I finally passed the hardest exam I had ever taken after 3 months of day and night studying. The CSAP is of a high quality difficulty level. It’s very tough to pass this exam if you do not deep dive into understanding AWS and it’s wide range of topics.

Topics to focus on:

API Gateway Error Codes specifically 504- what they mean and how to troubleshoot

Cognito came up once (integrated with API Gateway)

Many questions in API Gateway, LAMBDA, and DynamoDB (prioritizing serverless)

Lambda Optimization — resource allocation, access VPC resources, keeping Lambda warm

Rekognition- the questions are focused on optimizing the processes are them (whether to use Lambda or EC2 etc)

No Transit Gateway but a Transit VPC question came up

DMS — one one how to incorporate Schema Conversion Tool

RDS — know the database engines, know which limitations of licensed ones (MS SQL Server and Oracle)

Databases overall — know which DB engineers translate to which services (e.g. Cassandra — DynamoDB)

AWS Organizations — IAM vs SCP, consolidated billing

SAML with ADFS know the use cases

Federated Access

CloudWatch — (Logs, Metrics, Events)

DirectConnect — public vs private VIF, use cases and differences with VPN

VPC Endpoints — Gateway vs Interface, remember interfaces can be used for inter-VPC communication to get around peering etc if only certain services are needed

ECS, EKS, EC2 & Fargate mode came up a few times — assign roles to Tasks not containers

Aurora and it’s benefits (multi master, storage)

CloudFront

WAF and it’s functions

AWS Shield Basic vs Advanced

ELB/Autoscaling

Redshift — performance and backups

Know EBS types (io1, gp2, etc) — know how IOPS are provisioned

Resource-level IAM permissions — know use cases and how to implement

Cloudformation — StackSets (use cases), UpdatePolicies, DeletionPolicies

RTO/RPO optimization

KMS

S3 policies, events,

IAM

Know S3 vs EFS use cases (When you see durable or cost effective storage ALWAYS pick S3 over any other storage, unless a database requirement is mentioned.)

Study Resources:

ACG — Scotts lecture are a good starting material in prepping for the prof exam. It’s not as interesting as the other courses I took

because it lacks some topics meaning it needs to be updated but the lectures provided on the topics that are included in here are spot on!

Linux Academy — there is so much to learn from the videos provided by LA, it’s very helpful and complete with hands on labs for almost all services, I recommend it. Adrian Cantril is the instructor for this course and he is a very good instructor IMO.

Note: You can get a monthly subscription for a month and then cancel it when you are done.

I had taken 4 practice tests including LA and ACG. Their practice exam is pretty good, but not at the same difficulty level as the real exam.

The explanations provided at the end is only focused on the right answers and both lacks in explaining it deeply. It would have been better if they also provided explanations on the wrong answers.

Whizlabs — Bought this 1 month before my schedule I used this but would not totally recommend this but for professional exam it’s good to take lots of practice tests you can find and take. It’s not up to date for this exam and with mistakes, I contacted them but they take days to get back to you.

Jon Bonso —all the topics on the exam was covered by the practice tests from Udemy. What can I say is it’s pretty good too just like the LA and ACG practice tests. The level of difficulty is at par with the actual exam. My only concern was some questions are a little short whereas in the exam all have long 4–5 paragraphs. The key here IMO is to deeply understand why the answers are right or wrong. Study well the provided detailed explanations for the right and wrong answers (this is where they stand out the most out of all the practice tests I used) and also the links provided by this material as they are all helpful in preparing for the exam.

TIPS:

Take note of the most, best and least (you have to pick the best) there are a few questions in the actual exam where you can eliminate the answer quickly but mostly it’s not so be well prepared TAKE AS MANY PRACTICE TESTS YOU CAN FIND AND DO NOT LIMIT YOURSELF TO JUST ONE. All of the practice tests I had taken each have their own strength and weaknesses but it doesn’t matter because you need this to pass this hard exam.

Be aware of the keywords you can find either at the end of the question or on the answer on the actual exam it will lead you to the correct answers. The actual exam have long paragraphs but most of the words are just there to distract you. Read fast and find the keywords.

you can find either at the end of the question or on the answer on the actual exam it will lead you to the correct answers. The actual exam have long paragraphs but most of the words are just there to distract you. Read every single AWS Whitepaper you can find in the Cheat sheets and Study Path provided by Tutorials Dojo

Time Management is important in this endurance exam you practice reading fast. Skip the question you do not know and move on to the next one.

Watched all of the reInvent videos you can find

Documentations to study:

Sharing with you some of the feed backs I gathered that had been helpful:

I am planning to take the Big Data next maybe next year. I hope my feed back on the exam help others as well.