Igor's Blog

SAP-C02

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:35:52 +0900

Last Friday I passed SAP-C02 the AWS Solution Architect - Professional exam.

This is my second AWS certificate having passed the AWS Solution Architect - Associate couple of months earlier.

SAP-C02 took me about 2 months to study for and I used the following resources to study:

Cantrill’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional course. This course was almost 70 hours long, and it took me about 1 month to go through. It is a good course, but gosh is it long… I feel like it would be much better to complete 3 courses that are ~20 hours long instead of doing single Cantrill’s class.
Stephene Maarek’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional 2025 course. I ended up doing this course twice, with the second time being 3 days before the exam ( this involved 5+ hours per day cram sessions). Highly recommend
My own AWS Organization created just for learning and practice. This org is made out of 3 accounts, with SSO set up ( using Azure).
Tutorial’s Dojo Tests. These tests are not perfect, and sometimes frustrating ( due to grammar, and the way they are written). For ~$15 USD the value is unbeatable. My test scores were as follows:
- Review mode Set 1: 73%
- Review mode Set 2: 76%
- Review mode Set 3: 76%
Stephane Maarek’s Udemy SAP-C02 Practice Tests. My scores were:
- Practice mode Test 1: 72%
- Practice mode Test 2: 52% ( not sure what happened here, but I was sick and feverish when I did this one)
Neal Davis’ Udemy SAP-C02 Practice Tests. My scores were:
- Test #1: 74%
- Test #2: 71%
- Test #3: 82%

Overall the test took me 2 hours and 40 minutes to write, and overall was tough, but I felt confident I passed it when it was all done.

Oh My Zsh

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:10:53 +0900

Today I learned about Oh My ZSH.

I’ve got it installed and running on my laptop. The reason to get it is because Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer…but you may feel like one. Which hit the spot.

Oh My Zsh makes Zsh sleek and I ended up changing my default SHELL to ZSH, but I do not plan to switch exclusively to ZSH as BASH is still the SHELL to be used on servers, and everywhere else.

First Billing Alarms

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 20:23:21 -0800

Enabling IAM access to Billing

According to this post giving IAM access to Billing Console can only be done through console.

So let’s enable it.

Organization instance Identity Center

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 07:34:39 -0800

As mentioned initially here I was having trouble finding a way to enable organization instance of Identity Center using some form of automated way ( either through aws cli, or cdk, or whatever).

Back then, I did not enable it, hoping I could find a way to do it using code. Since then, I’ve spent some time researching this, and I found some documents ( which I lost…) that seemed to imply this can only be enabled manually using the AWS Console. So going to do this now.

Initial Cdk Setup

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 10:15:24 -0800

Installing CDK

Installing CDK is pretty simple:

$ sudo npm install -g aws-cdk
[sudo] password for iwidlinski:
added 1 package in 2s

It worked:

$ cdk --version
2.174.0 (build 9604329)

Bootstrap CDK

We can now bootstrap the account:

 $ cdk bootstrap aws://047719662517/us-west-2 --cloudformation-execution-policies arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AdministratorAccess
 ⏳ Bootstrapping environment aws://047719662517/us-west-2...
Trusted accounts for deployment: (none)
Trusted accounts for lookup: (none)
Execution policies: arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AdministratorAccess
CDKToolkit: creating CloudFormation changeset...
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:13 PM | REVIEW_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::CloudFormation::Stack | CDKToolkit User Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:19 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::CloudFormation::Stack | CDKToolkit User Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:21 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | LookupRole
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:21 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | CloudFormationExecutionRole
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:21 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::ECR::Repository | ContainerAssetsRepository
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:21 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::SSM::Parameter | CdkBootstrapVersion
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:21 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | FilePublishingRole
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:21 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | ImagePublishingRole
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:21 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::S3::Bucket | StagingBucket
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:22 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | ImagePublishingRole Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:22 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | LookupRole Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:22 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | CloudFormationExecutionRole Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:22 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | FilePublishingRole Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:22 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::ECR::Repository | ContainerAssetsRepository Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:22 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::SSM::Parameter | CdkBootstrapVersion Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 0/12 | 12:35:23 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::S3::Bucket | StagingBucket Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 1/12 | 12:35:23 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::SSM::Parameter | CdkBootstrapVersion
CDKToolkit | 2/12 | 12:35:23 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::ECR::Repository | ContainerAssetsRepository
CDKToolkit | 3/12 | 12:35:36 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::S3::Bucket | StagingBucket
CDKToolkit | 3/12 | 12:35:37 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::S3::BucketPolicy | StagingBucketPolicy
CDKToolkit | 3/12 | 12:35:38 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::S3::BucketPolicy | StagingBucketPolicy Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 4/12 | 12:35:38 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::S3::BucketPolicy | StagingBucketPolicy
CDKToolkit | 5/12 | 12:35:39 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::IAM::Role | ImagePublishingRole
CDKToolkit | 6/12 | 12:35:40 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::IAM::Role | FilePublishingRole
CDKToolkit | 7/12 | 12:35:40 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::IAM::Role | CloudFormationExecutionRole
CDKToolkit | 8/12 | 12:35:40 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::IAM::Role | LookupRole
CDKToolkit | 8/12 | 12:35:40 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Policy | FilePublishingRoleDefaultPolicy
CDKToolkit | 8/12 | 12:35:40 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Policy | ImagePublishingRoleDefaultPolicy
CDKToolkit | 8/12 | 12:35:41 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | DeploymentActionRole
CDKToolkit | 8/12 | 12:35:41 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Policy | FilePublishingRoleDefaultPolicy Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 8/12 | 12:35:41 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Policy | ImagePublishingRoleDefaultPolicy Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 8/12 | 12:35:42 PM | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | AWS::IAM::Role | DeploymentActionRole Resource creation Initiated
CDKToolkit | 9/12 | 12:35:56 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::IAM::Policy | FilePublishingRoleDefaultPolicy
CDKToolkit | 10/12 | 12:35:57 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::IAM::Policy | ImagePublishingRoleDefaultPolicy
CDKToolkit | 11/12 | 12:35:59 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::IAM::Role | DeploymentActionRole
CDKToolkit | 12/12 | 12:36:01 PM | CREATE_COMPLETE | AWS::CloudFormation::Stack | CDKToolkit
 ✅ Environment aws://047719662517/us-west-2 bootstrapped.

This should create s3 bucket, which it did:

First Post - initial environment setup

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:24:03 -0800

Plan

Plan is to get AWS Certificates and at the same time:

do all practicing and testing in code or cli (or as much as possible)
update this blog with experiences/things learned
get better at markdown, python, aws cli, etc

Root Credentials

AWS makes it clear that credentials for root account are not recommended.

This makes sense, but we can not use aws cli without active credentials. Once we have the credentials, it will be possible to create new admin user and use that accounts credentials instead of root’s.