How many questions are there in AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam?
Are you thinking to prepare for the new AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam? And confused about the pattern and the number of questions involved? Then hope that you are aware of the latest version of the AWS CSAP exam i.e. AWS CSAP Exam Released February 2019. Here we’ll discuss all it takes to appear for the AWS CSAP exam.
Let’s start with the vital details of the newly AWS CSAP updated exam.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam
AWS certifications are basically divided into four sections i.e. Foundational-level, Associate-level, Professional-level, and Specialty-level. This AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam is a professional-level exam. It is intended for individuals who have been performing a Solutions Architect Professional role.
The exam demonstrates and recognizes the experience and skills of the candidate. To design distributed systems and applications on the AWS platform.
The AWS CSAP exam affirms the capability of the individual in:
- Designing and deploying fault-tolerant applications, reliable, highly available, and scalable, on AWS
- Migration of multi-tier, complex applications on AWS
- Selecting suitable AWS services for designing and deploying applications as per the requirement
- Implementation of the cost-control strategies
- Designing and deploying scalable and reliable operations on AWS platform throughout the enterprise
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Information
Like any other AWS certifications and previous AWS CSAP exam, this newly released version also consists of multiple-choice and multiple answer questions. The exam is currently available in two languages- English and Japanese. And the candidate gets 170 minutes to complete the exam. Also, the candidate needs to pay $300 to complete the exam.
Let’s eye on the overview of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam information:
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Information
| Certification Name | AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional |
| Exam Code | SAP- C01 |
| Exam Format | Multiple Choice and Multiple Answer Questions |
| Exam Duration | 170 Minutes |
| Exam Language | English and Japanese |
| Registration Fee | 300 USD |
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Preparation
It is noteworthy that the exam objectives i.e. domains covered in the AWS CSAP exam have been changed and so the preparation resources changed. And it is really important to be focused on the exam objectives while doing preparation, and for this, it is required to choose the appropriate preparation material.
Go Through the Exam Study Guide
If you aspire to take the AWS CSAP exam released, then you must first go through the AWS CSAP exam guide given on the official certification page. This guide will give you all the required information that you need to take the exam. such as exam blueprint, topics covered in each domain, exam basic information, questions format, scoring pattern, exam preparation tips, etc. Also, getting a good knowledge of all the details will help you to prepare for the exam in a good way. The table followed represents the updated blueprint. So, go through it before starting your AWS CSAP exam preparation.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C01) focuses a lot on concepts and services related to Scalability, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Migration, Security and Cost Control.
- Be sure to cover the following topics
- Also, Whitepapers are the key to understand
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Blueprint
| Domain | % of the Examination |
| Domain 1 | Design for Organizational Complexity 12.5% |
| Domain 2 | Design for New Solutions 31% |
| Domain 3 | Migration Planning 15% |
| Domain 4 | Cost Control 12.5% |
| Domain 5 | Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions 29% |
| Total- | 100% |
Overview of Security Processes
Disaster Recovery make sure you understand the difference between each types esp. pilot light, warm standby w.r.t RTO and RPO
Cloud Migration also, make sure you understand the difference between rehost, replatform, are architect
- Architecting for the Cloud: Best Practices
- Building Fault-Tolerant Applications on AWS
Migration & Transfer
- Understand Cloud Migration Services
- Know Server Migration Service
- Also, Know the Database Migration Service (hint: Elasticsearch is supported by DMS)
- Know Snowball vs Snowball Edge vs SnowMobile
- Know AWS Application Discovery Service (hint: agentless mode does not track processes)
Management & Governance tools
Understand AWS Organizations
Know the difference between Service Control Policies and IAM Policies (SCP is the maximum permissions that a user can have, however, the user needs to be explicitly given IAM policy)
Systems Manager
- Understand AWS Systems Manager and its various services like parameter store, patch manager
- Understand the Systems Manager Patch Manager patching process
Understand CloudWatch
- logs
- Subscription Filters and its integration with other services.
- Events
Understand CloudTrail for audit and governance
- Know CloudFormation esp. in terms of Disaster Recovery to replicate the environment across regions.
- The exam does not cover developer tools like CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild
Networking & Content Delivery
Know VPC
- Security Groups, NACLs
- VPC Endpoints
- VPC Flow Logs
- Understand VPC Peering
Route 53
- The Route 53
- outing Policies and their use cases and mainly Focus on Weighted, Latency routing policies
- CloudFront and use cases
- API Gateway
- And, Know AWS PrivateLink
Load Balancer
- Understand ELB, ALB, and NLB
- Understand ELB with Auto Scaling
Security, Identity & Compliance
- AWS Identity and Access Management
- Understand IAM Roles and use cases
- Understand IAM Web Identity & Federation
- Know IAM Best Practices
- Know AWS Shield, WAF for DDoS Protection
Storage
The exam does not cover Storage services in deep
Focus on Simple Secure Service (S3) (Know S3 supports retrieval of partial content using Range Get requests)
- Firstly understand S3 Permissions (know S3 bucket policies to control access to VPC Endpoints)
- Secondly, understand S3 Data Protection
- Thirdly understand S3 Storage Classes (Glacier for archival)
- Then understand S3 Sub resources (Requester Pays can allow you to host content, while the user of the content pays the transfer costs)
- And know S3 disaster recovery across the region. (cross-region replication)
- Later know CloudFront for caching to improve performance
Elastic Block Store
- Using snapshots for HA and Disaster recovery focus mainly on EBS Backup
- Understand Storage Gateway
Database
- The exam covers databases mainly in terms- of Scalability, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery.
- Understand RDS Multi-AZ vs reading Replicas (cross-region replication and availability of data)
- Know Aurora DR & HA using Read Replicas and Global Database
- Know DynamoDB Streams for tracking changes
- DynamoDB Auto Scaling & DAX for caching (know TTL which can expire the data)
- Improve performance – Best practices (one question for selection of keys)
Compute
Understand EC2
- Firstly Instance Types
- Secondly Instance Purchase Types
- Later Understand Auto Scaling
Know Elastic Beanstalk mainly from the perspective of migration.
Understand Lambda (know what it takes to run Lambda within a VPC and Lambda Edge)
The exam did not cover anything of relevance relating to ECS and EKS
Analytics
- Understand Kinesis
- Understand the difference between Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Firehose
- Finally Know Amazon Elasticsearch provides a managed solution
Integration Tools
Understand SQS in terms of loose coupling and scaling.
- Know the difference between SQS Standard and FIFO
Know how CloudWatch integration with SNS and Lambda can help in notification
Who is eligible to take AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
A professional AWS architect is responsible for evaluating the requirements of the organization. And then making architectural recommendations in order to implement and deploy AWS-based applications. So to get this certification, a candidate must have experience and technical skills required to design applications on the AWS platform.
This AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification exam will also include practices implemented for architecting the AWS-based applications. So, this requires the candidate to have knowledge of the strategies used for cost optimizations. Also, they must know how to satisfy the application’s requirements by choosing the correct AWS service. Also know how to relocate the different, complex application systems to the AWS platform.
So, in order to meet the eligibility the candidate must have the following:
- At minimum 2 years of working experience in designing and deploying AWS-based cloud architecture.
- Skills to recommend services that can be used to design, provision, and deploy AWS-based applications
- Must be aware of the practices involved in implementing the AWS application’s architecture.
- Expertise in a high-level programming language.
As an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, you will be able to earn $167,500 per year.
So, Buckle up to become a certified Solutions Cloud Architect.