I have been using my time well, or so I thought, working towards the Solutions Architect Professional certification. Having used AWS professionally for 10+ years I thought, hey, I can do this. So I started studying and realized that holy cow, there are 175 services (3 when I started!) covering incredible breadth and scope. After failing the paid practice test (bad value!) I realized I needed to study more, and more, and more, and then some more.
I am now taking the Udemy practice tests and am beginning to think they are a little ridiculous -- one question revolved around the knowledge that for Storage Gateway you could only use Cached Volume gateway because it would handle up to 1 petabyte, whereas the Standard Volume Gateway maxed out at 500 terabytes (this information was listed in the doc under some appendix). This seems a downright absurd thing to test, so I wonder if the actual AWS has this kind of question.
In any case, it's absolutely amazing, fun, interesting, and great to learn, practice and do all the cool stuff you can do with AWS. It's a truly amazing service and, having spent a short time doing a comparison with Azure last year, it's clear that AWS is light years ahead of the competition.
Thanks for your write up!
Off to study even more :-)