Solutions Architect Certification
Ever since I joined Nautilus I’ve wanted to better understand the infrastructure that we used in AWS to support the iOS and Android applications. Because Nautilus follows the principle of least privilege however I only ever had access to S3, DynamoDb, and Terraform. My IAM user policy to those resources also only applied to the QA & development environments. As a mobile developer I didn’t really have any need for additional access, since troubleshooting missing resources, incorrect database entries, and broken builds concerned 99% of my interactions with AWS.
But I still wanted to understand how all the pieces fit together. So in March I began studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. I took Udemy courses, completed guided labs, listened to AWS podcasts during my commute, did practice questions on my Android phone, read AWS whitepapers, and finished over a dozen practice tests. I became familiar with all of Amazon’s esoteric resources, from Athena to X-Ray and everything in between. I also gained a depth of knowledge on subjects I had only superficially understood before. Topics like database sharding, RAID configurations, CIDR blocks, and server-side encryption.
Last Friday evening I sat for the Solutions Architect Associate certification exam. Six months of preparation distilled into a single, 130 minute, 65 question test. After answering the final exam question and completing a short satisfaction survey I saw a single paragraph:
“Congratulations! You have successfully passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. You will receive an email once your detailed results are available in your AWS Certification Account.”
I’d made it! Now all that remains is to apply that knowledge to my new role at Nautilus as the Mobile Applications Architect.
comments powered by Disqus