I’ve been studying for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam and naively thought I could renew my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certificate along the way as a refresher, and a way to build confidence for the exam. Unfortunately that was not the case, and that idea backfired on me.

I didn’t want to dedicate lots of time to studying for the Cloud Practitioner exam since I thought the material would be simpler version of what I’m currently studying for the Solutions Architect Associate exam, so I just bought two sets of six practice exams on Udemy. I quickly realized that while the material is similar, the question sets are very different. There are actually quite a lot of things I am encountering in the practice exams on the Certified Cloud Practitioner tests that I have not studied for on the Certified Solutions Architect Associate exams.

The Cloud Practitioner exam really focuses on having a breadth of knowledge about the different services AWS provides, whereas the Solutions Architect Associate exam goes very in depth on certain topics and leaves out a lot of the more fringe services. I’ve realized that AWS rarely puts fake services in the multiple choice selections to stump you. They are almost always legitimate services that sound similar to other things, so you can’t automatically rule any of them out, you actually have to have a sense of what they all do. Another thing that has been challenging on the practice exams is that the Cloud Practitioner exam has a lot of questions about things like the different AWS support tiers, cloud best practices and design principles, and the shared responsibility model. I was not prepared for those things either because they haven’t been covered much in the Solutions Architect Associate study materials.

What I originally thought would be an easy win has actually turned out to be a major setback. Studying for the Cloud Practitioner exam has taken a lot of valuable time away from studying for the Solutions Architect Associate exam. It might have been easier if I had chosen to renew the Cloud Practitioner before embarking on getting the Solutions Architect Associate exam, but I have a new-found respect for the Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, and I recognize they are both very challenging in their own right.