My company gave free voucher for data engineer exam. I enrolled to gain knowledge on data engineer

I only know kafka. Anyone please tell me how to prepare for this exam in 2 or 3 weeks.

Hey everyone,

​Just wanted to share the good news that I cleared my Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) exam! It feels great to have this one under my belt.

I wanted to give a quick breakdown of my experience and what I saw on the test to give back to this awesome community.

​My Study Strategy:

I did an intense, high-velocity revision sprint focusing heavily on the Disambiguation & Keyword method. Essentially mastering how to tell lookalike services apart (like DataSync vs. Storage Gateway, or ALB vs. NLB) and identifying the absolute trigger words AWS uses to signal the right answer.

​What Heavily Featured on My Exam:

​Serverless Pipelines: A lot of S3, Glue, Athena, and QuickSight combinations for cost-optimized analytics.

​Storage Disambiguation: Knowing exactly when to deploy EFS vs. EBS vs. FSx. Lustre and Windows heavily featured.

​Decoupling & Event-Driven: Tons of SQS (Standard vs. FIFO), SNS, and Lambda architectures.

​Security Layers: Tricky scenarios separating AWS WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, and Amazon Macie.

​Organizations & SCPs: Restricting root users across multiple accounts.

​My Top Tip for the Exam Room:

Read the very last sentence of the prompt first! It instantly tells you the core constraint (e.g., most cost-effective vs. least operational overhead). Once you know that, it is much easier to filter out the technically true but wrong for this scenario distractor options.

​Thanks to everyone in this sub whose past write-ups helped guide my prep. If you are preparing right now and have any questions, feel free to drop them below!

My exam was scheduled for today.

I completed the check-in process without any issues and joined the queue about 10 minutes before the scheduled start time. I waited for over 30 minutes, and by then I had reached No. 2 in the queue. However, that was about 20 minutes pass the actual exam time already (which was not due to my fault).

A "Reschedule" button appeared in the Pearson VUE app. I clicked it only to check whether there were any available slots later that same day in case the queue kept moving slowly. There were no available slots, so I had absolutely no intention of rescheduling. I wanted to take the exam immediately.

However, after viewing the reschedule page, there was no back button or any way to return to the exam queue. I was effectively stuck on that screen. A few minutes later, a dialog popped up saying that I could no longer reschedule through Pearson VUE and instructed me to close the app.

At no point did I confirm a reschedule or cancel my exam.

I did everything I was supposed to, i started check in in 30 minutes earlier, was done checking in 10 minutes earlier. 

Yet somehow I ended up losing my exam attempt.

To make matters worse, I immediately tried to reschedule through the Pearson VUE website. It appeared to go through, but I never received a confirmation email. When I checked again shortly afterward, rescheduling was no longer available.

This has been incredibly frustrating and mentally exhausting. I paid for the exam fee, cleared my schedule, was fully prepared, and still couldn't take the exam because of what seems to be an issue not on my side. I even took leave to study for this.

I'm currently trying to contact customer service through phone calls but no one was available. i have sent an email by filling in their form too, hoping i will get an update on this...

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Were you able to get a free reschedule, refund, or have Pearson VUE acknowledge it was a system issue? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I'm pretty happy that I got this over with and am trying to use this momentum to go on to CloudOps Engineer and then continue from there. Anyone got any tips for it or good study methods/resources for it?

https://preview.redd.it/fzzpuh7mzbbh1.png?width=1578&format=png&auto=webp&s=9695781f4bca72e9c5eea8aacc68c8b8d2ba4e85

Hello reddit family!

Happy to share that I have finally passed the exam.

The community was very helpful. I have been thoroughly following the group.

The experience was nearly similar to what others mentioned. I had taken the udemy Stephane Mareek's course for preparation and tutorial dojo practice test.

The exam wasn't very easy for me, especially when l didn't have much hands on.

I was getting 76-80 percent in the TD exams and then using claude and chatgpt to scrutinize the wrong answers.

Very important suggestions - target to score around 80 in the TD exam but DON'T memorize the answers instead, conceptualize about the services.

The real exam at least for me was very different from the TD but the learning from TD definitely helped to pass.

Hi everyone, actually I am feeling lost and doesn't know how to learn for the exam? I've completed Stephane Maarek course and also bought TD mock exams (Did only 1 exam).

Any tips/guides/strategies which I should use to learn for the exam? I am feeling lost/demoralized after my first attempt at TD questions. I did score below 60%

Any helps would be greatly appreciated :)

Hi, i am student preparing for cloud internship, But i don't want to spend money on certification currently, i would doing it on future , As the title says is there any certifications or certificate which are free and considered as valuable

Also, Can u guys suggest what all are the certifications or certificate are important to have in resume

THANK YOU

Hi,

I’m 14 and trying to map out a realistic path into cloud computing (AWS-focused), ideally working in IT/cloud by 18.

I’m not planning on going to college due to financial reasons and I want to avoid debt. So I’m fully focused on certifications, self-study, and hands-on projects instead.

I understand this is an extremely competitive field, so I’m trying to be realistic, not optimistic.

Right now I only know basic Python. I’ve paused deeper programming for now because I’m unsure whether I should prioritize cloud fundamentals + AWS certs instead of going deeper into coding early on.

From what I’ve seen, cloud roles can be cert-driven, but I don’t know how true that is for entry-level hiring in 2026.

What I’m trying to figure out:

• Is it actually realistic to enter cloud/IT without a degree or connections, just certs + projects?
• What’s the most realistic entry path at my age and timeline (help desk → sysadmin → cloud, or something else)?
• If the goal is AWS/cloud engineer long-term, what should I be focusing on right now to not waste time?

I’m willing to put in the work, I just want to make sure I’m not aiming at something unrealistic.

Yalllll, when I tell you I've been preparing for the SAA exam forever, believe me. I had been putting this exam off for nearly 6 months now - kept scheduling, rescheduling, cancelling and never felt confident enough to take it. Not even until the actual exam day when I just decided to say f*** it and take it.
For reference, I took about 4 practice tests in Tutorials Dojo and never passed any of them. Lowest was 46% (after months of no-study, took the exam to see what my baseline was) and the rest were 61%, 63%, and 66%. As you can see, I NEVER even made it into 70%. Was going through some posts in here and saw multiple people say they passed the actual exam after getting 60 something in TD. That gave me enough confidence to just book my exam and take it. And tbh, I was done studying. Even during the exam, I just wanted to get it over with.

If you feel like you have enough grasp and enough practice of the material, trust your self and the work you put in and go for it!! Good luck :)

Hey everyone,

I’m currently studying for a certification in Cloud (AWS Solutions Architect Associate – SAA-C03), and I thought it would be a good idea to connect with others on the same path.

I’m trying to put together a small study group for anyone who is:

studying cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.)

preparing for certifications

or already working in cloud and willing to share experience

The idea is simple:

help each other stay consistent and motivated

discuss concepts and clear doubts

share resources, tips, and practice questions

maybe do some hands-on labs or small projects together

I’m personally aiming to take the exam around October.

If you’re interested, feel free to comment or DM me. We can set up a Discord or something similar depending on what works best for everyone.

Everyone is welcome

https://preview.redd.it/99eob231svah1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd7302fe3b68970f021c8064cbb003aef21c8e43

Very happy to share my SAA here after following tips here for over a month. Seeing so many people sharing their success was inspiring.

I still remember some of (my) marked for review questions, I'll try to remember the topics and I encourage people to review those and go in more confident.

My main points are:

• I did not do video courses or followed skillbuilder that much, I did only TD and many timed/review exams, around dozen of those over a month, I stopped once it started to feel too familiar then I scheduled the exam. I have over 10 years of practical experience with AWS, but more around being and supporting dev teams and products, not that deep on networks.
• I was amazed on how much TD timed and review exams are on point. I mean, my very first question felt like I have answered it at least twice. The difficulty was on par, but only a few times I scored around that 85% mark so I'm very happy with myself and super pleased with TD.
• Also, the subjects at TD also felt like they have the exact coverage on topics. I did not see any topic that wasn't touched, nor any super new topic. Only one about AI but about SageMaker, and only two about Kubernetes but one around securing EKS. I encourage people not to fear new topics, I had many many questions around storage, EC2, load balancers, ECS, IAM, the usual suspects.
• I credit TD questions and support materials on closing my gaps around networks and storage options.

I remember to have marked around 10 questions for review, and a few other I was not 100% sure but I saw no point marking those for review.

Here's topics I reviewed some material because I failed to remember those properly:

• S3 Object Lock about governance and compliance mode - more than one question
  • One cannot overstudy S3 scenarios nor filesystems scenarios
• PII data security between Macie and Inspector
• I got a question about using Flink vs EMR vs Glue! I remember a similar question on TD, mine was about ingesting and processing data in near real time plus viewing it after
• ECS containers needing to access files either via EBS multiattach or plain EFS
• EventBridge API Destinations
• CloudFront accessing either NLB or ALB, TD helped me with those 100%
• Many questions about API Gateway scenarios
• RDS MySQL having a reader endpoint? IMO only Auroras have those
• A very cool but difficult DR scenario with RTO and RPO of 15 minutes, but the most cost effective solution so it was about choosing between keeping the DR env switched off or not
• Lambdas running inside VPC
• No questions about XRay, I barely remember getting any about Logs. I got more about Kinesis and Firehose.

Hope this helps someone. Again, I can't praise TD exams enough.

On to Developer Associate!