Avoid Cantrill at all cost
I completed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate course, and I will give it credit where it is due: it taught me a great deal about AWS, how its services work, and how they fit together. The material is detailed, and I now feel prepared to pass the exam. That said, the course is painfully bloated and terribly structured. If my choice were between this course and an instructor simply giving me the slides and walking through them clearly, I would choose the straightforward slide walkthrough every time, skip the "demo lessons" which is just you launching a CF stack essentially. Concepts that are completely unfamiliar to the student are casually referenced three or four modules before they are properly introduced. The instructor constantly jumps between ideas, buries important details under unnecessary commentary, and takes far too long to make basic points. It genuinely feels like someone gave ChatGPT a concise script and told it to triple the word count. I eventually had to watch the videos at 3.5× speed because nearly every explanation was packed with that much filler. The curriculum itself feels inconsistent and poorly planned. Some sections begin with lengthy historical background that could have been covered in literally one minute. Others provide an “architectural overview.” I feel like when the team or instructor gets too lazy a lesson turns into footage of the AWS dashboard while the instructor continues reading another bloated script. There is no consistent format for introducing a service, explaining its architecture, identifying its limitations, and highlighting what actually matters for the exam. This also makes taking useful notes unnecessarily difficult. The instructor repeatedly says, “You should remember this for the exam,” but the information often is not written on the slide. By the time he identifies it as important, he is already a paragraph deep into an explanation surrounded by several examples and tangents. If something is important enough to memorize for the exam, put it clearly on the slide instead of burying it in the narration, and even then he makes this point like once every minute. Despite the large “UPDATED” branding attached to the course, enough of the material appears outdated that I felt the need to independently verify my notes with an LLM. And the amount of things it usually finds, such as outdated information, entire deprecated services is ridiculous, and unacceptable. I don't give a damn if you are a "solo instructor", outdated information on deprecated, or soon to be deprecated services within a course should not be there, at all. If you cannot handle updating a basic index of videos with a up to date representation of reality and charging me $40 USD for the course and the misleading "UPDATED" branding, I dont think you should be operating at all. The slides themselves? its like the creators don't know you can make text smaller to fit more points, or at least properly write out an actual point rather then it being some obscure representation of some point that I need to try and parse out and understand with their weird truncation and abbreviation. Overall, I learned a lot and feel ready for the SAA exam, but that does not excuse the course’s lack of structure, inconsistent teaching format, outdated material, and painfully overwritten scripts. The useful technical content is buried beneath hours of unnecessary filler. That pushes what could have been an excellent course down to two stars. Also, the practice exam has vague wording, and no shit some questions no joke, have NO correct answer. I will not be using Cantrill for the SAP or for any other course.
By Adam S.