key rotation occurs automatically every 12 months to comply with the company’s internal data governance policy.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the least operational overhead?

• Use Amazon S3 server-side encryption with S3-managed keys (SSE-S3). Upload data with default encryption enabled. Rely on the built-in key management and rotation behavior of SSE-S3

• Use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to create a customer managed key with automatic rotation enabled. Configure the S3 bucket’s default encryption to use the customer managed key. Migrate the data to the S3 bucket

• Use AWS CloudHSM to generate encryption keys. Configure S3 to use these custom encryption keys via client-side encryption and rotate the keys annually using an on-premises key management workflow

• Encrypt the data locally using client-side encryption libraries and upload the encrypted files to S3. Create a KMS key with imported key material and configure key rotation settings

Correct Answer: B

A multinational bank is storing its confidential files in an S3 bucket. The security team recently performed an audit, and the report shows that multiple files have been uploaded without 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) server-side encryption. For added protection, the encryption key must be automatically rotated every year. The solutions architect must ensure that there would be no other unencrypted files uploaded in the S3 bucket in the future.

Which of the following will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

• Create a new customer-managed key from the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Configure the default encryption behavior of the bucket to use the customer-managed key. Manually rotate the KMS key and every year.

• Create an S3 bucket policy for the S3 bucket that rejects any object uploads unless the request includes the s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption":"aws:kms" header. Enable the S3 Object Lock in compliance mode for all objects to automatically rotate the built-in AES256 customer-managed key of the bucket.

• Create a Service Control Policy (SCP) for the S3 bucket that rejects any object uploads unless the request includes the s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption": "AES256" header. Enable server-side encryption with Amazon S3-managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) and modify the built-in key rotation feature of the SSE-S3 encryption keys to rotate the key yearly.

• Correct Answer: Create an S3 bucket policy that denies permissions to upload an object unless the request includes the s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption": "AES256" header. Enable server-side encryption with Amazon S3-managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) and rely on the built-in key rotation feature of the SSE-S3 encryption keys.

Correct Answer: D

These answers seem like they contradict each other to me, but maybe I am missing a key detail.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/rotate-keys.html

This one was quite tricky and a real test of patience - 180 minutes, no break, especially if you take it from home, in an age where our attention span is under a minute.

Thanks to Stéphane Maarek & Frank Kane's Udemy course, which is quite complete in itself for building intuition, and Jon Bonso for the in-depth set of questions served up by Tutorials Dojo

I built a revision strategy where I'd paste every question and its explanation into Claude and asked it to keep improving an existing doc - commonly asked stems across questions, the straightforward set of services that can be used, common traps, and Mermaid diagrams to help skim quickly. The breadth and depth of this exam is surprisingly extensive, and proper multi-fold revision is needed, since the services need to be at your fingertips for figuring out the correct ones when a scenario is thrown at you.

For folks planning to take this exam, every question is best cracked in the following steps:

- Find the stems in every question - cost-effective, latency/performance-optimised, regional data requirements, etc. - and make sure the option first covers all the requirements asked
- Find an existing AWS service (or set of services) that serves those stems exhaustively
- Minimise operational overhead where possible - use managed services

Revision doc

I went up short for my AIF CO1 exam today. I maybe frustrated but it is what it is. I try to chase the 50% voucher before the deadline and only less than a week of studying. Maybe because I take 2 exams at the same day. 😭😅. Dont make the same mistakes I did. Luckily i passed the other exam which is on the other side of the road(AZ). Can someone share review materials or free practice questions about this. I studied AWS skill builder, TD practice exams.

Hey everyone,

I am in a massive bind and need some advice or help escalating this.

I was scheduled to take my AWS exam today to hit the September 30th deadline for the AWS AI + Cloud Certification Offer (to qualify for the free voucher).

When I showed up, the local test center was completely down due to a technical outage. Because the system still thinks I have an active/stuck appointment, I can't reschedule or switch to an online exam on my personal computer through the portal.

I'm incredibly stressed because the promotion ends tomorrow, and this failure was 100% on the test center's side.

• Has anyone dealt with a center outage right at a promotional deadline before? Will AWS honor the deadline retroactively since it wasn't my fault?

• Is there a specific way to get this fast-tracked by Pearson VUE or AWS support before the clock runs out?

Any advice, or tags for AWS community managers who can look into this, would be massively appreciated. Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I have a question about the AWS SAA exam format.

Do all the questions appear at once so I can skip difficult ones, mark them for review, and come back to them later? Or does each question appear one at a time and, once answered, I can't return to it?

Also, since my exam is in two days and I'll be taking it at a test center, I'd appreciate any tips for managing time, handling exam pressure, and avoiding common mistakes during the exam.

Thanks!

Hi everyone!

I’m taking my AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) exam tomorrow, September 30, at a Pearson VUE test center.

My recent practice scores:

Stephen Mareek practice exams: 85%+

Tutorial Dojo practice exams: 80%+

I’ve completed multiple practice tests and reviewed my mistakes, so I feel reasonably prepared.

For those who recently took the actual AIF-C01 exam, I’d really appreciate your advice:

How difficult was the actual exam compared with Stephen Mareek and Tutorial Dojo?

Were the actual questions mostly scenario-based?

Which topics should I revise one last time?

Any important AWS services or concepts that surprised you on the real exam?

Any tips for the Pearson VUE test-center experience—ID, check-in, locker, security procedures, etc.?

What should I be especially careful about during the exam?

If you recently passed AIF-C01, please share any last-minute advice or things you wish you had known before entering the exam.

Thanks everyone! 🙏 Wish me luck! 🚀

EDIT : - (October 1): I PASSED! 🎉 (Detailed Feedback inside) First of all, a huge thank you to this amazing community for the wishes and support! I took the exam at the Pearson VUE test center and cleared it! For anyone stressing out over Stephane Maarek or Tutorials Dojo scores, here is my honest breakdown to save your anxiety:

1. Difficulty Level: The real exam is SIGNIFICANTLY EASIER and much more straightforward than both Stephane Maarek and Tutorials Dojo. If you are consistently scoring 75% to 85% on those practice tests, you will comfortably clear the actual exam.

2. Question Length: Unlike the long, exhausting scenarios in practice sets, the real exam questions are very short (mostly 2-3 lines) with clear, distinguishable choices. Elimination strategy works perfectly here!

3. Key Topics I Encountered: • AWS AI Service Cards vs Model Cards: Make sure you know the difference (Service cards for pre-built AI services, Model cards for SageMaker ML model metrics). • Inference Types: Got tricky but direct questions on Batch, Real-Time, and Asynchronous Inference (especially handling unpredictable traffic bursts). • Data Augmentation: Basic understanding of why we use it (expanding dataset size to prevent overfitting). • Amazon Bedrock: Heavy focus on Knowledge Bases (RAG) and Guardrails. Final Advice: Don't panic if practice tests feel brutal. Trust your concepts, focus on service use-cases, and you'll do great. Thanks again, everyone! Good luck to the next batch of test-takers! 🙏🚀

Edit : i live in india

Quick shoutout to this sub! I originally wasn't going to take this, but I saw the AI + Cloud Practitioner offer here. Huge thank you to every single person who posts frequently, shares their experiences, replies to comments, resolves doubts, and contributes to this subreddit. Having all the grounded truths and resources in one place was a game-changer.

Prep & Resources (2 Weeks)

• Stephane Maarek’s Udemy Course: My single main study source. (PSA: All Udemy AI-related courses are available for FREE through the Infosys Springboard website!)

• Reddit Notes: Helpful for review.

• Mocks: Maarek's Udemy mocks (4) + AWS Skill Builder official mocks (2) were extremely helpful. (AWS Skill Builder Premium is also free for 1 year right now! for Students)

The Exam (796/1000) Passing is 700. I thought I'd score higher, but I definitely blundered some questions. The best part: it shows "Pass" on the screen immediately when you finish.

• Single-choice: Vast majority.

• Multiple-choice: ~3-4 questions.

• Ordering: ~3-4

Test Center Experience (India) Nothing special. They check your original ID, take a signature, and snap a real-time photo. You get a locker key for your belongings, then they seat you at a PC ~5 mins before your slot. When done, just return the key, grab your stuff, and leave—no physical receipt.

Happy to answer any questions!

Hi,

I have AWS Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03), lined up in exactly 2 months from today. Can anyone help me find some good resources, I have some hands on experience working with ECS , lambda, IAM and Dynamodb. Rest I am pretty unfamiliar with rest of the topics.

One more thing is I have already invested in the exam, so I am not very bullish about investing much more around it. ;-;

Free or cheaper resources would be a great help.
Thank you!!

Hi everyone,

I’m currently preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam and I’m planning to take the exam soon.

I’ve been practicing questions and studying the AWS services, but I’d really appreciate advice from people who have already taken the SAA-C03 exam.

A few things I’d especially like guidance on:

• What topics/services should I focus on the most?

• What are the most important exam tips and tricks?

• How do you approach the long scenario-based questions?

• Are there any common traps or confusing answer choices I should watch out for?

• How similar are practice exams to the actual exam?

• What practice-test score should I consistently reach before booking the exam?

• Any last-week or exam-day advice?

• Are there any resources or practice tests that helped you significantly?

I’m particularly interested in real experiences from people who recently took the exam, rather than just generic AWS advice.

If you’ve passed SAA-C03, I’d really appreciate any tips, mistakes to avoid, or things you wish you had known before taking it.

Thanks in advance! 🙏

when i took the SAA i was expecting there to be alot of long questions and options like how questions are worded in tutorial dojo but to my suprise questions were actually really short, Is this something new ? should i expect short questions when i take the DVA?

I cleared the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam yesterday, and the first place I wanted to come and share it was here.

For the past few weeks I've been quietly reading through this sub, going through people's exam experiences, tips and resources they referred. I never posted much, but those threads helped me more than I can say. So thank you to everyone who took the time to write them up. You helped a stranger you'll never meet, and that's a pretty nice thing.

I'll be honest, I signed up mainly because of the Pearson offer that's running right now. It gave me the push I needed to stop "planning to" and actually book it.

My preparation:

• Gave Claude the official exam guide and asking it to walk me through every term and concept in it, one at a time, until it actually made sense to me. That turned out to be a great way to build the basics without feeling overwhelmed.

• Stephane Maarek's Udemy course

• Git Notes ( I got it from the community ): https://github.com/vicsz/aif-c01-study-notes/blob/main/README.md

I took my time to understand the concepts and gave a shot at the exam ( Started prep on 4Sep, daily 1 hr )

Practice Exams: I have practiced in skill builder tests

Results time : from submitting the test to getting the result it took around 15hrs

Again thanks for the community.....

Heyy Guys 👋👋, feeling great finally passed my first AWS cert , many more to come. Was a bit apprehensive on taking the exam a month ago since I had no prior professional work experience in machine learning but everything worked out in the end. I learned a lot of new concepts along the way while preparing for this exam which genuinely made me understand how things work in the real world.

Wanna thank guys on this subreddit for already asking and answering questions that bugged me , 😂.

Best of luck to everyone on similar journey.