I recently completed the Sysops Administrator exam which was refreshed late last year. Below are a couple of quick thoughts and study areas that should be focused on for the exam.
S3
- MFA Delete
- Versioning
- Vault Lock
CloudFormation
- Stacksets
- Rollbacks
- Deployment dependencies
Load Balancers
- Difference between ALB / NLB / Classic
Storage Gateways
- (AWS Storage Gateway) File vs Tape vs Volume
- (AWS Storage Gateway) Stored Volume vs Cache Volume
Resources used:
I used a combination of the acloudguru course that’s been refreshed for the 2018 exam, as well as some practice exams. in order of dificulty they range from -
- acloudguru - easier than exam (aim for 95% plus)
- Whizlabs - medium difficulty (aim for 90% plus)
- tutorials dojo - hard, possibly harder than the exam (if you can get 90-95% on these you should be fine)
Some forums posts of note:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/b6cltj/passed_my_sysops_administrator_exam_with_acg_and/
- https://acloud.guru/forums/aws-csysops-2019/discussion/-LYg6M9whzRjPMocIfEQ/passed_aws_sysops_administrato
Final Thoughts:
I was able to pass the exam with 88% with 6 days of prep, this is having done the two other associate level exams (some time ago) and having a number of years working inside the console. after scoring consistently well on the practice exams and having a once-over on the course content / reviewing wrong answers in tests. I breezed through the exam in about 30-40mins, flagging about 6 questions i wasn’t immediately sure on.
Check out the attachment below of some (very rough) notes that i took down in preparing for the exam, if you don’t recognise any of the commands, read the whitepapers / docs of the service.
Hope it helps!