After a couple months of evenings spent doing demos on AWS, watching courses and taking a bunch of practice exams, I passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) examination.
Intro and first thoughts
My first contact with hosting a site was around 18 years ago, back when 'deploying' meant dragging your files onto the server over FTP, or clicking around a control panel like Plesk, and watching them land. Pure magic.
A lot has changed since then. I've poked at a handful of cloud providers over the years, but AWS is one that's really clicked for me. I've been using it on a daily basis for more than three years now across a number of different client projects, either managing a bit of infrastructure here and there or utilizing some of the go-to services in isolation such as S3, SES and the like. More recently I've taken on the AWS environments for the platform I work on day to day. But I've always felt some curiosity about going deeper in a more structured way, even though as a Ruby on Rails Engineer it can feel a bit out of scope.
Then again, what is actually out of scope for a Rails Engineer? The whole premise of Rails is that it empowers you to the point you can build amazing products and get them out to the world, whether solo or on a tiny team (even prior to LLMs).
Wait, you are a Rails dev though, right?
Yes. I happily write, read, maintain and design Ruby on Rails solutions for a living. Cloud architecture sits a layer below the code I usually tend to, and while I've increasingly ended up owning that layer too, going for the cert was about turning hands-on habit into deliberate, structured knowledge. For me the decision to go for an AWS cert boils down to two key points.
- I like learning. And by learning, I mean really putting effort into retaining deep knowledge in things that interest me (mostly around SWE or Music). We are not wired to learn easily; our brains learn through repetition, hands-on successes and failures, so I'm always looking for an excuse to submit myself to all that. (new blog post about this subject coming soon, stay tuned 😎)
- I like AWS. Not saying it should be the default choice for all projects of course, but it opens up a lot when a project would actually benefit from that scale. That said, AWS can also be daunting to take on due to the sheer number of products it offers (200+). With each product having its own quirks, constraints and use cases, it is a serious achievement to deeply know even a core subset of those from experience.
Was SAA-C03 what I expected?
It certainly scratched the itch for both my bullet points above.
- The exam was moderately challenging, but overall of fair difficulty. There's a fair amount you simply have to learn by heart, but the part I liked most was the questions framed around realistic client scenarios, which ground them in the kind of trade-offs you actually face at work.
- I feel more comfortable architecting solutions than before. Anything that can't be solved by the usual RDS+EC2+S3 combo used to feel too far outside my comfort zone.
- The hands-on demos, videos and tons of targeted Q&A sessions with my trusty AI were what helped me the most.
Worth it?
If you keep bumping into the infra layer and feeling like a tourist there, then I'd say go for it. The SAA-C03 (or any cert for that matter) won't turn you into a DevOps engineer overnight, and it shouldn't. But it provides a solid mental map of what AWS can do and, just as importantly, what it shouldn't be doing for you.
If you feel like you know a good amount but need an extra boost to fill in the gaps, also go for it.
If you expect to just get the cert and log out of the AWS console waiting for some magic return on your investment, probably not worth it.
Nothing beats real-world experience. For me, the real value comes after the exam: building actual solutions empowered by all the cool new stuff you've now got at your disposal. Get out there and build, build, build!
