So, I finally took and passed AWS SAA-C03. 4 years of procrastination, 2 exam reschedules, and 3 days of actually soaking my head in SAA topics.
As most of the things in my life, I spent more time stressing for it, and when I actually pushed thru working on it turned out to be easier than expected.
I spent 40 mins out of the 130 mins allowed. There were about 10 questions I had absolutely no idea about. The rest were fairly straightforward. The questions I did not know weren’t like some architecture questions, more on familiarity on what a service actually does. Anything CloudFront, S3, EC2, ECS, Lambda, VPC I was able to answer confidently. These are services we actually run in production. Having real hands-on experience helped a lot.
I think getting a certification did its purpose, filling in gaps with my AWS knowledge on things we don’t use but actually could be useful. Fun to learn about different storage solutions and appropriate uses. Fun to learn about AWS Org.
The exam felt unusually easy. It didn’t remove my impostor syndrome of being a qualified cloud engineer. Instead, it clarified that the gaps are less about fundamentals and more about reasoning across larger systems. I decided to pursue the more tougher exam Solutions Architect – Professional (scheduled Q1 next year).
Let’s see where this goes.