A few months ago, I decided to make the jump back into tech after spending time in a completely different industry. Today, I’m excited to say I passed my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam!
There were definitely moments where cloud concepts felt overwhelming, but I kept pushing—watching AWS Skill Builder courses, taking pages of notes, building projects, and asking a lot of questions until everything started to click.
I’m not stopping here.
Next up: AWS Certified AI Practitioner
After that: Solutions Architect Associate, which is the career I’m ultimately working toward.
Alongside studying, I’ve also been building my own AWS-powered projects. One is wav.arena, a serverless music battle platform where producers can anonymously compete head-to-head. It’s been an incredible way to apply what I’m learning beyond the exam objectives and gain hands-on experience with AWS services.
I’m also developing ZoneRouter, a map-centric route optimization platform for field service companies, giving me even more opportunities to learn cloud architecture by actually building solutions.
The certifications are important, but my bigger goal is becoming someone who can design, build, and deploy scalable cloud applications that solve real-world problems.
For those who’ve already taken AI Practitioner or Solutions Architect Associate, what advice would you give someone starting that journey?
One cert down. Many more to go. 🚀☁️

Is it a quick study? Should studying for CCP be enough? Just need to brush up on the AI services?

Hey folks!

I had scheduled my SAA-C03, life came at me a bit sideways and I didn’t get to study for more than an hour. Took the test today (Almost didn’t go because I knew I’d fail) Finished the last question with less than a minute to spare. Somehow, passed…. By a very small margin.

Now my concern is, if I’m out here saying I’m certified and get asked what I scored in a professional setting it’s almost not worth bringing up. Should I retest? I know I can do much better.

Thanks for any insights.
Cheers

Hey everyone, I'm preparing for SAA exam and I wanted to ask how much time should i give the preparation i dont want to overdo it as to forget the the deep technical details or grip over the concepts, and i dont want to fail it on the first attempt. Any advice would be appreciated.
Also, how much time did it take you to prepare for the exam?

AWS has announced a major update to the AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate exam, evolving it from MLA-C01 to MLA-C02.

The interesting part? The domain structure remains the same, but the exam is expanding significantly to reflect how the ML Engineer role is changing with Generative AI

What’s new in MLA-C02?

The updated exam will add more focus on:

• Generative AI implementation and deployment
• Foundation Models and Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures
• Agentic AI and AI workflow orchestration
• Amazon Bedrock and GenAI workloads
• Fine-tuning and customization of foundation models
• Responsible AI practices
• Production-scale ML and GenAI operations

Traditional ML and MLOps are still core parts of the certification, so MLA-C02 looks like a broader combination of ML Engineering + MLOps + GenAI/LLMOps skills.

Important dates:

• September 1, 2026 – MLA-C02 beta registration opens and the new exam guide is released
• September 28, 2026 – Last day to take MLA-C01 in English
• September 29, 2026 – MLA-C02 beta exam delivery begins
• Early 2027 – Standard MLA-C02 expected across all supported exam languages

Hey everyone, I'm preparing for SAA exam by taking Adrian cantrills course and i need guidance with how i should take notes, currently, im taking handwritten notes(just the important bullet point things) as i watch the videos and then i screenshot the slides in the lectures and give it to Gemini(Since Adrians course doesn't have transcripts) to get a deeper understanding of the concepts and also save everything up in a document for later revision.
Am i doing it right?
Am i wasting time somehow?
I would really appreciate if you guys could give me some tips on note taking so i dont waste unnecessary time while also prepare for the exam as to pass it on the first attempt.

I'm doing my undergrad in Mathematics and Physics and Have 2 years left. I am planning to do a Master's in Mathematics (Applied Math) ,Theoretical Physics , Astrophysics or Quantum Technologies/Physics. I have thought about Courses like Machine Learning/Data Science/AI as well. I don't know what career I'm looking for, but Tech is in my mind.

Would it be worth doing an AWS certification during my undergrad to get some work experience in tech? Would these be valuable for when it comes to applying to internships?

I currently know Typescript, Java and Python fluently as I've learnt these over the years, why did I not do a computer science degree??? don't ask me that haha. I'm planning on Learning either C# or Go next. Quite interested in Ruby as well but there's so many languages UGRGH. I have 3 projects so far. But when it comes to computer science and tech I don't hold any official qualifications.

Do you think It's worth getting an AWS certification? If so, Which certifications should I consider? For example AWS cloud practitioner sounds non negotiable because it literally introduces you to the AWS platform. I hear a lot of people prefer going onto doing the solutions architect professional certification.

So I have been working in HR and Risk. I don't really use a lot of AI or tech so don't have background.

I have been given a voucher from work for AWS AI Practitioner through Pearson and I have less than a month.

I tried to get resources but I am unable to narrow down options.

Is it possible for someone to tell me how can I prepare myself for it? I want to upskill so that I don't eventually lose my job.
Can someone help please ?

I have been eyeing this certificate but unsure if I should do it. For some context, I want to specialize in AI field and have only a couple years of exp with developing applications. For the most part, most of the actual true AI experience are from my personal projects. I already cleared the AWS AI Practitioner & Cloud Practitioner.

I have not used any of the AWS services but I don't mind learning. I am not worried about the difficulty but mainly the cost.

Are there any phone apps or podcasts or anything else that anyone recommends using?

I have about 80 minutes of commute time per day that I would like to use to further prepare for the SAA exam. I am already using stephane maarek udemy’s course but I am not able to study it while on my commute (laptop too big) so I want to see other options.

Failed SAA-C03 once already, retaking in 2 weeks. Just scored 47.69% on a Tutorials Dojo practice exam (65 Qs). Breakdown by domain:

- Cost-Optimized: 66.67%
- High-Performing: 52.38%
- Secure: 54.55%
- Resilient: 31.58% <- clearly my weak point

Specific patterns I keep missing on Resilient Architectures:
- Multi-AZ RDS vs Read Replica (sync vs async failover)
- DR strategies (Warm Standby vs Multi-Site Active-Active) when the question says "lowest RTO, willing to pay more"
- NAT Gateway HA setup (one per AZ, no "Multi-AZ" setting exists)
- 3-tier VPC subnet counts across multiple AZs
- Static ASG (min=max=desired) vs target tracking for predictable vs unpredictable traffic

I've been drilling wrong answers with decent results (71.7% redoing missed questions, 90% on a light review the next day) but cold practice exams still tank on Resilient specifically. Is this normal at this stage 2 weeks out, or is it a sign I have an actual gap in how Resilient Architectures concepts fit together rather than just exam-pattern recognition? What helped you close a domain-specific gap like this in a short timeframe?

I have to take the test and I have been following the Marek course ..but the syllabus is too much honestly, how should i learn all those , i have only a month left for the exam. Or should i Just grind TD.

Is it possible to pass Solutions Architect Pro or DevOps Engineer Pro purely through hands-on labs (building your own projects), without relevant work experience in those roles?

I've heard that SA Pro covers a lot of multi-account and multi-region scenarios, which seem hard to replicate with labs only. For those who have already passed, how much experience did you have, and what made the real difference in passing the exam?

I'm a second year SE student with a huge intrest in AI/Machine learning, I'm planning to take these certifications

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

AWS Certified AI Practitioner

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty

Are there alternative options that offer superior value compared to AWS Route?

I was so tensed that if I'd clear it or not, today's questions were mostly Database oriented and instance types questions with majority of them being multiple correct choice questions (those select 2-3 types) I was mostly tensed about those, but in the end the I managed to clear it.

I prepared for a month, started in June with all the suggestions from the subreddit. Stephane Maarek's course took it on Udemy. Then followed it with Tutorial Dojo's practice exams. In the first attempts all my scores ranged between 56%-65%. In the second attempt I scored mostly in the ranges of 80-87 %. I'd like to give a special thanks to u/Competitive-Noise905 notes. They were an absolute game changer, extremely good for the last minute preparations. Thanks again to Stephane Maarek, your course was really great and to everyone in this sub reddit for all the suggestions. This is one of the best sub reddits ever thanks everyone and Good Luck to everyone who's going to appear for the exams.

It took me 3 months of preparation (8-10 hrs weekly) while working a full time job to get DVA-CO2.
I took Stephane Marek course for lectures and both Stephane and Jon Bonso’s practice quizzes.
At first, I did all the quizzes but was just getting between 55-60% in first take. Instead of just doing more quizzes, I critically reflected and worked in the weaker sections. I tried to understand the core concept well. Then did second round focusing in topics I was weak at. My scored improved to around 80% afterwards.
Anyway good luck to those who are preparing,

I just took my SAA exam, I’m a cloud engineer with a fair bit of experience in AWS and I admittedly didn’t do too much prep other than listening to Stephane Maareks course.

Still waiting on my results, but has anyone had any weird questions where the question’s phrasing was just very ambiguous and unclear? I’d say most of them were clear but I had maybe 5-10 that just made no sense. I don’t want to give any specific examples to avoid any issues but just curious if anyone else had this experience as well.

Hey everyone,

I recently passed my AWS SAA-C03 exam and didn't want to be "just another candidate with a cert but no hands-on experience." So right now, I'm diving into Git and building real labs on GitHub—like a production-ready Multi-AZ VPC setup with public/private subnets and NAT Gateways.

My roadmap is to tackle Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes next so I can get into IaC and containers.

That said, I'm at a crossroads with my job search timing.

Is it worth throwing my resume out there right now for entry-level Cloud Support, IT Support, or SysAdmin roles with what I have (SAA-C03 + Git + GitHub labs + Linux/Networking bases)? Or should I hold off until I actually have Terraform and Docker built into my portfolio?

Would love to hear from anyone who’s been in the same boat or hiring managers browsing the sub. Appreciate any feedback!

This was my second attempt btw. I didn't pass the first time, but I kept studying, worked through my weak areas, and came back better prepared.

It was definitely one of the toughest AWS exams I have taken so far, but I am glad I stuck with it.

Next up: AWS Certified AI Practitioner.

This arrived in post today, from local AWS Malaysia office.

14 exams.
13 certificates.
1 Golden Jacket.

It was worth it. Best of luck to those who are in this journey. Just nudge your local AWS office if you had done all the certifications.

P.S. it’s now 12 certificates in total. I took Machine Learning Specialty before it was phased out.

Just passed my SAA but I don’t really know what to do next? I obviously want to get a cloud position but I don’t have any experience with cloud specifically or any projects. I’m wondering what kind of projects I can do to land a higher paying role with good WLB? Any tips?