From the course: AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty (ANS-C01) Cert Prep

Exam taking strategies - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty (ANS-C01) Cert Prep

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Exam taking strategies

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- [Instructor] The AWS exam contains a variety of question formats and writing styles that you should be aware of. Some questions have obvious answers, while there are others that require you to choose between two similarly similar options. You have to be aware of the specific keywords in the scenario and the primary objective that it wants you to accomplish. In addition, you should also pay close attention to the small details in each option that can help you select the most suitable option. There are different test-taking strategies that you can use to help you select the best answer for the exam. These are keywords, elimination, evaluation, and patterns, or KEEP for short. The first one is all about finding the relevant keywords or key phrases that can help you identify the most suitable AWS service or feature that you have to use. These keywords are the important clues that will help you identify the culprit in a particular troubleshooting situation and match the perfect AWS service for a given requirement. There are two types of keywords, a primary and a secondary keyword. The primary keyword is the main one being asked in the scenario, which is usually found in the last part of the question. In contrast, the secondary keywords are scattered within the first few statements of a scenario. There will be rare circumstances in which the keywords in the scenario may contradict each other. If you stumbled upon a similar question like this, you have to prioritize the primary keywords over the secondary ones. A keyword helps you associate and select the most relevant AWS service that satisfies the requirements in the scenario. However, you should also be aware of the associated keywords of each AWS service to properly map them with the keywords found in the question. The second technique is the process of elimination. As its name implies, this means that you have to eliminate certain options that are not relevant to the question. This is a straightforward process that will help you clear the clutter and disregard the obviously incorrect answers. For example, if a scenario is looking for a scalable object storage service, then most likely the answer is Amazon S3, since you have the object storage keyword. All other options that are not related to storage systems should be eliminated like AWS Global Accelerator IAM Access Analyzer, et cetera. You can also eliminate other storage-related services or features like AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon EBS or Amazon FSX. Although these are storage services, they have a different storage type and are not considered as object storage like Amazon S3. If the question asks for a block storage service, you can directly eliminate Amazon FSx for Windows File Server or Amazon EFS in the options, since these are file storage services. You should pick Amazon Elastic Block Store or the Amazon EC2 Instance Store if your block-level storage service is required. If it explicitly asks for a high-performance parallel file storage service, then your best bet is to choose Amazon FSx for Lustre. This service is based on the open source parallel file system called Lustre that supports many HPC simulation environments. All you have to do is find the keyword in the question and eliminate the unrelated ones. Now, what if there are two or more options that match your primary keyword? For example, it asks for a block storage service, and there's a selection for both Amazon EBS and EC2 instance store. Which one should you pick? This is where the secondary keyword comes in. You have to meticulously search and carefully sift through each statement in the question. Let's say you're planning to deploy an application that downloads a large amount of data from an Amazon S3 bucket and performs a multi-stage analysis to generate an output. The application requires block-level storage to store a femoral or temporary data. The primary keyword here is block-level storage, and the secondary key phases are the following. Downloads a large amount of data from an Amazon S3 bucket and store ephemeral or temporary data. This implies that the data is already stored in the durable and scalable storage service, which is in Amazon S3. The data that the application is fetching is actually just a copy, so the block-level storage service is not meant as its primary storage. It also explicitly says that you are just storing ephemeral or temporary data. That's an indication that you have to choose Amazon EC2 Instance Store. This storage service is perfect for storing temporary data that does not require long-term data persistence. After finding the relevant keywords and eliminating the unrelated options, it's time for the third technique, which is evaluation. You'll have to evaluate the remaining options further and assess whether the option makes sense or not. Remember the fundamental concepts and features for each service and whether it can do a certain action or if it is incapable of doing so. This one sounds too obvious, but you might accidentally pick the wrong answer if you didn't eliminate and closely evaluate the unlikely answers in the first place. For example, an option says you have to use an application load balancer to load balance the traffic across different AWS regions to your application. The first part sounds okay, but the latter is definitely wrong. Since an application load balancer is a regional resource and it can only distribute the traffic to a single AWS region. It cannot be used for cross-region load balancing or for controlling traffic to multiple AWS regions. If you need this capability, you have to use Amazon Route 53 or AWS Global Accelerator instead. Let's take another scenario. Say you're planning to migrate a Microsoft SharePoint hosted in your on-premises to AWS. It requires a shared Windows file storage with an integrated Active Directory for access control. Which service should you use? Then you saw an option that suggested using an Amazon EFS for file storage and enabling its Active Directory domain for authentication. How should you properly evaluate this statement? For this one, it's quite apparent that Amazon EFS is indeed a file storage service, so it passed through our first two strategies. The tricky thing here is, it's Active Directory domain support, which is actually a Microsoft-based technology. We all know that Amazon EFS is a Linux-based file system, so how come it has Active Directory support? You can easily miss this if you don't know the fundamental concepts behind Amazon EFS and other AWS services. The fourth test checking strategy is patterns. Each AWS service has its own corresponding pattern and anti-pattern that you should be aware of. A pattern simply means the recommended use case for a particular AWS service. For example, the requirement is to totally move or migrate your data to AWS without leaving any remaining integration to your on-premises network. You can use AWS Storage Gateway or AWS DataSync to move your data to AWS, but which one of these is a recommended service to use? which is the most suitable? For this, you can simply eliminate AWS Storage Gateway or any option that contains any AWS integration service because the scenario explicitly mentioned that you have to totally move or migrate your data to AWS. If you use Storage Gateway for this particular use case, that's called an anti-pattern. Yes, you can technically use the service for migration, but it'll incur a necessary cost, since the storage gateway service is meant for integrating both of your on-premises network and the AWS storage services together. In this case, using the AWS DataSync service is the best choice, since this service is meant for migrating data to AWS. Okay, let's continue your analysis on our previous example regarding the migration of your Microsoft SharePoint hosted in your on-premises network to AWS. What if we deploy an SMB file share using an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway? An SMB or server message block file share is technically a Windows-based file storage that does support Active Directory, so it should work. Is this the correct answer here? Are we using AWS Storage Gateway for its intended purpose? Again, this is an example of an anti-pattern since the requirement already says that this is a migration task. A common pattern for AWS Storage Gateway is setting up hybrid cloud storage where you actively utilize both your on-premises storage and the AWS storage services. This service is not meant for online data transfer or for migration. For this scenario, it is ideal to launch an Amazon FSx for a Windows File Server file system on AWS and set its Active Directory domain for authentication. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server ticks all the boxes, and it matches the pattern for this Microsoft SharePoint deployment task. And in addition, both of them are Microsoft based technologies. And there you have it. You now know how to use these four strategies on your upcoming exam. Make sure that you always look for keywords, eliminate the unrelated options, closely evaluate the underlying concept behind a given option and look out for patterns and anti-patterns in a given scenario. This KEEP strategy will keep you sharp throughout your test and help you avoid having a mental block during your exam. In the event that you still can't deduce the right answer, I strongly suggest that you select one of the two possible answers that you haven't eliminated yet. Afterward, flag the question and move on to the next one. Once you're through with the rest of the items, you can always go back and change your answer, but if you run out of time, you still have at least a 50% chance of getting the right answer. This is better than totally leaving out the question blank. Again, keep the KEEP strategy in mind at all times. I wish you all the best in your exam, and I hope that it may significantly help you upgrade your skills and advance your career to the next level. You can make it.

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