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Hello :), I’m happy to share that I’ve obtained a new certification: AWS Certified Security – Specialty from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Last Friday, September 23, 2022, at 5 AM lol, I was able to pass AWS Certified Security – Specialty exam. Today I’ll be sharing my thoughts and experience on the said exam certification.
The videos, books, and tools I used for studying are as follows:
- AWS Skillbuilder Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Security – Specialty
- AWS Skillbuilder AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Practice Question Set (SCS-C01 – English)
- Zeal Vora’s AWS Certified Security Specialty 2022. Highly Recommended.
- Jon Bonso’s AWS Certified Security Specialty Practice Exams 2022. Highly recommended.
- AWS Documentation and FAQ. KMS, IAM, Cloudtrail, Cloudwatch, GuardDuty, VPC Security, EC2 Security, S3 Security, Cloudfront Security, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Config, Systems Manager, RDS Security, DynamoDB security, and AWS Signer.
- AWS Whitepapers. AWS Key Management Best Practices, AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency, etc. Follow https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-security-specialty/ under the AWS whitepaper.
- AWS Management Console. It’s a must. I already have more than 6 years of experience in AWS and I used it for work, so I just focus testing on those I’m not familiar with
I spent 150USD for the exam (300USD originally). I got a 50% off from my last exam on Passing AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional. I took the exam via Pearson Vue OnVue Online at my home or office. I spent also 17USD Udemy by Zeal Vora (make sure to use coupons from Zeal Vora’s Github account) and 14USD tutorialsdojo.com practice exam.
Before I took this exam, I already have 8 AWS certifications, it’s much easier to review since some AWS exams already covered AWS security so I suggest taking at least the associates before taking this exam. Don’t just depend on the videos and practice exams, make sure to read the docs and do some testing (specially KMS encrypt, decrypt, envelope, symmetric vs asymmetric, IAM policy, etc.).
Good luck to those who will take the exam and see you around 🙂