Never thought I will clear AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty in the first attempt.
Tags: aws, awscertificate, networking, community
Published: 2022-11-01 01:15:48

Hey networking team, I believe a high network latency impacts application queries, and access to the remote database is slow. Please help troubleshoot the problem from the network side; The closest I could go with network troubleshooting while working on performance issues as a database guy. Let me be kind to myself! Guys, I neither had the required access nor networking tools for troubleshooting. (Read between the words, no networking skills. lol)

If I can do it, anyone can do it. No kidding. I never thought of attempting the AWS Advanced Networking specialty certification, forget about clearing it on the first attempt. Hold on and be with me while I get to more details on how I achieved it.

Let me be very honest; this is not an easy certificate. Be prepared to spend a few months learning and practicing AWS networking services. I bet having a networking background would help, and you may disagree with me on the toughness of the certificate. For the rest of you, you still have a daunting task at hand.

Let me elaborate on each step I have gone through during my preparations. 

S#1. Go through the Udemy course by Stephane Maarek and Chetan Agrawal.
[NEW] AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty 2022

https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-advanced-networking-specialty-ans/

The course is beneficial and covers most of the concepts and scenarios. I still find few services like transit gateway and gateway load balancer should be covered with enough depth as there were more questions specifically on those. I find instructors do a good job revising the course materials; no worries. The hands-on tutorials are a must, don’t skip these. 
I can’t emphasize hands-on learning enough. I am not getting into technical details here but still, pay close attention to different use cases needing network load balancer versus gateway load balancer. 

S#2. Solve a couple of practice exams.
Udemy and Stephane for rescue again 😊.
Practice Exam - AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty by Stephane Maarek and Abhishek Singh.

https://www.udemy.com/course/practice-exam-aws-certified-advanced-networking-specialty/

You should read explanations for each question after the practice exams. I also took one practice test from WizLabs. That is good too.

S#3. If you are like me, now you feel completely unprepared and start to think about whether you are on track or not.
Don’t worry; revisit a few sessions from the Udemy course where you feel you are lacking. I am being nice to say few sessions but don’t get disheartened if they are more than a few.

S#4. I came across this gem late in my preparations, but I highly recommend Networking fundamentals videos by Adrian Cantrill

https://youtu.be/6hPMdpk9qA4

S#5. Try your hands-on learning. I do run my YouTube channel and put my learnings there. I created networking videos during my preparation, and that helped too.

https://www.youtube.com/@AWSLearn

Something I did which you may or may not like to spend time on is watching deep dive videos on YouTube by AWS. I did this for critical concepts like direct connect, advanced VPC designs, etc.
I find those insightful even though little longer than I would like.

Feel free to reach out if you need any help or wondering about anything I said above. 

Everyone has different learning curves. Take time and be prepared. You will crack it. Let me know once you do.
All the very best.