AWS Certified Big Data -Speciality (BDS-C00) Exam Learning Path

Clearing the AWS Certified Big Data – Speciality (BDS-C00) was a great feeling. This was my third Speciality certification and in terms of the difficulty level (compared to Network and Security Speciality exams), I would rate it between Network (being the toughest) Security (being the simpler one).

Big Data in itself is a very vast topic and with AWS services, there is lots to cover and know for the exam. If you have worked on Big Data technologies including a bit of Visualization and Machine learning, it would be a great asset to pass this exam.

AWS Certified Big Data – Speciality (BDS-C00) exam basically validates

  • Implement core AWS Big Data services according to basic architectural best practices
  • Design and maintain Big Data
  • Leverage tools to automate Data Analysis

Refer AWS Certified Big Data – Speciality Exam Guide for details

                              AWS Certified Big Data – Speciality Domains

AWS Certified Big Data – Speciality (BDS-C00) Exam Summary

  • AWS Certified Big Data – Speciality exam, as its name suggests, covers a lot of Big Data concepts right from data transfer and collection techniques, storage, pre and post processing, analytics, visualization with the added concepts for data security at each layer.
  • One of the key tactic I followed when solving any AWS Certification exam is to read the question and use paper and pencil to draw a rough architecture and focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able to eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach to the right answer or atleast have a 50% chance of getting it right.
  • Be sure to cover the following topics
    • Whitepapers and articles
    • Analytics
      • Make sure you know and cover all the services in depth, as 80% of the exam is focused on these topics
      • Elastic Map Reduce
        • Understand EMR in depth
        • Understand EMRFS (hint: Use Consistent view to make sure S3 objects referred by different applications are in sync)
        • Know EMR Best Practices (hint: start with many small nodes instead on few large nodes)
        • Know Hive can be externally hosted using RDS, Aurora and AWS Glue Data Catalog
        • Know also different technologies
          • Presto is a fast SQL query engine designed for interactive analytic queries over large datasets from multiple sources
          • D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS
          • Spark is a distributed processing framework and programming model that helps do machine learning, stream processing, or graph analytics using Amazon EMR clusters
          • Zeppelin/Jupyter as a notebook for interactive data exploration and provides open-source web application that can be used to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text
          • Phoenix is used for OLTP and operational analytics, allowing you to use standard SQL queries and JDBC APIs to work with an Apache HBase backing store
      • Kinesis
        • Understand Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose in depth
        • Know Kinesis Data Streams vs Kinesis Firehose
          • Know Kinesis Data Streams is open ended on both producer and consumer. It supports KCL and works with Spark.
          • Know Kineses Firehose is open ended for producer only. Data is stored in S3, Redshift and ElasticSearch.
          • Kinesis Firehose works in batches with minimum 60secs interval.
        • Understand Kinesis Encryption (hint: use server side encryption or encrypt in producer for data streams)
        • Know difference between KPL vs SDK (hint: PutRecords are synchronously, while KPL supports batching)
        • Kinesis Best Practices (hint: increase performance increasing the shards)
      • Know ElasticSearch is a search service which supports indexing, full text search, faceting etc.
      • Redshift
        • Understand Redshift in depth
        • Understand Redshift Advance topics like Workload Management, Distribution Style, Sort key
        • Know Redshift Best Practices w.r.t selection of Distribution style, Sort key, COPY command which allows parallelism
        • Know Redshift views to control access to data.
      • Amazon Machine Learning
      • Know Data Pipeline for data transfer
      • QuickSight
      • Know Glue as the ETL tool
    • Security, Identity & Compliance
    • Management & Governance Tools
      • Understand AWS CloudWatch for Logs and Metrics. Also, CloudWatch Events more real time alerts as compared to CloudTrail
    • Storage
    • Compute
      • Know EC2 access to services using IAM Role and Lambda using Execution role.
      • Lambda esp. how to improve performance batching, breaking functions etc.

AWS Certified Big Data – Speciality (BDS-C00) Exam Resources

23 thoughts on “AWS Certified Big Data -Speciality (BDS-C00) Exam Learning Path

    1. they were helpful, but as other resources do not cover all. So make sure you practice well and read related documentation.

  1. Hi Jayendra,

    Do you have any feedback on acloudacademy aws bigdata course? Is Stephane’s course sufficient for the certification?

    1. Haven’t seen acloudacademy aws bigdata course. I used Linux Academy which was quite good. Also Stephane’s course has got good feedback from the users.

  2. AWS is testing to split Big Data Specialty to 2 certs: Database and Data Analytics. Hope seeing your updated guides soon. Thank you very much for bring us the wonderful AWS cert exams guides.

  3. Hi Jayendra! Went thru much of the Udemy and acloudguru course but my confidence shattered while giving whizlabs practice exam. not sure actual exam might have these way too difficult questions. Could hardly find 1/2 straightforward questions among 70 and few latest services being also asked. Your views and guidance please

    1. Hi Sameer, i felt the Whizlabs exams for professional and speciality are not in-line with the exams. The questions have lot of irrelevant text which does not appear in exams. I would recommend check on Braincert exams, that should give you a better picture of the actual exams.

  4. Hi Jayendra, This exam is getting retired. Do you have any updates on Data Analytics Speciality exam? I would really look forward to your exam tips and tricks.

  5. hi Jayendra
    Could you please let me know if udemy exams are relevant? I found them quite easy as compared to whizlabs exams.

  6. Hi Jayendra
    I wanted to ask if you gave udemy exams for bigdat certification. Could you please let me know if they were helpful? and how would you compare them to whizlabs and braincert?

    Would you recommend udemy exams.

    1. hi palak, haven’t checked the udemy ones as I did not find good ones when i appeared.

  7. Hi Jayendra,
    IT Professionals who are on Database fields are eagerly looking for your thoughts on “AWS Certified Database – Specialty” exam . Can you please provide some light on it?

  8. Hi Jayendra,

    Please let us know AWS Bigdata Speciality and AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty 2021 are same ?

    In Udemy, I see Stephane Maarek has this course – AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty 2021

    Please clarify

    1. Big Data is obsolete now and replaced by Data Analytics. There is a different learning for the same.

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