r/AWS_Certified_Experts

One thing we've noticed is that most teams know how much they're spending, but not exactly why the bill increased. Digging through services, resources, regions, and usage data takes time, so it often gets pushed aside.

We've been working on a tool to help us answer those questions:

What actually caused the increase?

Which resources are responsible?

Is it expected growth or just waste?

What can be optimized without affecting workloads?

We're looking for a few real-world cloud environments to test it against and get honest feedback.

No catch—we're genuinely trying to validate whether the insights are useful.

If the tool doesn't find meaningful savings, that's useful feedback for us too. If it does, we'd discuss a success-based pricing model instead of charging upfront.

I'm also curious—how do you currently investigate unexpected cloud cost spikes? Is it mostly AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing, custom dashboards, or something else?

Would love to hear what's worked (or hasn't) for you.

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!

I am open to paid and free courses. I am new to cybersecurity. I have some coding background.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a small project I've been working on for the past few months.

When I started learning AWS, I kept running into the same problem. There are tons of courses and YouTube videos, but it was hard to know what to learn first or how everything fit together. I'd finish a tutorial and still not feel like I could actually build anything.

So I decided to build CloudArena.io.

The idea isn't to replace AWS documentation or the big learning platforms. I just wanted to make something that helps beginners learn by actually doing things, with a clear path instead of jumping between random tutorials.

Right now it includes:

• Learning paths for people starting from scratch
• Hands-on labs
• Simple explanations without assuming you already know cloud
• Progress tracking so you can see how far you've come

It's still very much a work in progress, and I'm constantly adding new content and improving things.

If you're learning AWS (or you've been through that beginner stage), I'd genuinely love your feedback. I'm especially interested in hearing:

• What was the hardest thing for you when you started?
• Is there anything on the site that feels confusing or unnecessary?
• What would you like to see added?

Here's the site: https://cloudarena.io

I know there's a lot of AWS learning content out there already, but I built this because I wanted something that I personally would've found useful when I was starting out. If it helps even a few people, I'll be happy.

Thanks for reading, and I'm happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback.

So I’m i’m going to preparing for this exam. Can anyone give me a tips or resources so I can get a good score and currently I am following STEPHANE MAAREK UDEMY VIDEO COURSE

And if any one have notes or any other resources please share with me 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Tips would be appreciated

Thank you