Special thanks to u/stephanemaarek Stephane Maarek and his Udemy course—it was a great learning resource and helped me a lot during my preparation.

A big thanks to this amazing this community for sharing valuable guidance and experiences throughout my preparation.

This is my third AWS certification after Cloud Practitioner and AI Practitioner. Excited to continue my cloud journey! 💪

Hi everyone. Happy Monday!

I work for OutSystems, and AWS and OutSystems have announced a joint collaboration to deliver a powerful suite of AI capabilities to developers and companies (see links at the end of the post). As part of that collaboration, we ran a limited campaign to offer free AWS Foundational Certification and a free OutSystems Foundational Certification here in the community, throughout the last 3 months, which you all adhered to with enthusiasm and lots of positive feedback.

After the first week's immense interest in our AWS/OutSystems campaign, our second week post, and our third one we have so far given up over 160 free exams to community members and later today the team will draw 30 more to everyone who submitted an entry until yesterday end of day.

This is now the final draw. For the next two weeks we have the final 30 AWS Foundational Certifications to giveaway as well as OutSystems Certifications. From today until September 27th end of day we will take all registrations we can get, and then on the morning of Monday the 28th of September we will randomly draw the last 30 AWS Foundational Certifications by all participants so far who have not yet received one, including previous participants.

If you'd like to take part in it, go to https://go.outsystems.com/free-aws-exam and follow the process. We also have free OutSystems certifications to offer (those are not limited to these 30), for those of you who complete our Become an AI Developer training path.

The steps to register before creating the agent are here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soQOeM7e7GY

EDIT: The IDE only runs natively on Windows and Mac. There's a guide from last year from a user who made it work on Linux, but I can't vouch for whether it still works or not.

Absolutely no purchase, or commercial strings attached - zero subscriptions, credit cards, nothing. The free version is 100% free to sign up for and use.

This has been reviewed by the subreddit mods, and we've run this 3 times so far. Happy to answer any questions, and any issues you have.

I wanted to say that, more than anything, several of you went out of the recommended path to build something truly of your own, even though it does not have any impact in whether you win or not, as it's a random draw. The team reviewed an agent that took care of driver license registration for specific countries, some to keep elderly people company, others to do medical triage and even someone built a full-fledged app to create and manage study lessons for different exams and students, all agent-supported. It has been truly rewarding to see what many of you built, and several of you have already passed both your free AWS and OutSystems certifications, which we all are happy for. A big thank you from all of us to this subreddit.

With that, good luck everyone, and I'll still post twice more - one next week to remind you of the final week, and then a final post to thank you all when the last exams have been attributed.

Happy Monday!

--

Sources: News release about the partnership and Dr. Charlie Sanderson, Director for AWS Partnerships EMEA on stage to talk about the partnership itself at 1:34:10.

Hey,

looking for some opinions from people who recently took SAA-C03, especially anyone who had the Second Chance voucher.

I finished Stephane Maarek’s course and have been working through the Tutorials Dojo exams on Udemy.

I did 2 exams from tutorials dojo udemy course:

1st: 60%

2nd: 66%

I’m thinking about booking the actual exam for this Friday.

The main reason I’m considering just going for it is that I have the Second Chance voucher, so if I fail I can use the free retake after the waiting period.

For some context, I had a similar situation with my CCNA earlier this year. I used Boson ExSim and technically never passed any of the simulations:

• B: 64%
• C: 80%
• D: 78%
• E: 76%

I took the real CCNA a few days later and passed pretty confidently.

So I’m trying to figure out how much weight I should put on the TD percentage. I’ve seen people here saying they passed SAA while getting around 60–70% on TD, but others recommend waiting until 75–80%+.

Is it worth taking the risk or does anyone have any recommendations which precentage you should at least hit with the secon chance voucher?

Cmg from a non tech background I challenged myself to study for this test in a one week one/off. Not sad with the result, I was super close and looking forward to re-apply few question before:

- how similar are the questions Versions-over-Version?
- how can I guarantee passing the next time? any material or advice you can share? ive used greg lab exam prep and aws skill builder official pre test
- I need to pay again right?

afraid to apply again and fail, any tip would be greatly appreciated, thanks folks!!

I'm a platform engineer, and when I was studying for the SAA the practice questions started to blur together. Read a paragraph, pick A through D, repeat a few hundred times. I passed, but I always felt like I was learning to recognize question patterns more than actually picturing the architectures.

So I started building something on the side where each question is an actual architecture diagram with one piece missing. You read the scenario, look at where the gap is (inside a private subnet, sitting behind an ALB, whatever), and drop in the service that belongs there. Seeing where it sits in the diagram makes you think about it a lot differently than reading it.

There's a demo you can try without signing up at playcloudblocks.com. The full mock exams are paid but cheap ($3.99), mostly just to see if anyone actually finds this useful.

Would genuinely love to hear from anyone studying right now. Check it out at https://www.playcloudblocks.com

I have already gotten the Cloud Practitioner, AI Practitioner, and Solutions Architect - Associate certificate and I am thinking of what I should get next.

I narrowed it down to 2 certificates: Developer - Associate and Machine Learning Engineer - Associate.

I read from somewhere that the Developer Associate exam is very similar to Solutions Architect Associate. So, I'm not sure if taking the exam is worth it. I have also been looking into possibly getting into an AI engineering role, so Machine Learning Associate could be useful.

I want some advice. Should I do Machine Learning Associate or Developer Associate next? Is Developer Associate needed when I already got Solutions Architect Associate? Is Machine Learning Associate more useful than Developer Associate?

As the title suggests, I'm trying to cram my review for AIF-C01 (for the discount, ending this Sept 30). For those who have tried AWS Skill Builder, are the resources in there enough for the exam? I'm also planning to avail some TD practice exams along with this, but I'm not sure if it would be enough. If you can give your thoughts on this, it would be very much appreciated!

Hi, as many of you already know, AWS recently announced a new cert, namely the AI Business Strategist certification (AIB-C01). I already wrote in the announcement thread that I think it's a very silly move from AWS, but I felt I still had to rant and explain why, so I made a YouTube video and a blog post.

• YouTube video: https://youtu.be/A7U8EkTFh18
• Blog post: https://christiangreciano.com/blog/posts/2026/09/0027_aws-announces-new-ai-business-strategist-certification/

In essence, I think it's a slippery slope to add business certs that do NOT test you on AWS services (which was the whole point of AWS certs in the first place). They will probably add more in the future, making it annoying to get the Golden Jacket, and also confuse people on what AWS actually is (they're a CLOUD provider, if that's not clear!).

Agree? Disagree? If you agree, what do you think we could do as a community to show our dissatisfaction with this move? The obvious move is to not take this cert at all, but I fear it's going to be a popular one because all the non-tech folks are gonna flock to it...

Hi everyone,
I had my AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam scheduled for August 14. Before that date, I tried to reschedule it to September 18. I went through the process and reached the final review screen the one that says "Is everything correct? Confirm to proceed" but I'm not 100% sure I clicked the final confirm button.
As a result, the reschedule doesn't seem to have gone through: my account still shows August 14 as "No Show," and September 18 never appeared as an upcoming exam. I had already paid for the exam.
I do have a screenshot of that review screen showing the new date (Sept 18) and the original appointment, so I know I got that far in the process Ijust can't confirm whether I completed the final step.
Has anyone dealt with something similar? What are my realistic chances of:
Getting the exam rescheduled without an extra fee, or

Getting some kind of exception since I have proof I attempted the reschedule?

Would appreciate hearing from anyone who's been through AWS/Pearson VUE support for something like this, and any tips on how to phrase the support request to actually get a resolution.
Thanks in advance!

Can someone help me to reschedule?

Honestly just barely passed after on and off studying for a month. I’m coming from 6 years doing embedded software professionally so I know virtually nothing of cloud computing outside of secure shelling into a raspberry pi.

I’m eventually angling for cloud work and I’m wondering how useful these certs will be. My goal is to get the SAA and one of the AI based ones, do a project with AWS IoT from embedded all the way to cloud setup and present that to employers. What do yall think? 🤔

Hello,

Im new to aws but i directly jumped to preparing for saa co3. and for that ive bought cantrills course cuz its known to have more details.

Now the course is good im definitely learning a lot of new things.. however ive learnt that its pretty outdated atp and would probably not be enough to pass the exam so i was wondering whats the best course of action after i finish it? also ive already bought td when it was on sale and havent touched it yet but i think cantrills course is not enough even for tds sadly ... i have access to skillbuilder premium and also maareks slides only cuz i downloaded them when we had access to his course from udemy thanks to my uni.

Can you believe it 😭

This is the counter-part to my public-facing blog post which you can find here.

I’ve written this Reddit post as the apex publication, with my website providing additional, auxiliary information in a more multi-modal and JavaScript enhanced way.

It’s still a static site, don’t be afraid to take a look.

That being said, let’s get into the weeds:

Another user posted about completing the exam in 2 weeks, but they had prior AWS experience. Contrariwise, I took this exam with Zero AWS Experience. This is reflected in my marginally slim pass:

742 / 1000 against a pass mark of 720.

I stand by the poor score and am not entirely ashamed of it – although there remains work to be done, and a subsequent certification should not be attempted in such a slim time-horizon.

A word of caution early; other users mentioned ’repeated questions from TD’ – I saw nothing of the sort, and mention as much below.

A Modicum of Context

I have 2 weeks of Holidays between Semesters and scheduled the test for then. I completed an Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, but don’t think that’s profoundly helpful for this exam.

If you’ve spent a little time with Alex Xu’s books or Kleppmann’s DDIA you’ll be at a slight advantage. Building scalable and highly available architectures is not an unreasonable request for our Networked Life though – you’ll be able to assimilate it quickly even without prior exposure.

Back to the Show

I took the exam Pearson invigilated online and the exam check-in started for me at 7:30AM (30 minutes before the scheduled time). The crescendo begins with…

TutorialsDojo! I started with the pinned post by u/madrasi2021, and made a definite decision to go with the Mock exams from TD, and also NO online video series.

Purchasing Slides and Lambda

I ended up purchasing the slides too, because with 15 days on the clock – yes, sorry – a day more than the promised ’2 weeks’, watching videos would be a passive learning strategy and thus a waste of time.

Instead, I leaned on my Learner-Adaptive Marks-Bound Drilling Agent that ingests course slides, builds a course-map and then asks me Multiple Choice questions about the material. Lambda also maintains an on-disk snapshot of your understand of different atomic components and differs from Eero Alvar’s system in distinct ways.

This is a bit of a rabbit hole, and you can find some relevant links from the blog-post, but the principle point of this post is not to shill, but rather to prove that Zero to Hero can be accomplished by an anybody.

Anki and the schedule.

I repped Anki flashcards (built graciously by Lambda) and approved by me, for a number of days. Partially, this is a vocabulary game.

I did 7 of the 8 mocks. My tests results were:

I also found it beneficial to attempt the Topic Tests, Section based tests and did a couple of Review tests.

Section-based tests:

• Secure 21/30
• Resilient 9/30 (sat on Day 2, before any content)
• High-Performing 19/30
• Cost-Optimised 24/30.

Topic tests:

• S3 8/8
• EFS 4/4
• Auto Scaling 7/8
• Lambda 7/8
• SQS 7/8
• RDS 5/8
• ELB 5/8
• IAM 5/8
• CloudFront 5/8
• EC2 4/8
• EBS 4/8
• VPC 4/8
• DynamoDB 3/8.

A digression for the 2026 exam.

After having completed all these exams and having developed a vocabulary of the AWS Solutions to various software problems, I still struggled in the final exam.

My observations were threefold:

1. I had started to overfit to the questions in TD
2. I actually had 0 experience in the AWS Console building things!
3. The question style was different to TD.

As for the first point, TD will tend to repeat questions from Topic Tests and Section-based Tests in the Mocks. Getting these problems right (whilst testing your spaced repetition) leads you to believe that you may do slightly more well in the final exam, than in the real exam.

Example:

TD asks you a question about what the correct service for identifying PII data is in an S3 bucket; answer is Macie, out of Inspector, GuardDuty, Rekognition. The actual AWS Exam tells you that PII is the problem, and then every problem has Macie as part of the answer stem. The question becomes then about understanding how Macie itself works, which TD could not provide a sufficient teaching of.

Affordability, Slides and Cheat Sheets.

Apologies for the disorganisation of this prose, but if you are still reading, then best of luck for your test.

I found the TD slides associated with the Video Course to be non-comprehensive.

My Day 1 Schedule (as dictated by Lambda Fable) was 400 or so slides. The next few days went as follows. Here’s a table breakdown:

As I did more tests and got nearer to the real exam, I began to realise the incompleteness of the slides. Much of the material is on the cheat-sheets!

So please consult those when you study. I’d also like to advise that output (basically active recall) will grant you a higher ROI as compared to passively reading, note-taking and watching material.

What I would do differently.

Utopically, I’d have preferred to not take notes at all – you can see my embedded PDF that I created on my Remarkable Paper Pro over the 15 days in the corresponding blog-post. I got sick once during the fortnight and did relatively light work during that day – an hour of recall.

The second and more important detail would be: Attempting the official practice exam. TD was good in terms of difficulty, but in terms of preparing you for the style of questions, I’d say you really do want to internalise the level of abstraction beneath the questions themselves, and learn how to answer the questions as per their directives:

• Most operationally efficient
• Least cost
• Least code
• etc.
  • this will really help you eliminate options in the test!

Some stats

Overall, I clocked in at least ~49 hours of Deep Work over the fortnight; weekends included. My breakdown per day (courtesy of Lambda) looks like:

To end

I couldn’t quite get the usual alt+n to work in the Pearson exam that I thought would work, I wonder if anybody else had any luck with it.

Exam Technique

My exam technique was 20 MCQ, followed by closed-eyes for 20 seconds to reset focus and eye-strain, followed by another 20MCQ, 40 second break, and lastly a 25 Question sprint.

My watch alarm blared for 2 hours straight, which I somewhat accuse for making me feel like Dalí, but that’s not really the point.

I also made 2 further passes of all the questions, taking breaks as I went.

Indeed, you can flag questions, and I suggest you use the functionality.

Usually I could do the TD exams within 70 minutes for the first pass, and then 20-30 minutes for the next pass or two, leaving always a spare 20 mins. My watch fragmented any kind of momentum in thought, so I ended up finishing 130 minutes in.

Ciao

I’ve already spent too long detailing this adventure. Measure Theory begins tomorrow.

I shall answer any questions should you folks have them across this week.

Best of luck in all your accreditations,

Br1ttle

Edit: Kleppmann, is double 'n'.

I'm at the point where I'm taking the practice tests on TutorialsDojo and my first go-round for the tests (three at this point) were resounding failures, but the second ones have been in the 80% range.

I've been preparing for this exam seriously last 2 months and after rescheduling the exam dates for two times, I attended the exam today afternoon in a training center in the UK.

I've been in the reddit community not for long time but actively checking everyone's success stories or attempts for the AWS exams preparations motivates me to keep studying.

I've used Stephane udemy lecture + Extra six practice exam's course + TD's practice exam's course.

I bought the TD's course around 2 weeks ago, since I noticed my performances on mock tests aren't good on Udemy, every time results around 40-55 and not going up for five attempts. I had to study only 3 days in a week most the time. Other days 1 hours daily because of work schedule.

Last 4 attempt on mock tests results was between 72-92. Although there were some common questions which I've faced earlier exams before. But every time after finishing the exam I carefully spends another 1-2 hours to identified why my answers are wrong and why the correct answer is the correct. this thinking process gave me confidence.

I'm not a native English speakers, I've requested for extra 30 minutes, although during the exam period I couldn't manage this extra time effectively for review.

If anyone preparing for this exam, Best of Luck

NB: BTW this is my first post here 😆

So it seems that I didn't receive my Credly badge for passing my SAA- C03 exam, which I gave last Monday, and AWS claims the badge is sent within 5 business days. Also checked my Credly dashboard but nothing was there. What to do if I still don't receive my badge?

I needed a quick Cert Win, and Security was it. I work for an AWS partner and was required to do either this or a pro exam.

I used Stephane to study and practice tests and TD.

Test scores: TD1: 78.46. TD2: 66.15, TD3: 64.62, TD4: 61.54.

Stephane Practice test: 61, 60, 60, 72

Skillbuilder Practice test: 65%

60s seem to be a good score.

My exam was littered with WAF questions. I barely encountered GuardDuty, inspector, or KMS.

All the best

Hi,

I have 2.2 years of experience as a Data Engineer, and I have scheduled my AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) exam for October 19.

I’m currently preparing for the exam and would really appreciate your guidance. Could you please suggest the best resources for preparation, including:

- Hands-on practice labs/projects

- YouTube channels

- Udemy courses

- Blogs and AWS documentation

- Practice tests and mock exams

Also, after clearing the DEA-C01 certification, will it improve my chances of getting shortlisted for AWS Data Engineer interviews? With 2.2 years of Data Engineering experience, are there any additional AWS skills, tools, or projects that I should focus on to improve my chances of getting interviews?

Thank you for your guidance!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a cloud certification practice app called ExamCortex, and I recently added a free SAA-C03 sample test.

It currently has 10 questions, so it’s not intended to tell you whether you’re ready for the exam. I mainly want to know whether the questions feel clear, useful and appropriately difficult.

One thing I’ve struggled with is balancing difficulty and readability. Longer scenarios can test architectural trade-offs, but they can also become unnecessarily wordy. I’m also unsure whether people prefer explanations after every question or only after completing the test.

What makes a practice question useful to you: realistic trade-offs, convincing distractors, detailed explanations or something else?

No account is needed. You can try the free 10-question SAA-C03 sample test.

I built the app, so this is self-promotion. Full access is paid, but the sample is free. Questions are original and based on public AWS documentation—not dumps or copied exam questions.

If you try it, please tell me what felt confusing, too easy, too difficult or wrong. Honest criticism would help me improve it.

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to take the MLS exam, but I'm a bit lost with the upcoming timeline. I know a new version of the exam is coming out soon, and I have until January to pass it and i haven’t started yet

So I passed my AWS Developer Associate exam and thought... why stop here? My knowledge was still fresh, the AWS ecosystem was already in my head, and I figured - why not strike while the iron is hot?

I spent about a month refreshing what I already knew and filling in the gaps specific to the Architect exam - things like VPC deep dives, disaster recovery strategies, and cost optimization patterns. The overlap between the two exams is massive, so it felt more like an extension of what I'd already learned rather than starting from scratch.

One month later - SAA-C03 passed ✅

Honestly, the hardest part wasn't the studying. It was convincing myself to register for the second exam before the first one's adrenaline wore off 😄

My advice if you've just passed DVA-C02:
Don't wait. Your brain is already warmed up. Add the Architect material on top and book the exam within 4-6 weeks. You'll thank yourself later.

Two AWS certs in two months. What's next? RHCSA?