What did I do to prepare:

1. Watched most of the videos once or twice.

2. Read all of the service FAQs a few times (except Elastic Beanstalk...should have
read that one because there was something in the FAQ for EB that would have enabled
me to get a question correct)
3. Explored the UI for each of the services trying to ensure I understood each capability
exposed in the UI.
4. Created a few complex scenarios around non-default VPC setups that I wanted to
experiment with and tested that stuff out. Experimented with SG and NACL to validate
how to troubleshoot and understand that I configured things correctly.
5. Did some of my own auto scaling labs involving custom AMIs that I created. I went
back and later watched Ryan's lesson in this regard and his lab was very similar to what
I created for myself prior to watching his training.
6. Experimented with snapshots, encrypting snapshots, creating AMIs for encrypted
snapshots, and using both pv and hvm AMIs.

Be sure to understand the impacts of

hvm vs pv amis.
Read this:
https://blogs.aws.amazon.com/security/post/Tx2PC3QQDXJKASD/How-to-ConnectYour-On-Premises-Active-Directory-to-AWS-Using-AD-Connect

Some key items you should know before you take the exam:

how to configure and troubleshoot a VPC inside and out,

including basic IP subnetting. VPC is arguably one of the more
complex components of AWS and you cannot pass this exam without
a thorough understanding of it.

the difference in use cases between Simple Workflow (SWF),

Simple Queue Services (SQS), and Simple Notification Services
(SNS).

how an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) interacts with auto-scaling

groups in a high-availability deployment.

how to properly secure a S3 bucket in different usage scenarios

when it would be appropriate to use either EBS-backed or
ephemeral instances.
a basic understanding of CloudFormation.
how to properly use various EBS volume configurations and
snapshots to optimize I/O performance and data durability