I thought I was ready for the AWS Associate Developer exam. Then I went into the forums of A Cloud Guru (ACG) and panicked. Reading the forums, you need to know a lot more than what ACG covers, read whitepapers, read FAQs, have tons of hands on experience, etc.

That wasn’t my experience. I can think of a few reasons for this discrepancy.

Target score

If you are aiming to pass, ACG has enough. If you are aiming to get a perfect score, it does not. Luckily, I was aiming for a pass.

Un-scored questions

There are un-scored questions on the exam that Amazon is piloting. By definition, these are likely to be things that are hard/aren’t covered. And this is ok. They aren’t scored. But seeing a question on X, doesn’t even mean X is in scope for the exam.

Scenario Questions

Scenario questions tell a story. Like any good word problem, the are extra words in the question that don’t affect the answer. For example, “Suppose you are working on a Docker application and want to store the source code in a repository. Which do you use?”

Yes, this question mentions Docker. But it isn’t *about* Docker.

Distractor Answers

Similarly to the previous item, an incorrect answer doesn’t mean the question is about that. So if AWS Neptune is an answer, it doesn’t mean the question is about databases, let alone graph databases.

Logic

Sometimes you can figure out a question from what you do know. For example, “Suppose you are building an application with technology Foo and it runs too slow. What can you do to speed it up: a) reduce memory b) add ssl c) add an index d) none of the above”

You should be able to tell that the answer is C without knowing what Foo is. (Which is good because I made it up).