Becoming an AWS Certified Data Analytics — NEW April 2020
This certification is intended for individuals who design, build, secure and maintain analytics solutions. We will cover how to prepare for the exam, practice tests and prior recommended knowledge.
I just earned my second AWS certification by passing the AWS Certified Data Analytics -Specialty exam (DAS-C01). As you may know, this certification is one of the latest AWS releases (April 2020) and comes to replace the AWS Certified Big Data — Specialty. This certification is intended for individuals who design, build, secure, and maintain analytics solutions.
You have 3 hours to answer 65 scenario based questions.
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Prior Recommended AWS Knowledge
- The AWS Certified Data Analytics — Specialty (DAS-C01) examination is a pass or fail exam. You are given 170 minutes to complete the exam. It consists of around 65 questions.
- As always, there are two types of questions on the examination: multiple choice and multiple response questions.
- Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing
- Your examination may include unscored items that are placed on the test to gather statistical information. These items are not identified on the form and do not affect your score.
- Results for the examination are reported as a score from 100–1,000, with a minimum passing score of 750. The examination uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to “pass” the individual sections, only the overall examination (NEW)
- Apart from the 2 years of hands-on experience working with AWS, now it’s recommended a minimum of 5 years of experience with common data analytics technologies for this certification. (NEW)
Content Outline
Let me first draw side by side comparison of the changes in the exam format:
Data Analytics — Specialty
Big Data — Specialty
As you can see, the analytics and visualization domains go from adding 29% together to 18%, giving more importance to the Processing (+ 8%) and Storage and Data Management (+ 5%) domains.
For its part, the Collection domain increased by 1% in total weight and Security decreased by -2%.
Main Tips
The main services are EMR, Redshift, Kinesis and S3+Glue+Athena. That makes approximately 80% of the exam, also if you have the Associate level certification it will be much easier to pass over the rest of the concepts.
If I had to start from scratch, I would recommend spending more time learning the most important concepts, details, options, and components of the main data analytics technologies than practicing with practice tests that surely differ from those on the real exam. Furthermore, as of today, there are not many test exams available for this certification.
I highly recommend doing the Solutions Architect Associate first for these reasons:
- It is much simpler and useful as a first approach to the AWS cloud world.
- Helps you familiarize yourself with the testing methodology and pace, as well as other services within the AWS stack, allowing you to really focus on the main Data Analytics technologies for this exam.
- You currently get 50% off on the next exam. So if you take the associate which is cheaper (150 USD) you get 50% of this one which is more expensive (300 USD).
How to prepare for the exam
These are the resources that I have relied on to pass the exam:
- Online Courses
Without a doubt, the course par excellence is Udemy’s AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty 2020 (ex Big Data), created by Sundog Education by Frank Kane, Stephane Maarek | AWS Certified Solutions Architect & Developer Associate, Frank Kane
With its over 12 hours of on-demand video, a comprehensive test exam, and unlimited access to its resources, it is the best guide and one of the best resources to follow for this exam.
From my point of view, I think it is necessary to watch the videos twice. I listened on 2x speed and reviewed each lecture by skimming through the linked whitepapers and documentation on the resources section.
Optional: You could also enroll in A Cloud Guru’s AWS Big Data Specialty course for a high-level overview of all of the products and important concepts, as a starting point. For now, they have not launched the specific course for Data Analytics certification.
- AWS Whitepapers
Amazon has countless documents that refer to Data Analytics products. However, I would recommend these two papers within the Data Analytics Learning Path that help you to better understand the services that exist. In my case, I decided to read the Kinesis whitepaper as it is a technology with many details to remember and different implementation options, such as its producers, consumers, encryption and security, as well as inputs and outputs of these services.
— Streaming Data Solutions on AWS with Amazon Kinesis (29 pages)
This whitepaper discusses the evolution of analytics from batch to real-time. It describes how services such as Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon Kinesis Firehose, and Amazon Kinesis Analytics can be used to implement real- time applications, and provides common design patterns using these services.
— Big Data Analytics Options on AWS (56 pages)
This whitepaper helps architects, data scientists, and developers understand the big data analytics options available in the AWS cloud by providing an overview of services, with the following information: ideal usage patterns, cost model, performance, durability and availability, scalability and elasticity, interfaces and anti-patterns.
- AWS Training
— Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Data Analytics — Specialty (Free Course, 3 ½ hours)
This course helps you prepare for the exam by exploring the exam’s topic areas and familiarizing you with the question style and exam approach.
In a very visual way, it allows you to understand each of the most important components of the exam, the most important details to remember and examples of questions that may appear on the exam. In addition, they include reference links to the main topics or issues that usually appear with these technologies.
This training, from my point of view, is essential. As it is such a short and useful course, I could easily have reviewed it 2–3 times from start to finish.
- Practice Exams
— Go check Whizlabs.
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As I just mentioned before, go through the free sample exam questions and exam readiness questions on the official AWS training and certification website. These questions help you imagine what the exam will look like and will allow you to assess the knowledge you are acquiring.
In my case, in addition, I bought the Whizlabs practice tests. These questions do not follow the model nor are they consistent with the official exam questions. However, they help you explore new areas of knowledge that you may not have seen before, considered important, or not covered in such detail in previous materials. The good thing about Whizlabs is that it justifies the answer with new information links and support material.
A quick snapshot of popular analytics analytic services that you should be familiar for this exam:
- Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Firehose and Kinesis Analytics, for streaming data.
- Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK)
- Simple Queue Service (SQS) for queuing messages
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
- Simple Storage Service (S3)
- DynamoDB for optimizing transactional queries
- AWS Lambda
- AWS Glue
- Processing data at unlimited scale with Elastic MapReduce, including Apache Spark, Hive, HBase, Presto, Zeppelin, Splunk, and Flume
- Amazon Elasticsearch Service, for earching and analyzing petabyte-scale data and Kibana
- Athena for querying S3 data lakes
- Redshift and Redshift Spectrum
- Relational Database Service (RDS) and Aurora
- Quicksight for visualizing your data interatively
- Keeping your data secure with encryption, KMS, HSM, IAM, Cognito, STS, and more.
How to answer the questions
Take this approach to answer the questions:
- Read and understand the question before reading answer options (pretend the answer options aren’t even there at first).
- Identify the key phrases and qualifiers in the question.
- Try to answer the question before even looking at the answer choices, then see if any of those answer choices match your original answer.
- Eliminate answer options based on what you know about the question, including the key phrases and qualifiers you highlighted earlier.
- If you still don’t know the answer, consider flagging the question and moving on to easier questions. But remember to answer all questions before the time is up on the exam, as there are no penalties for guessing.
Useful links
- Get your AWS Certified Data Analytics Study Guide
- AWS Architect Certification Training by Edureka Master the skills to design cloud-based applications with Amazon Web Services. Know More!
- Buy 100+ Unique Practice Questions for AWS Certified Data Analytics — Specialty Exam
- 17+ hours of Training Videos and 38 labs for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam | Enrol Now
- https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-data-analytics-specialty/?nc1=h_ls
- https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-data-analytics-specialty/AWS-Certified-Data-Analytics-Specialty_Sample-Questions.pdf
- https://www.udemy.com/share/101WhCAkodeVtRQXg=/
- https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/whitepaper-streaming-data-solutions-on-aws-with-amazon-kinesis.pdf
- https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Big_Data_Analytics_Options_on_AWS.pdf
- https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=46612
That’s all folks. Hope you found this article useful.
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Best of luck on your exam!
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