Monday, 2025-10-20, was one hell of a day. The AWS outage started somewhere between the previous evening into the early morning. I was up at 4am trying to figure out how to get data out of Dynamodb. Then I spent the rest of the day babysitting services, desperately waiting for ENIs to become available. Supposedly the problem came from DNS records to DynamoDb. Honestly that seems very strange to me. Why would a rollback of DNS cause us to not have ENIs available?

Today’s post is going to be a short one, I just renewed my AWS Solutions Architect - Associate certification and gained the AWS AI Practitioner certification and thought I would share some tips that helped me through both. Read the questions thoroughly: there’s usually 1-2 keywords that will make one answer stand out. Read the answers thoroughly: I’ve found that the pattern is usually 1 off the wall answer, 2 that are similar, and one that seems plausible, but still kind of out there.