I passed the exam two days ago! Thank you to Thomas and Anthony for a great course. Here's the breakdown of my results:

Overall Score: 68%

Topic Level Scoring:

1.0  Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems: 68%

2.0  Implementation/Deployment: 80%

3.0  Data Security: 66%

4.0  Troubleshooting: 60%

Although this was cutting it close, I was very happy with my results since I have no IT experience or background.

One thing I noticed about the exam is that it was 55 questions in 80 minutes instead of 60. I suppose they changed it recently.

The exam was pretty tough, but I used the knowledge learned here and from the AWS practice exam to knock it out. For those upcoming testers, I did not read the whitepapers (except the first two), but did study the flash cards and especially the orion papers.

Some hot topics that came up included:

-Networking and communication between instances (specific to AZ, region, subnet)

-Bastion Hosts and NAT gateways

-Protocols, Ports, Security Groups, NACLs (also S3 ACLs)

-CORS

-RDS and how to make its instances highly scalable, available, etc.

-Know how to use ECS, not just what it is

-Know the basics of EFS

-CloudTrail, VPC and ELB Logging!

-CloudWatch and TrustedAdvisor monitoring

-What is ElastiCache

-A couple questions on API Gateway

-OLTP

-Autoscaling (Launch Configuration)

-Importing and Exporting Data

-Placement Groups

- Elastic IPs (be sure to experiment with these in the LA lab)

-Kinesis

Thanks again to Linux Academy!