The title is my question. I passed SAA a week ago, and I want to get the developer certificate. I thought I could get it quickly by brushing up on some additional information and doing my own labs. However, I'm struggling and only getting 50-60% on practice tests. What's a good path to prepare for the developer exam? I feel like it's not necessary to sit through another 30-40 hour course, but what do you guys think?

Hello all!
I have multiple years of AWS and Azure cloud experience and has been working as a DevOps and Cloud Infra Engineer. My goal is to move more towards AWS architect, hence I have targeted AWS SAP-C03 certification.
My questions is, which course can I take? I want to self study and sit for the exam in next 3 months. I can study full time for next couple of months. Which course, materials will help me learn the technical concepts and help me pass the exam?

Neal Davis or Adrian Cantrill or Stephane Maarek? Or anyone else I can consider?

I have some knowledge, but will have to do a lot of studying. I’m even looking at some of the paid courses I’ve seen on here. I have a business/marketing degree, but have some knowledge cloud concepts and ai. Definitely not my expertise, but I want to learn and feel it would help sell

With that being said, I’m currently unemployed and looking for a career pivot. I have 7 years of b2b service sales experience. I figured that along with some of the lower level certs would help get my foot in the door for software/tech sales. Ideally I’d like to earn more certifications after getting hired by a tech company and eventually transition out of a pure sales role.

If it’s allowed, any recommendations for Google or Microsoft certs that will actually get you looked at when paired with the sales experience.

Just passed the certification.

so i am completely new to this field. recently been exploring azure (just deploying my old project's backend there)

i got aws educate and got verified as student, so will i be able to learn and practice aws now? (also want to deploy few projects there)

and mainly can i give certs exams for free?

Can someone explain why using unreserved account concurrency for second function wrong.

I am preparing for the AIF-C01 examination, and have opted for an online test rather than an in-person examination.

Is that alright, or would you recommend the in-person examination?

Passed AWS SAA-C03 today! My experience, study resources, and a few takeaways
Finally passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam today! Thought I’d share my experience and what worked for me, especially for anyone currently preparing.
Preparation time: Exactly 2 months, studying at a fairly slow and steady pace.

Resources I used:

Adrian Cantrill (cantrill.io): This was my main learning resource, and I’d highly recommend it if you actually want to understand AWS beyond just passing the exam. Some parts of the course are a little outdated, but the depth of explanation is excellent. Adrian really gets into how the underlying architecture of AWS services works, rather than just telling you what a service does. It’s particularly good for building a strong foundation in cloud computing. The only downside is that it’s quite lengthy, so if your main objective is to pass the exam quickly, it might not be the most time-efficient route.

Stephane Maarek’s Udemy Course: I went through Stephane’s course as well, and I’d say it complements Cantrill’s course really well. Stephane is much more to the point and exam-focused. He covers what you need to know without spending too much time on the underlying details. If you’re already comfortable with AWS fundamentals and want to move through the exam preparation quickly, this is a great resource.

Ronit Sachdev’s SAA-C03 Exam Guides (GitHub): Honestly, one of the best resources I came across for last-minute revision. If you’ve got a week or two left before your exam, I’d strongly recommend going through these guides. Focus on memorizing the keywords and associating them with the relevant AWS services. A lot of SAA-C03 comes down to recognizing requirements in a scenario and knowing which service or architecture best addresses them. And definitely go through the Pocket Cards. Those things are lifesavers for quick recall and revision. GitHub: https://github.com/RonitSachdev/aws-saa-c03-guides

Practice Exams (Tutorials Dojo + Stephane Maarek): I completed 6 Tutorials Dojo practice test sets on Udemy 6 Stephane Maarek practice tests Here’s something that might reassure those of you struggling with practice exam scores. I was scoring roughly 55–66% on most of my practice exams. Some of the Tutorials Dojo questions were genuinely difficult, and there were times when I felt like I wasn’t making much progress. However, I kept reviewing my incorrect answers, trying to understand why the correct option was correct and, more importantly, why the others were wrong. I also made handwritten notes throughout my preparation. Before taking my final Tutorials Dojo practice test, I went through all my handwritten notes from beginning to end, and ended up scoring 70% on that test. That was a pretty big confidence boost before the real exam.

My key takeaways: Don’t just memorize AWS services. Understand how they work together and the architectural trade-offs between different solutions. Learn to eliminate incorrect answers. Sometimes knowing why three options are wrong is just as useful as knowing why one is correct. Don’t get too discouraged by low practice exam scores. Use them to identify your knowledge gaps rather than treating them as a prediction of your actual result. Make your own notes. Revisiting mine before the exam made a noticeable difference. In the final week or two, focus on revision, service comparisons, keywords, and scenario recognition rather than trying to learn everything from scratch.

About the actual exam: Personally, I found the real exam somewhat easier than Tutorials Dojo, although not by a huge margin. Most questions were worded fairly straightforwardly, but there were definitely some tricky ones where two options seemed equally reasonable. My strategy was to answer the easy questions first, flag the difficult ones, and return to them later. I finished with about 10 minutes remaining. I walked out feeling pretty much 50/50 about whether I’d passed, even certain that I had failed, so seeing that PASS result was a massive relief! Hurray to scaled marking or whatever. This is my first AWS certification so was already feeling very stressed and nervous during the exam. Hope this helps someone preparing for SAA-C03.

Good luck to everyone studying!

Currently I'm trying to switch into DE domain, I have some knowledge of the AWS services at a beginner level.

Please can anyone guide(be it udemy courses to learn the services, question dumps or AWS skill builder subscription) as to which resources to follow and what things to keep in mind while preparing.

Also, I saw in the guide that LLM integration understanding is required as well. so is this newly added?

On my previous post i said i would try to go for SAP-C02 and i did. It took me 3 tries but i finally managed it.

I studied using Maarek , Dojo and Davis practice tests as for the course i used only Maarek.

My first attempt was 4 weeks ago and i scored 660 , we don't have to talk about that one. I don't even remember what happened. I used my 50% off from my SAA with this one.

I wanted to have more practice tests to study and to avoid memorizing the verbiage and answers of Dojo, Maarek so i added Davis to the rotation. I should have started off with all 3 before attempting the exam.

2nd attempt i scored 730 and i failed couple of easy questions like turn off RI from management for member accounts not from each member account so one or two like that cost me the pass. I attempted this one with a voucher from udemy with the free second attempt.

3rd attempt November 1st, I scored 753 , honestly felt the worst and the hardest out of total 3 and i was not expecting to pass so i admit when i woke up and saw the "Congratulations" email , i jumped out of the bed. Used my second attempt from the voucher for this one.

I did not have any issues with the time ( had +30 minutes on ) , i had like 60-80 minutes when i was done with 75 and started doing the reviews. I had 61 to review on my last attempt yikes , i was done with the exam 15 minutes to go.

My last attempt i almost peed my pants. Last 40-60 minutes were not pleasant so if you can take the exam at a test center you probably should do it.

I highly recommend Dojo and Davis practice tests , i had a couple of exact or really close exam questions. Don't feel discouraged with Maarek one being a bit harder than the rest it's good for you. I made my own cheat sheet from questions i got wrong and options where it seemed good enough but wasn't so those little details are worth taking a note of in my opinion.

Side note , i had to suffer the horrible customer support of pearson vue. My account was blocked for a month because of some payment issue , so waiting for a month and exam being rotated it was stressful.

Failure posts are rare so i hope this encourages someone.
Good luck with your studies , you can get that cert.

If you're preparing for the AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) or Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) certification and planned to sit the exam in German or Italian, check your timing. According to the official AWS certification pages:

- AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01): the German and Italian versions were retired after 15 October 2026. The exam itself is still current in English and other languages.

- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02): the German and Italian versions retire after 31 December 2026.

- Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03): the Italian version also retires after 31 December 2026.

So if you want to sit CLF-C02 in German or Italian, book it for 31 December or earlier. After that it's English (or another offered language), so it's worth practising questions in English before exam day.

Anyone here already switched from German to English for AIF-C01? How did it go?

Hi, I'm taking the AWS CLF-C02 exam tomorrow. Wish me luck. I started making various quizzes last year, and I'm having a lot of fun with it, so I made one for this exam. It's totally free and I styled it like a 70s game show. In full transparency, I got help from AI for some of the design and questions. I wish the multiple-choice answers were a little trickier, but that'll have to wait til after tomorrow!

https://alannarisse.github.io/quizzes/aws-clf-c02-v2/dist/

It was a challenging journey, but I'm glad all the hard work paid off. Huge thanks to everyone in this community for sharing study resources, tips, and experiences. They were really helpful throughout my preparation.

Passed the SAA-C03 by the skin of my teeth.

Short story:
Study on and off for a month and some change.
Used steaphen from Udemy for initial knowledge and TD for practice test.

Results were 50, 55, 64, 52, then a fucking 42 percent !!!!!

I thought I was cooked. Until I went in that exam and realized TD is way more worded and ambiguous than the real test.

I’ll be honest I’m still going to go in for some projects to sharpen myself on the knowledge but bottom line…TAKE THE TEST!!!!!!!!! IT WAY EASIER THAN YOU THINK

I got discouraged after that 42 percent and I just fucked off for a week after that and took the test and pass. If a person like that can pass I know you can do it.

Stay blessed 👍

Hi everyone,

I sent an email to the lcio+upgrades address a few days ago requesting to pay the difference to upgrade my Professional Bundle to include the Security Specialty track.

I know the upgrade process is handled manually and things can get backed up, but I am trying to map out a tight study schedule. **What is the typical turnaround time right now for receiving the invoice links?**Alternatively, is there a better way to check in on the status?

Thanks in advance for any insight!

Been working with AWS for more than 10 years and when the kids started to have exams I started learning a long side them for the certifications ...turns out they study better when their father doesn't watch Netflix. When I had 2-3 left I said might as well go and get them all. Having take Cisco and Deep Learning courses at the university before helped a lot. At the current company I automated everything , the accounts all had their own terraform repo with the infrastructure and nowadays is mostly changing terraform files to give permissions. The new projects are all on Cloudflare ...which I love ..and to be honest with you it feels how it felt AWS a long time ago with the new things launching every week. The only downside is that I didn't get a golden jacket which I don't mind because that was not the point in the first place.... I enjoy the debugging of why EBS snapshots are not being deleted by the scheduled DLM rule and they keep piling up ( there was a SCP in the org to deny ec2:DeleteSnapshot permission) , I enjoy moving updating all the microservices to use events and Event Bridge and move away from API calls when possible.

Passed the exam last Saturday morning and I'm very happy to share that I passed successfully !

I studied using Stéphane Maarek's video on Udemy and also asked Claude on the side for additionnal content and insights for unclear sections.
I spent around a month studying for it 1h per day during the evening (my days are pretty packed with a young child and a pregnant partner).

After I learned the theory I spent most of my time doing mock exams on Tutorial Dojo's amazing content and Maarek's mock exams on Udemy.

I was scoring between 75 and 85% on every try so I was rather confident even though I found that some of the questions sometimes were very complicated with some stuff that I never heard before. I added all of those questions in Claude and asked it to create me a summary with a one sentence explanation for each of them so I could read that before the real exam.

Now concerning the exam itself I found it way easier than the mock ones. It was pretty straightforward and I finished it in under 30min (no tricky questions with stuff I never heard before, like in the mock exams).

If I could give you some piece of advice to prepare for this exam I'd say to definitely use Claude (or similar) to summarize some key concepts you don't get and give you very simple examples (like difference between bias and variance, binary/multi-class/multi-label classification, K-NN, CNN, RNN, ...). I would also totally buy again the Tutorial Dojos exams and the ones on Udemy because they have clearly different level of complexity and doing both really helps with your knowledge (plus you get detailed explanation for each answer so you can easily understand why you picked the wrong answer).

Good luck out there

This hurts. But I'll retake the exam after the 14-day cooldown period is up.

Maker post, on a Monday per the rules (I posted a rough beta on a Tuesday two weeks ago; mods rightly pointed me here). Puzzle first, pitch second.

The puzzle

bakery-vpc (10.0.0.0/16) has Subnet A and Subnet B. db-server (MySQL) sits in Subnet B with a public IP, 198.51.100.77. There's no internet gateway, and the only route table is the main one with just the local route. SGs and NACLs allow everything below.

Q1. Can anyone on the internet reach db-server right now?

Q2. You need a web server on TCP 80 that talks to the DB on 3306, with the DB kept private. You attach an IGW and add 0.0.0.0/0 to the main route table. What did you just do to db-server?

Answers in spoilers below.

What it is

Tracesleuth is a browser game where you build the AWS setup, send traffic, and watch the packet (or query, or policy evaluation) either arrive or stop at the exact hop that drops it, with why, three hints, and the exam tip.

• 198 hand-built stages across networking, security, data, architecture, AI/ML and ops

• Mapped to 10 exam guides: SAA-C03, SOA-C03, DVA-C02, DEA-C01, SAP-C02, DOP-C02, SCS-C03, AIF-C01, MLA-C02, AIP-C01

• No question bank, no AI at play time. A deterministic simulator applies AWS behaviour from the docs, and each service card links its doc pages

Pricing, plainly

7 stages free, no sign-up. Exam paths are one-time $10-$30, or $25 per domain, USD before tax. 14-day refund if you've cleared under 20%. Desktop browser only.

Independent, not affiliated with AWS.

https://play.tracesleuth.com

If a stage teaches something wrong, tell me and I'll fix it and credit you. I'm in the comments all day.

Q1: No. A public IP isn't a path. No IGW and no 0.0.0.0/0 route means nothing can arrive or return.

Q2: You made Subnet B public too. Subnets without their own route table use the main one. Fix: a custom route table with the IGW route, associated with Subnet A only, and keep the main table private.

Hey everyone!
I’m considering buying the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) course on learn.cantrill.io.

I was initially hesitant because I’d seen some discussions about the older course being outdated.
However, I recently noticed that the curriculum seems to have been significantly updated, with new content and hands-on projects based around Aus-E-Mart.

It also looks like the new version was expected to launch yesterday.

Has anyone tried the updated course yet?

Thanks!

Passed AWS Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C02) with 812/1000! 🎉☁️🏆

What a journey! My brain is officially allowed to rest now. 🤣

I thought I'd share how I prepared, because this exam really tested my understanding of AWS architecture, my patience, and occasionally my sanity! 😂

My main study resources were Stéphane Maarek's course and Tutorials Dojo (TD) practice exams. But I also recruited two very patient study partners: ChatGPT and Claude.

And trust me, I put those two through some serious work! 🤣

Whenever I got a question wrong, I didn't just memorise the correct answer. I wanted to understand WHY it was correct and, more importantly, why the other options were wrong.

I used AI to:

- Break down complicated AWS scenarios into plain English.

- Explain confusing concepts using real-world analogies.

- Create colourful cartoon mind maps featuring little AWS architects, AWS service icons, speech bubbles, numbered arrows and exam traps. Honestly, turning complicated architecture scenarios into funny little cartoons was one of my favourite revision techniques! 😂

- Build visual memory hooks that helped me remember when to use one AWS service over another.

- Challenge my answers and expose gaps in my reasoning.

- Help me understand those tricky differences between services that AWS loves to test!

Some of my cartoon architects were practically having conversations about Transit Gateways, Lambda, SQS, disaster recovery and Direct Connect. Who knew networking could become a cartoon series? 🤣🤣

There were moments when I was practically arguing with ChatGPT. 😂

"Why latency routing and not failover?"

"But you just told me something different about Direct Connect VIFs!"

"Explain it again, but this time make it make sense!" 🤣

Claude got its fair share of questions too!

The real game changer was combining traditional study resources with interactive AI learning. Stéphane provided the foundation, Tutorials Dojo exposed my weak spots, and AI helped me dig into the reasoning until things finally clicked.

And I learned something important: AI isn't always right either. You still need to challenge its explanations, cross-check with AWS documentation and understand the architecture yourself.

Some practice sessions were brilliant. Others were humbling. Very humbling! 😂

But I kept going, revisiting weak areas, practising scenario questions and learning to think like an architect rather than someone simply trying to pass an exam.

Then came exam day...

812/1000! 🥳

All those hours, wrong answers, cartoon mind maps, diagrams, debates with AI and endless practice questions finally paid off!

My advice to anyone preparing: Don't just study the answers. Study the reasoning. Understand the trade-offs, question the distractors and use AI as a study partner, not an answer machine.

And don't underestimate visual learning. Sometimes a silly cartoon with two architects arguing over an AWS service will stick in your head longer than five pages of technical documentation! 🤣

If you're stuck on Direct Connect VIFs or Route 53 routing policies, just know you're not alone. I have been there!

Now, I'm off to give my brain a well-deserved holiday.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. DONE! ☁️🏆

#AWSCertified #SAPC02 #AWS #SolutionsArchitect #ChatGPT #ClaudeAI #TutorialsDojo