After many years of telling myself "I should take the SA Pro exam," I finally made the leap to take (and pass!) the exam this morning. While there's no shortage of exam prep info out there, one thing that helped me feel comfortable going in was finding similar stories to mine. So in the interest of giving that back: here's mine.
Some Context - Why did I take the test in the first place?
I hate tests. I've never been a good test taker, and the thought of sitting for a three-hour exam on a Saturday morning isn't exactly my idea of a nice weekend activity. I'm also not someone who particularly chases certifications. For me, it's more of a way to validate that I have the skills at a particular level, especially when I can't always apply that full skillset in my day-to-day work.
That said, I've taken the Solutions Architect Associate exam twice in the past, and with my associate certification coming up for renewal, I felt that I couldn't just take the associate-level exam a third time. I've been working with AWS for the past 10 years and have helped teach an exam prep cohort internally at my company three times over, so it felt like I was overdue for a professional-level certification.
Solutions Architect best reflects the work that I do "in my day job," so that felt like a natural choice (plus I needed to renew that associate-level cert). I'm exposed to many, but not all, of the concepts and services that the solutions architect track covers. At this stage, I'm not sure if I'll also pursue the DevOps Engineer track, but I haven't ruled out trying some of the specialty certifications.
What did my prep look like?
Effective test prep looks different for everyone, and I think a good way to plan your exam prep is by looking around at how others have tackled it. I spent just over one month preparing for my exam, and heavily weighted most of my practice in the 2 weeks leading up to exam day.
No matter what, I think the best place to start any AWS Certification exam prep is by reviewing the AWS-provided Exam Guide. From there, I opted to review using Stephane Maarek's excellent Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional 2025 course on Udemy. I watched through all of the lectures, even for the services that I thought I was very comfortable with (just in case).
The only section I didn't spend a lot of time with was the "Exam Preparation" section, which deep-dives on a handful of sample questions. If you haven't taken an AWS Certification exam in a while, this is a great walkthrough on the mindset that you should take into answering the questions. I instead opted to replace this section with Jon Bonso's practice exams on Tutorials Dojo. In helping people prepare for the associate-level exam, I've found that Jon's practice exams are some of the best in terms of reflecting the difficulty level of the real exam, and sometimes are even more difficult. I was really glad to see that the professional-level practice exams were no different.
Now that's not to say that I was confident walking into that exam... The practice exam questions were challenging, and working through them in "Review Mode" was a great learning tool, but I got a lot of questions wrong in the process. Ultimately, I did one final walkthrough in timed mode the day before, which I passed comfortably, and then decided to stop thinking about AWS for the rest of the day. 😅
Exam day
If you're reading this and preparing for the SA Pro exam, you've certainly taken an AWS Certification exam before. Structurally, this one isn't much different from SA Associate, but of course it's longer and more difficult. The high-level specs are as follows:
- 75 questions, where 10 unidentified questions are not scored
- 180 minutes total, with a few extra minutes allotted for reading the terms and completing a survey at the end
- Tests can either be taken in-person at a Pearson Vue testing center or proctored virtually on your own device
The vast majority of the questions involve reading through a fairly involved scenario with lots of detail. Sometimes you need to lean on all of the provided detail; other times it's given as "fluff" and you need to see through it. Many of the answers will be mostly or nearly correct, and you need to find the key detail that makes a given answer "most correct." Working through all of this in the time allotment can be a challenge, but I personally found that there were a few questions with shorter scenarios that I could answer quickly to earn back some time to invest in others.
I always choose to take my tests at a testing center. I've heard too many stories of people having accidental situations like background noises or someone walking into their testing room, causing virtually proctored tests to be invalidated. I also feel that I can mentally focus better when I'm in a purpose-built testing setting. The only downside that I ran into is that the machines used at my testing center were quite old and used what seemed to be 720p displays that were a little annoying to read the dense questions from for 3 hours, especially after being spoiled with nice 4K displays at home.
Final Thoughts
I walked away feeling decent about my exam, but I definitely wasn't confident that I had passed. Considering that Jon's practice exams seemed to trend more difficult, it made me feel like I'd taken an easier test on exam day. AWS tells you that most exam results are delivered within 24 hours, with some taking up to 5 days. My results came about 5 hours later, so thankfully I didn't have to wait in suspense for too long.
As I mentioned before, I'm not particularly chasing all of the certification exams, so I'm not sure what I'll tackle next. For now, I'm happy to have this one in the bag for the next three years.
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