About the Exam
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam includes multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions. You will have 80 minutes to complete it. Exams are administered at PSI centers.
Prerequisites
The prerequisites below demonstrate the skills and knowledge that will help you achieve the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification:
AWS Knowledge and Experience
- Hands-on experience using compute, networking, storage, and database AWS services.
- Professional experience architecting large-scale distributed systems.
- Understanding of Elasticity and Scalability concepts.
- Understanding of network technologies as they relate to AWS.
- A good understanding of all security features and tools that AWS provides and how they relate to traditional services.
- A strong understanding of how to interact with AWS (AWS SDK, AWS API, Command Line Interface, AWS CloudFormation).
- Hands-on experience with AWS deployment and management services.
General IT Knowledge
- Excellent understanding of typical multitier architectures: web servers (Apache, nginx, IIS), caching, applications
- RDBMS (MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server), NoSQL.
- On servers and load balancers.
- Knowledge of message queuing and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
- Familiarity with loose coupling and stateless systems.
- Understanding of different consistency models in distributed systems.
- Experience with CDN and performance concepts.
- Network experience with route tables, access control lists, firewalls, NAT, HTTP, DNS, IP and OSI Network.
- Knowledge of RESTful Web Services, XML, JSON.
- Familiarity with the software development lifecycle.
- Work experience with information and application security, including public key encryption, SSH, access credentials and X.509 certificates.
Recommended Courses
The following courses help you prepare for this certification:
Recertification
AWS Associate-level certification holders are required to get recertified every two years in order to remain valid. Two ways to maintain Associate-level certification:
- Take a Recertification Exam. This is not the same exam as the original, but follows the same format.
Read more at AWS Recertification FAQs.
- Pass the Professional-level Exam. You can remain certified by earning either the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional certification.