AWS Big Data Certification Exam tips

I just passed the exam. It is one of the most difficult AWS certifications, more difficult than the professional level but not as difficult as you think. You just need to understand the technologies and how the integrate with each other. You have 3 hours to answer 65 scenario based questions. Refer to the exam blueprint and sample questions.

Main Tips

Main services are EMR, Redshift, Kinesis and DynamoDB. That makes 80% of the exam, if you have the associate level certification then you just need to review the rest of the concepts. Most of the time, other services like Redis or RDS are there as wrong answers. The questions are mostly escenario based mixing many technologies but you get a couple of short questions.

I got many questions regarding data ingestion and for me are the most difficult ones since you have always many valid approaches. Make sure you watch reInvent videos and check the use cases. Read the questions carefully and look for clues to discard options. I didn’t get questions regarding how to do streaming (rolling windows vs stagger) or how to design a table in DynamoDB which in my opinion are more important than how to ingest data to AWS (In real life, you have constrains and there is not much choice regarding how to get the data in but lots of choice and specially bad choices designing NoSQL and Big Data…