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SAP-C02

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 montht 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 test are not perfect, and sometimes frustrating ( due to gramma, 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.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025 | 2 minutes Read
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First Billing Alarms

Enabling IAM access to Billing According to this post giving IAM access to Billing Console can only be done through console. So lets enable it.

Saturday, February 1, 2025 | 1 minute Read
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Organization instance Identity Center

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.

Saturday, February 1, 2025 | 1 minute Read
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Initial Cdk Setup

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:

Sunday, January 5, 2025 | 8 minutes Read
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First Post - initial environment setup

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.

Saturday, January 4, 2025 | 2 minutes Read