I passed AWS Solutions Architect Associate last December. At the end of that post I mentioned I’d pursue the Professional tier next. Passed Solutions Architect Professional on February 15. Then took DevOps Engineer Professional on March 19.

One day of prep for each (the day before). I mostly banked on production experience. Most of what came up in the exam, I’ve encountered at work in some form.

SAP felt like a more comprehensive version of SAA. I finished in two hours out of three.

DOP was a lot harder than I expected. It was less about architecture and more on the specific behavior of AWS services. A lot of EKS questions came up and we don’t use Kubernetes at work. I guessed on those. I flagged 30 questions total. I went back and re-read each one carefully. I used the whole three hours, super exhausted. I was honestly bracing myself for retaking it. Luckily, I passed.

I joined my current role without even knowing what Terraform was. I only knew web development and LAMP stacks. I always had this doubt at the back of my mind whether I’m actually a cloud engineer or just got lucky landing the role. SAA felt too easy and didn’t really move the needle on that.

DOP being tough and still passing did. It’s not something someone could LLM their way around. Almost everything I relied on was things I actually learned on the job. That’s what made it feel different. I feel much more genuine with my title now. More confident with my voice. These exams showed me I can reason out architectural design decisions.

I don’t plan to take more certifications anytime soon. But if I ever did, it’d be CKA or CKAD. The amount of EKS questions on both exams made me realize how much I’m missing there. ECS is what we use at work but it’s AWS-only. Kubernetes is cloud-agnostic, can run anywhere including self-hosted, and it’s almost synonymous with DevOps at this point.

I want to widen the net.

So, I finally took and passed AWS SAA-C03. 4 years of procrastination, 2 exam reschedules, and 3 days of actually soaking my head in SAA topics.

As most of the things in my life, I spent more time stressing for it, and when I actually pushed thru working on it turned out to be easier than expected.

I spent 40 mins out of the 130 mins allowed. There were about 10 questions I had absolutely no idea about. The rest were fairly straightforward. The questions I did not know weren’t like some architecture questions, more on familiarity on what a service actually does. Anything CloudFront, S3, EC2, ECS, Lambda, VPC I was able to answer confidently. These are services we actually run in production. Having real hands-on experience helped a lot.

I think getting a certification did its purpose, filling in gaps with my AWS knowledge on things we don’t use but actually could be useful. Fun to learn about different storage solutions and appropriate uses. Fun to learn about AWS Org.

The exam felt unusually easy. It didn’t remove my impostor syndrome of being a qualified cloud engineer. Instead, it clarified that the gaps are less about fundamentals and more about reasoning across larger systems. I decided to pursue the more tougher exam Solutions Architect – Professional (scheduled Q1 next year).

Let’s see where this goes.