AWS Advanced Networking Speciality Preparation journey (ANS-C01)
I would like to share my preparation journey in cracking the AWS networking speciality certification.
New version of Advanced Networking speciality (ANS-C01) was released in July 2022 which includes newer concepts like Transit Gateway, SD-WAN, Gateway Load balancer etc...
AWS has changed the exam guide format in last few years, and they are providing detailed information for each section. I would strongly recommend going with exam guide and understand the depth of AWS services knowledge that you need to have for the certification.
Exam Guide:
Recommended Courses:
As everyone knows, Udemy would be your starting point to have the structured path for any certification. But this time based on community recommendation I went with Adrian Cantrill networking course, and I definitely made a good choice for my preparation.
Adrian’s course helped me a lot and I would definitely recommend to go through this course multiple times to learn and practice the concepts. Someone like me, who didn’t have the opportunity of exploring networking concepts on a regular job, this course will definitely be a crucial learning experience.
https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-advanced-networking-specialty/
Do we really need to follow two courses.?
Depending on the time and effort that you would like to put in…
Udemy Zeal Vora course — At my company, luckily we have Udemy Business account and I was able to complete this course as well to have more in depth knowledge on few must services. ( I will cover them little down, hold your breath…)
Books:
surprisingly there is a book already published for Networking speciality (ANS-C01) exam (little expensive and personal choice). I came to know about this little late (3 weeks before the exam date), but still I ordered this one and prepared the practice tests. (Little different than Udemy).
https://www.amazon.com/AWS-Advanced-Networking-Exam-Guide/dp/B0BBY87P7T
- Book covers at a high level of networking concepts.
- Book has 3 practice tests.
Practice Tests:
- AWS Skill Builder
2. TutorialsDojo practice test is a must. Tutorials Dojo
3. Udemy practice test by Stéphane Maarek is must. (Hard questions, I have failed in the warmup test…)
https://www.udemy.com/course/practice-exam-aws-certified-advanced-networking-specialty/
Highlights:
I would strongly recommend practicing the following,
- Route53 (Private, Public hosted zones and Incoming/Outgoing endpoints)
- Elastic Load balancers (NLB, ELB and GWLB)
- S2S VPN, Direct Connect (Private, Public, Transit VIF)
- BGP is a must.
- Transit Gateway — A Must
- Endpoints (Gateway, Interface, PrivateLink) — understand ENI mechanism first.
- Elastic Kubernetes Service (Networking concepts)
- Cloudfront, SD-WAN, Networking Firewall
- GuardDuty vs Inspector
WhitePapers:
- Building a Scalable and Secure Multi-VPC AWS Network Infrastructure.
2. Multiple Region — Multi VPC Connectivity
Last Points:
- Finally you need to have patience for sitting 3 hours for the exam. The questions are long, even the answers that we need to choose from.
- In your AWS certification account, you can request for additional 30 mins for the exam. You need to do this before registering for the certification.
- Prepare notes all along your preparation journey, which can help in last few days to revise all the concepts.
Please let me know your feedback in the comments. Finally, I have cleared the AWS advanced networking speciality certification after rescheduling multiple times…