Overview
A Cloud Guru is an online learning company focused on cloud technologies. They offer over 400 courses and 1,800 hands-on labs on subjects ranging from AWS to Azure to DevOps and more.1 In this report, I will focus on their SAA-C03 course. Specifically, I will comment on the course lecture videos, its labs, practice exams, and how well it prepared me for the SAA-C03 exam. In this course, there were 54.8 hours of course content, which includes 231 lessons, 23 course quizzes, 17 hands-on labs, and 4 practice exams. The course is included in the Personal Plus subscription, which is on sale for $348/year. The cost of the exam itself is $150, however, there are discounts and incentives if you’ve taken and passed the AWS cloud practitioner exam in the past.
About the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Certification
Before jumping into the course content, let us first discuss the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification and why it is worth getting. In order to become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, you must pass the SAA-C03 exam. Passing the SAA-C03 exam demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of AWS services and technologies as well as an ability to build secure and robust solutions using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.2
Becoming AWS certified is worthwhile because more and more businesses are migrating to the cloud, and Amazon has the largest market share in the cloud market.3 Naturally, the Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is focused on AWS services. However, preparing for the exam will increase your knowledge of cloud agnostic concepts and even enable you to architect solutions in different cloud environments. For example, one of my customers needed to transfer data from a SaaS application to blob storage. They intended to use Azure functions (similar to Lambda functions) to query the application and send the data to blob storage. AWS has a service called AppFlow that transfers data between applications or from applications to storage.4 Equipped with knowledge of AppFlow, I found a similar, albeit less optimal, solution on Azure that may be more cost-effective than the customer’s original plan.
Course Review
As of the time of this report, A Cloud Guru’s SAA-C03 prep course features 54.8 hours of content, which includes 231 total lessons, 23 course quizzes, 17 hands-on labs, and 4 full-length practice exams. A Cloud Guru continuously monitors the course content to make sure it is up to date with Amazon’s exam objectives. In fact, A Cloud Guru updated the course in the middle of my learning — I had to go back to lessons I had marked complete to check out the new content. The course instructors have deep subject matter expertise. Ryan Kroonenburg, a co-instructor, is an Amazon Community Hero, an Alexa Champion, and the founder of A Cloud Guru.
Overall, I really liked this course. The interface is intuitive. The hands-on labs take you to a sandbox AWS account, which provides you with real-life experience in the AWS console and command line without having to incur any costs. The instructors do a great job of breaking down concepts into digestible chunks. They also present exam tips at the end of every lesson and chapter, which I highly recommend committing to memory. After I completed the course, I made flashcards out of the exam tips at the end of every lesson with Quizlet.5 Finally, the practice exams are a good benchmark for the real exam.
Conclusion
A Cloud Guru’s SAA-C03 exam prep course is an excellent course to take to help you become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect -. That being said, completing the course is the absolute minimum you should do to pass the SAA-C03 exam. To ace the exam, make sure to take advantage of Amazon’s free training resources, browse their customer success stories, and read their foundational whitepapers.
References
1. https://acloudguru.com/
2. https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/
3. https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/as-quarterly-cloud-spending-jumps-to-over-50b-microsoft-looms-larger-in-amazons-rear-mirror
4. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appflow/latest/userguide/what-is-appflow.html
5. https://quizlet.com/
