My study plan and experience for AWS Certified Solution Architect examination

First I apologies though I like to keep this post short but eventually it became a long post.

Before going into the details I like to tell I'm having 10+ years of experience and although before the preparation I've very little know-how about AWS but I had some working knowledge with Azure in data side i.e. Azure SQL DW, ADF ADLS hence I don't need to spend time to understand what is cloud why it's been used etc.
Lets come to my plan from the beginning - it took me around 4 month as my study  being interrupted.

First I created an account to Udemy and go thru couple of free courses given by Linux academy and one by backspace.

Then I searched and find the reviews for the below  course is decent AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate [New Exam] Created by DolfinEd .

The reason I took this course apart from feedback is that the content it covers and I don't want a short cut here. Getting a certificate is not my only target rather implement the knowledge in real life project is my aim (sorry for some GYAN :-)

Nevertheless I go thru the course religiously and find though it's lengthy but most of the topic are covered in depth. For the sheer length some of the topic I skipped like DW architecture, understandings or Database design or NoSQL introduction. I feel DAX is missing for Dynamo DB and ALB topic should be better. There should be a brief lecture for CodeDeploy, Code Pipeline etc. and as well as Athena what is it, what it does.

Another thing I didn't like about this course is instead of the quiz questions after each topic they should have small quiz section after each and remaining questions can be put into couple of practice tests. Let me explain why 'm  critical on this. Lets say a question comes after Dynamo DB in the quiz section so  your mind start guessing that the answer should be Dynamo DB. This guessing without understanding why the others can't be the best answer will not help.

Therefore I bought Whizlab test series where all the exam my score was 85%.

Then in group I saw people are recommending about Neil Davis question bank which is ful of tricky questions. There I got just 70 to 73% to all tests barring test 5 where I got fail :-(
(The pass mark for Neil Davis is 70%)

And another thing I like to share that due to my intense work pressure I can't repeat any of the examination but try to understand while reviewing why my answer is incorrect.
After the test i spend at east 1.5 to 2 hours for a particular set and raised question to the owner if I have any doubt about the answer.
Let me give an example from Neil Davis question

So according to me this kind of arguments should be in your mind as you'll hardly get any common questions in your exam. So in real exam you need to differentiate why the other options can't be correct.

Before the topics from where I got the questions in exam I'd like to add two more points.
1. Lots of people I know are complaining they don't have AWS real life experience hence they feared it'd be a road block to the exam. I have real life AWS experience but I worked mainly on server-less part Glue, Lambda, API Gateway. My DB work on majorly to build a data-warehouse in  Redshift and for real time streaming I worked on Kinesis . None of these topics are carrying high weightage in the actual exam, at least the question bank against which I've been tested! I got one simple Redshift question for which you only need to know the use cases of any Data warehouse like what kind of data they are storing. Same for Kinesis and 2 in lambda. So my work brings 5 sure points and without that also anyone can score those straight forward 5 questions! Believe me.
2. I'm an avid reader this helped me a lot. I finished the exam in less than 105 minutes. If you read faster it'll help. I know this is not an English exam but for me quite a few questions are lengthy and for some question which is 2 liner , each options were about 3 to 4 lines :-((

Now the topics what I recollected from exam.
1. ASC -- what's the minimum number of instance you need to have so even an AZ down you still can survive with 6 instances (simple arithmetic)
2. Few questions of ALB (host based , path based) and one for NLB
3. AWS Athena
4. SG vs NACL
5. DAX & other use cases differentiation between Dynamo DB and RDS
6 Cloud front
7. Elastic Cache
8. EFS (quite a few)
9. Route 53
10. AWS AD directory, Ad connector , simple AD use cases
11. SQS
12. Instance type
13. EBS type - which to use when kind of?
14. S3.
15. Redshift, Kinesis, Lambda

I didn't get any question which looked for choose 3 options- 20+ questions are about choosing 2 options though!

Please feel free to post in the comment section if anyone wants to know more. I'll answer as per my best knowledge. Good luck!