Aws

I sat the AWS Certified AI Business Strategist beta on 29 September 2026, the first day it was available worldwide, and passed. If you copy anything from this, do the Claude drills first to get an idea of what kind of material you might already know, and for sure build a fact sheet, because that covers off the rote questions where logic won’t work. AWS Certified AI Business Strategist Early Adopter In this guide The setup at a glance Why I needed this What you need Start with the business problem The steps 1. Put everything in the project first 2. Set up the instructions 3. Let Claude build the Notion pages 4. Ask for drills early 5. Put each practice test review in Notion as its own page 6. Start the Fact Sheet on day one My run through it What I used for AIB-C01 Checking the result What fought back What I’ll take back to work Limits The setup at a glance AIB-C01 2026 hub (dashboard: scores, repeat misses, overrides, gaps, session log) Study Noteswhy an answer is right, in syllabus order Rulescue → answer, grouped by stem question Fact Sheetstraight facts and lists, one line each Quiz Databaseevery missed or shaky question, one row each Last nightrepeat misses and exam technique, one phone screen Frameworks & Standardsoptional, for framework structure This is the layout my instructions now build, reworked the day after the exam from the pages I used for AIB-C01. A Claude project holds the instructions and reads and writes these pages through the Notion connector, and so every drill, practice test and miss lands in them. ...

I finally opened one of the tabs I’d left sitting since I started studying for the AWS recert, a trigger.dev post on Claude Code tips I’d flagged months ago as worth coming back to. Of the ten tips, two were things I didn’t already do, and a couple of the others described features that had changed or gone entirely since it was written. The post wasn’t wrong when it was published, it had just aged, and I’d saved it at the point where saving it felt close enough to reading it. ...

I’m only weeks out from recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional for the second time, and most of the studying is sitting a three-hour practice exam after work and then spending another few hours going back through it afterwards. It’s an architecture exam so it does test patterns, but they’re AWS-specific service combinations, the deep single-vendor recall of one stack, and my actual days are spread across AWS, GCP, Azure, on-prem and a pile of AI tooling, jumping between Windows, Mac and Linux. The exam wants me deep in one place, and real work has been taking me wide for years. ...

A few weeks ago, recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time, the course covered AWS Fault Injection Service, and it made me think about a company where the backups had been failing for a long time and nobody knew. The backups ran weekly to a server at a remote site, and the tapes were swapped by someone there whose job had nothing to do with infrastructure. Every swap the job had failed and the screen had shown a red line saying so, but the person doing the swapping had no reason to know red meant the backup had not worked. The job ran every week and the light was red every week. Nobody who could read the light was looking at it. ...

The biggest change I made for this AWS recert isn’t which AI I’m using, it’s that I moved my study notes out of OneNote and into Notion. Back in March I wrote about studying with custom GPTs for the AI Practitioner. The note-creation GPT had grown a system prompt that read like a software spec, the coaching one had stayed simple and useful, and the post ended with me saying I’d try Claude as a study partner for the SA Pro and figure out whether to move my notes out of OneNote. ...

The AI Builders Breakfast Before the main programme opened there was a smaller invite-only session called the AI Builders Breakfast, which I hadn’t known about when I wrote the pre-Summit piece and only found out about after. It ended up being the part of the day I got the most out of. The room was smaller than anything else I sat in all day and the conversations were about what’s actually hard rather than what’s being announced. ...

I’ve been to plenty of vendor events and briefings over the years but never an AWS Summit, so heading to London on Wednesday for the first time I genuinely don’t know what to expect. I’m planning to get there when doors open at 8am partly to beat the keynote crowds and partly because I’ve already had to make some hard choices about how the day runs. Picking the Sessions I had four sessions I wanted to attend: the keynote on agentic AI, a workshop on rapid prototyping with Kiro, a zero trust for AI security session, and a fast-track VMware migration workshop. Some run 2–3 hours, the zero trust session clashes directly with Kiro, and doing all of them would mean spending the entire day in rooms with no time to actually see any of it, so I’ve cut two. I’m skipping the keynote, which at my first AWS Summit feels like it should be a bigger deal than it is, and dropping the AI security session because it runs at the same time as Kiro and that’s not a close call. The keynote will be streamed and I’ll catch it later. The VMware workshop and Kiro are what I’m actually there for. ...

I’ve held AWS certifications since 2019, starting with Cloud Practitioner and then working through Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps, Developer Associate, and Solutions Architect Professional within about a year (It was Covid year after all). I recertified the SA Pro in 2023 and passed the AI Practitioner in February this year. The SA Pro is due again, exam’s booked for end of June, so I’m back studying. My study method has been the same every time, which is watch a Stephane Maarek course on Udemy, make notes in OneNote as I go, grind practice exams. The notes are dense and compressed, topics separated by slashes, exam questions dropped in wherever they’re relevant. The formatting is all over the place because it’s written for speed of recall, not for anyone else to read. I’ve used this approach for every cert I’ve passed and never had a reason to change it. ...

I’m recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time right now, so when I decided to build a personal site the temptation to go straight to Route53, CloudFront, S3, and Terraform was real. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini what they thought before starting, and while they disagreed on a few things they all said to use GitHub Pages and not overthink the hosting. Gemini included a cost comparison that had an EKS cluster as one of the options at £150-200/month, which is overkill for basically any website, but it helped make the point that GitHub Pages with a custom domain was the obvious starting point. I could have spent weeks on infrastructure before writing a single post, or I could just start writing. ...