Big Data

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

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 23 Comments

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