Passed the SysOps Associate exam.

I'd say this was the hardest thing I've done since college. It felt like studying a semester's worth of material, though there's no way everything could have been covered in a single semester course ...

Definitely couldn't have passed without prior tech/networking knowledge, at least from a high level abstract basis. Also, don't think I would have passed without prior experience setting up and running my own VPS, both on AWS and other providers, but again, that's more high level knowledge (firewalls, access restrictions, automation, logging, etc). And I know I couldn't have passed without hands on AWS experience.

As for the test, I was surprised at how many questions I had seen before. Maybe half or so of the questions were either verbatim practice questions, or practice questions with some slight tweaks.

pluralsight was helpful for getting big picture knowledge, but overall, I'm not sure I'd recommend it to study for the exam. acloudguru was helpful for exam tips, but not so much for really understanding AWS. Probably the most useful thing was that personal blog with a million practice questions: jayendrapatil.com

Overall Score: 85%

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Monitoring and Metrics: 75%
2.0 High Availability: 87%
3.0 Analysis: 77%
4.0 Deployment and Provisioning: 100%
5.0 Data Management: 85%
6.0 Security: 87%
7.0 Networking: 85%

Amazon says I can now use the following: