When I started studying for this exam, the exam version was SAP-C01 but by the time I took it, it was SAP-C02. It has been 3 years since I took the SAA-C02 and while not much has changed, a lot of services and features have been added. Like all other exams, I took the exam online with PearsonVUE and encountered no issues while taking the exam. I feel like it was actually similar to the the associate but with added complexity. Instead of asking what service you needed for which scenario, it was now which COMBINATION of services will work to solve these multiple issues. Sometimes the choices are very similar and you will have to remember specifically if this service supports the function. I had to flag several and do double takes when going over them for review.
Example:
DB hybrid scenario
- needs credential encryption
- needs deployment of application to both AWS and on-prem
- servers need permissions to access the credentials
Options
- SSM parameter store? AWS Secrets manager?
- Beanstalk or Codedeploy?
- IAM role or policy?
Exam Prep Resources
- If you are newer to AWS, I suggest going with Adrian’s SAP course. It was very detailed and included an overwhelming amount of information but at least it had fun diagrams so you would not lose focus.
- Take Jon Bonso’s (Tutorials Dojo) practice exams Always.
- Pay attention to key SA numbers… I wish I saw this earlier but unfortunately I found this page only a couple days before the exam.
- Obviously play around in the AWS console for services you are not familiar with.
Exam Topics
- Lots of TGW/DX/VPC peering
- Lots of AWS Organization/Control Tower
- Cross-account access, roles, policies, SCP
- There was no ML services on my exam (and here I wasted my time with rekognition, comprehend, lex 🙄)
- Lots of IoT questions oftentimes with keyword MQTT, and at least one with greengrass
- Global Accelerator, R53 routing, Cloudfront
- Some pipeline stuff like CodeDeploy agent in AMI, codebuild and codepipeline
- Traffic filtering with firewalls and proxies
- Cost Savings Plan vs Reservations when Load is variable
- Cost Explorer provide Compute Optimization Recommendations
- Azure AD to AWS for SSO via Identity Center
- Kinesis Data Firehose Targets (redshift, elasticsearch, S3)
- VPC endpoints, gateway endpoint vs interface endpoint
Good luck with the exam and let me know if you passed!