How I cleared AWS Data Analytics Speciality Certification
On 28th August 2023, After preparing for like 2.5 months, I appeared on AWS Certified Data Analytics Speciality Certification and cleared it. This post will list all the resources that I used and helped me to prepare for this certification.
It’s going to be a bit exhaustive list because I just didn’t go for the certification for name sake 😜 but getting my skills upgraded while I am on a journey to preparing for it, not to mention the content in this list is really amazing.
To start with, as this is a specialty exam, I am assuming you know the basics of AWS services and have been interacting/working with at least a FEW of them for a few years now. But worry not, you don’t need to be working with all of these as there are so many AWSome resources provided by AWS for getting your hands dirty and getting the exposure you need.
As an honest opinion and from my personal experience, you can take an online course or 2 on Udemy or some other platforms but that just won’t be enough when you are preparing for a specialty certification because it needs MORE THAN just knowing what a service does and offers. As a refresher for AWS services and getting introduced to a service you are not familiar with, these courses are a great resource that gives you a good start and will provide you some tips on how to approach a question in certification exam but nothing that you won't find in the resources I am about to list. I personally took one and found it as just good for knowing about services but missed quite a few things from a Data Analytics Speciality perspective.
Enough said, on to the point for the list of resources I used:
Here’s a great starting point if you are looking for a refresher that is free and provided by AWS itself: Data Analytics Learning Plan
AWS Twitch on-demand videos
- Let’s ship it - Data Analytics by amazing hosts: Skye Hart, Kevin Shaffer-Morrison and Stuart Fox.
- AWS Power Hour - Data Analytics hosted by Mai N. and Mark:
- The best way to do the workshops that you are interested in is to do them in the AWS Free Tier Account. Most of the workshops will end up for as low as 2$ and you will get to learn all the concepts that are expected out of that workshop.
Blog Posts
A great starting point once you are ready to deep dive. All the resources mentioned in this are a must-read and super valuable.
Best Practices and Performance Tuning
Performance Tuning Amazon Athena
Performance Tuning Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift Best practices
Thiyagarajan Arumugam
ETL processing using Redshift - Best Practices
Exam Readiness
Once you are prepared for the exam and want to go through all the concepts really quickly. I couldn’t recommend this enough. I went through this in the last week before my exam and it really helped me recollect everything I have gone learned so far: AWS Skill Builder - Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty
Once you have gone through all the basics and advanced details with some hands-on via AWS Workshop. Now it's time to attempt as many sample exam questions as you can which will actually give you feedback on which section you really need to improve on before exams. This is the most important part before the examination because it's a self-evaluation from before.
AWS itself provides a few resources for these, that you can find here which will give you access to 20 practice questions.
If you are hungry for more practice questions, there are many other websites where you can get sample exam questions like Whizlabs, Udemy, A Cloud Guru, etc. But to start with free resources for practice questions, you can go through here.
Good Luck..!! I hope these resources will provide you with the means to upskill yourself and clear the certification exam.
That's it for this one folks.!!