I recently prepared and sat for for the AWS Security Specialty Certification Exam. I successfully passed in Oct 2020. The purpose of this blog post is to highlight the resources that I found useful during my preparation. Hopefully this will assist others who are also pursing this certification . The certification itself is quite valuable. Organizations across the globe are increasingly moving more of their workloads into public cloud. This will necessitate an increased focus on securing the workloads using the native security features available on the relevant cloud platform. Those security professionals that have good skills in this space will be highly sought after. This is the first AWS specialty certification that I have pursued. The material and the exam are definitely more rigorous and challenging than that of the associate level certifications. Without further ado, these are the resources that I used to prepare for this exam.
1. Who will benefit from this certification?
People who are working as architect on AWS and want to understand and implement Security of Application and Infrastructure on AWS. Also if you are a security engineer and want to understand how to apply it on AWS this certificate is a good choice.
2. Resources preparation
Everyone’s preparation steps to pass this certification will be different based on their work experience. So, the steps I mention below may not work for you, I will just lay down my preparation steps which might give you a direction to find your own. I have a total of 3+ years of IT experience and 3 years of experience on AWS. In these 3 years I have worked on AWS services like IAM, KMS, Cognito, VPC, SNS, CloudWatch, TrustedAdvisor etc. etc. so I had a base on the basics of security. I did not however get a chance to work on services like GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, WAF, Shield, SSM which I had to learn during preparation of this exam.
AWS whitepapers. These are the list of whitepapers that I found helpful:
- AWS Security Best Practices: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/AWS_Security_Best_Practices.pdf
- Security at Scale, Logging in AWS: https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_Security_at_Scale_Logging_in_AWS_Whitepaper.pdf
- AWS Well Architected Framework — Security Pillar: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Security-Pillar.pdf
- Overview of Security Processes: https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-security-whitepaper.pdf
- AWS Best Practices for DDOS Resiliency: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/DDoS_White_Paper.pdf
Reinvent videos — please see this playlist:
- AWS WAF and Shield: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W01f7g7slHw&list=PLxDUpHq1V4DTh_8_t1uW58NsUCeX-IWho&index=18&t=953s
- Amazon Athena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGJ4zxeG9PI
- Amazon Macie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCjX2rsQ2wA
- Advanced Security Best Practices Masterclass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU1x5SfKEzs
- Encryption and Key Management in AWS : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhXalpNzPU4
- Active Directory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoHo47Hl2t0
- Architecting container infrastructure for Security and Compliance — https://youtu.be/Ofu22X7qHnc
Exam dumps: I found awslagi com after googling. This site include the best resources for exam prep. All the real questions helped me a lot of in my real exam.
- AWS Security Guarantee Part: https://www.awslagi.com
Source: Medium
