The Gold Jacket Journey - How I passed 12 AWS Certs without Burning Out (and what I learned along the way)

The Gold Jacket Journey - How I passed 12 AWS Certs without Burning Out (and what I learned along the way)

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  By: Victor Szoltysek April17th / 2025 How I Passed 12 AWS Certs Without Burning Out (and What I Learned Along the Way) 🏆 THE GOLD JACKET JOURNEY
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  💡 WHY CERTSSTILL MATTER • Perfect for when you don’t know what you don’t know — like picking the wrong service because you didn’t know a better one existed. • In a competitive market, di ff erentiation matters. Certs aren’t the only way — but they’re a simple one. • Structured learning beats scattered docs and YouTube rabbit holes. • Still the most practical way to get breadth- fi rst AWS knowledge. AI Makes Them More Valuable, Not Less.
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  🚀 MY GOLDJACKET* JOURNEY • Never planned to take them all — but once I hit half, I fi gured, why not fi nish the set. • The real unlock wasn’t more hours — it was cutting out everything that didn’t move the needle. Smarter, not harder, actually worked. • Traditional study methods? Wildly ine ff icient by comparison. • Realized most teams aren’t leveraging AWS nearly as well as they could — and it’s costing them. 1 Year. 500 Hours. Extensive AI. * Yes, you do get a Gold Jacket. They just ship them quarterly — apparently because they're that rare.
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  🧠 HOW ISTUDIED (AND PASSED)
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  🤖 CHATGPT: MYAI-POWERED SECRET WEAPON • Used ChatGPT the entire time — to clarify, quiz, and walk through every practice question. • Built a custom prompt tailored to how I learn (via ChatGPT Projects* or Custom GPTs). • Treated it like a study buddy, not a search box — turned studying into a conversation. Custom Instructions = Bespoke Private Tutor * ChatGPT Paid Versions Only
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  💬 CUSTOM INSTRUCTIONSEXAMPLE You're my study partner for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certi fi cation. When I give you a question: Give a concise correct answer, with a short reason why it's right Brie fl y explain why the other options are wrong (1-liners) Include a rule of thumb — clearly stated — that helps guide future answers Example format: Correct Answer: C — It uses NLBs with static IPs, which the scenario requires. Other Options: A – Doesn’t use NLB for DNS-level HA B – Public IPs for ECS are complex and less predictable D – ALB doesn't support static IPs or TCP Rule of Thumb: NLB + Elastic IPs -> Use for TCP protocols and static IP requirements. Also, group related notes by AWS service (e.g., "Load Balancers") Include concise rule-of-thumb entries that start with the AWS concept, not the purpose - EventBridge + CloudTrail: For real-time security/event detection * My actual exam prompt is MUCH longer and heavily re fi ned over 12+ AWS certi fi cations. This is the distilled version that works best for fast feedback and pattern recognition.
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  🔍 CHATGPT DEEPRESEARCH:MY SUPER SECRET WEAPON • Synthesizes Reddit threads, blogs, docs, and forums — including real exam-taker experiences — into clear, actionable insights. • My fi rst step for every cert — it helped me deeply understand what to study and why. • Worth the price of ChatGPT Plus all by itself — easily the most underrated paid feature, hands down. Helps You Cut the Noise and Find What Really Matters
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  💬 DeepResearch EXAMPLE I'mpreparing for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. Search across credible internet sources — including Reddit, Medium, LinkedIn, blog posts, and community forums — to identify: • High-yield study areas that people say show up most often on the exam • Common traps or tricky topics candidates tend to overemphasize or misunderstand • Topics that are safe to deprioritize or skip based on real-world exam experiences • Any recent changes or new service focus in the latest version of the exam Give me a concise, prioritized list of what to focus on and what to ignore, with brief justi fi cations for each item.
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  📚 HOW IACTUALLY STUDIED • Used AWS SkillBuilder and trusted Udemy instructors — especially for Pro and Specialty certs, they’re actively updated to match what actually shows up. • Built muscle memory for keywords — these exams are high in pattern recognition (i.e. PII -> AWS Macie). • Spent the fi nal 50% of my study time on sample questions — and used ChatGPT to break down every answer and fi ll in the gaps. • Stopped once I consistently got questions right — you only need to con fi dently answer ~60% to pass, thanks to multiple choice and smart elimination. No Flu ff . Just Focus.
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  🧰 MY LEANSTUDY STACK • ChatGPT (Plus) + Custom Instructions + DeepResearch • AWS SkillBuilder (free), Udemy (80% o ff sales), etc • Stephane Maarek + Adrian Cantrill (no duo tutorials though) • Tutorials Dojo, Medium, and Reddit • GitHub for my own study notes What I Actually Used — and Only These
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  🪄 TOP EXAMTIPS • Just book the exam — it kills procrastination, and you’ve got 2 free rebookings if life happens. • Use the fl ag feature — don’t get stuck. Mark tricky questions and circle back once you’ve answered the easy ones. • Pick the most-AWS, least manual, most managed option — it’s usually the right answer. • Treat it like a word puzzle — many questions are keyword bingo. Just. Book. It.
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  🧠 PLAYING KEYWORDBINGO ON AWS CERTS Question Keyword Likely Answer Most cost e ffi cient interruptible compute Spot instances Least operational overhead Serverless Personally Identi fi able Information (PII) AWS Macie Serverless under 15 minutes Lambda Decouple apps SQS Near real-time ingestion Kinesis Data Firehose Up Lambda performance with RDS RDS Proxy Secure internal access to S3 or DynamoDB VPC Gateway Endpoint * * It’s a trap at Pro level! Gateway Endpoints don’t work across VPC peering. Pro exams are sneaky this way!
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  🧭 ADVICE FORYOUR PATH
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  🧭 CERT ROADMAP:WHAT SHOULD YOU ACTUALLY DO? • Start with Cloud Practitioner + AI Practitioner — both are weekend-level certs with free resources available*. Fundamental AI skills are a must in today’s landscape. • Then go for Solutions Architect Associate — the best breadth- fi rst technical summary of AWS. It teaches you what you didn’t even know to look for. • Only chase Pro or Specialty certs if you're deep in that domain — this is where the di ff iculty seriously ramps up, and the ROI just isn’t there unless you’re already working in that space. • Bonus tip: The toughest exam? Advanced Networking. Nothing else came close. Stephane Maarek’s course alone had 1,200+ slides and 34 hours of content. It caused more existential despair than all the other certs combined. My Straight-Up Advice * Even the exams don’t have to cost you — 50% o ff with AWS’s challenge, or 100% through Educate’s Emerging Talent Community.
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  🧠 12 AWSCERTS LATER HERE’S WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS
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  🧱 THE REALPURPOSE OF THE CLOUD • Yes, you could do everything yourself — just like you could code in assembly and never use frameworks • But the point of the cloud (and AWS) is to let it handle as much as possible • That way, you can focus on business value and building a great product • AWS calls this "undi ff erentiated heavy lifting" — avoid it whenever possible • This is the #1 mistake I see teams make: doing too much themselves instead of using what AWS already provides Let It Do the Heavy Lifting
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  🔧 MAXIMIZE ABSTRACTION,MINIMIZE WORK • Beanstalk > ECS > EKS > EC2 — AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the most underrated AWS service, ideal for traditional cloud-native compute. Average apps should start — and probably stay — there. • Use the magic checkbox. If AWS manages it for you, let them. • Serverless makes life easy (though often more expensive if tra ff ic is steady or predictable). • AWS has 240+ services — use them. Stop rebuilding what AWS already solved. (e.g. Fraud Detector, Bedrock, Cognito, Step Functions) • The best AWS service? The one you don’t have to think about. Don’t Reinvent What AWS Already Solved
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  🔍 COMMON CLOUDMISTAKES I KEEP SEEING • Using the wrong service for the job — often just because you didn’t know a better one existed (e.g. running static sites on ECS/EC2 instead of S3 + CloudFront) • DIYing the undi ff erentiated heavy lifting — which AWS literally built to save you from (e.g. rolling your own auth when Cognito handles it out of the box) • Buzzword- fi rst thinking — resist it. Simpler is often better (e.g. defaulting to Kubernetes, service mesh, or containers when you don’t need them) • Forgetting the fundamentals — the Well-Architected Framework exists for a reason. (Its pillars are how you should be designing apps — not chasing resume-driven architecture.) • Overpaying for basic apps — you can run most CRUD workloads for $20/month on RDS and still sleep at night Even at Experienced Shops
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  ⏪ WHAT IWISH I KNEW EARLIER • You don’t need to read whitepapers. Seriously — they’re optional, not required. • Most book-based study guides are outdated or incomplete. Use them carefully, if at all. • At the Pro and Specialty level, good training courses are essential. Ad hoc testing alone won’t cut it. • Use ChatGPT DeepResearch to build your initial study plan and prioritize what actually matters. Save Yourself the Trouble.
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  💬 FINAL WORDSOF WISDOM • Certs = structured learning + a market edge. In a crowded fi eld, they still help you stand out. • AI is a study game-changer. It multiplies your learning speed, eliminates fl u ff , and helps you lock in what actually matters. • Always focus on business value — not infra tinkering. That’s the whole point of AWS. Let AWS Work for You
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  [email protected] www.linkedin.com/in/victorszoltysek/ https://github.com/vicsz/ Next up (Thursday,May 8, 2025): Cloud for Grownups: No Kubernetes, No Complexity, Just AWS-Powered Results (Where I will go deeper into how to really get the most value out of Cloud/AWS) Toronto DevOps Enterprise Meetup (downtown) More details on meetup.com