General tips and free resources to pass any AWS Certification

Tips to get free AWS resources to pass the AWS certifications, or how to get discounts, extra time, and laboratories to practice real hands-on.

September 15, 2022

4-Minute Read

AWS Certification validates cloud expertise using AWS. The exam are multiple-choice or multiple-answer format. Each question covers a real-world scenario. Questions are intentionally written to be ambiguous to test the depth of your knowledge, you need to read carefully. Prepare the AWS Certifications are a great way to learn in deep more about the AWS services.

Table of contents

Exams information

The cost, time and question depend on the level of each certification.

Exam Type	Price	Time	Questions
Associate	$150	130 min	65
Professional	$300	180 min	75
Specialty	$300	170 min	65

Get 30 min extra time

If you are a non-native English speaker, you can get an extra 30-minute on your exam. You need to request accommodation “ESL +30” and needs to be requested once before registering for an exam. After that, it will apply to all future exam registrations. This is a crucial point to use in the professional and specialty certifications because every question is pretty long, you need every second.

Skill Builder

It’s a learning center with +500 digital courses and with learning plans, for example, you could have access to a course to learn about Well-Architected Framework or a complete course to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/

Skill Builder

Readiness courses for AWS Certifications

These webinars help us to prepare for AWS Certification, my advice is only to use these video courses after preparing the certification and before the actual exam. To only know if we need to fill some gaps. We could access the AWS Skill Builder site, and we need to filter using “Exam Readiness” and we could filter for languages. Nowadays, we have 9 webinars.

Readiness

Amazon Qwiklabs

Qwiklabs is a platform with laboratories to do practice hands-on. The amazing of this website is we could have a free real AWS account with labs, we only need to register on https://amazon.qwiklabs.com

qwiklabs-0

AWS Account with awsstudent user, with permissions only to do the laboratory tasks.

qwiklabs-1

Labs:

Introduction to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Introduction to Amazon DynamoDB
Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Introduction to Amazon CloudFront
Introduction to AWS Device Farm
Introduction to AWS Key Management Service
Introduction to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Troubleshooting connectivity using EC2 Serial Console

AWS Free Tier

We could only study from video courses and books, but the best way to learn is with real hands-on. AWS allows us to use a Free Tier for 12 months. For example, we could get a Running EC2 t3.micro and RDS db.t3.micro with a S3 bucket with 5GB without any cost. We only need to create an account. My advice is creating a billing alarm to monitor the AWS charges; for example, if we expend more than $5, trigger an alarm to send us an email.

AWS Workshops

The AWS Workshops are Hands-on tasks designed to teach or introduce practical skills, we could filter by level, 100 for the introductory ones and 400 for the advances. In addition, we could filter by categories such as Containers, DevOps, Security, Serverless, and so on. These workshops need an AWS account. So this is the perfect moment to use our AWS Free tier, and don’t forget to set the billing alarm.

AWS Workshops

AWS Certification Official Practice Question Sets

On the Skill Builder we could get 20 questions developed by AWS to demonstrate the style and depth of our certification exams. In the past cost 20 USD but now are available for free on AWS Skill Builder. On the Skill Builder search bar type “AWS Certification Official Practice Question Sets” to filter to show only the practice questions sets.

Conclusion

AWS provides many free and excellent resources to prepare and study for AWS certifications. The good part, also we could learn fundamental hands-on tasks. In my experience, every time i study for a new certification, i learn a lot of new things, it is a great way to improve our knowledge and challenge us.

Good luck with your certifications!

Nahuel Hernandez