Today I cleared the recertification exam as AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. And I am very happy. I passed my first certification with AWS early in 2013 and I have been through a few AWS exams since then as all certified architects are required to renew their certifications every two years.
Taking a recertification exam certainly help in keeping up to date and force any cloud specialist to review technologies he does not use every day and widen his knowledge of AWS patterns and best practices. And that’s incredibly valuable. But according the Get Recertified page, the goal the recertification process is something else:

AWS releases a growing number of new features and services each year. To maintain your AWS Certified status, we require you to periodically demonstrate your continued expertise on the platform though a process called recertification. Recertification helps strengthen the overall value of your AWS certification and shows customers and employers that your credential covers the latest AWS knowledge, skills, and best practices.

Unfortunately this is not the case yet. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Blueprint has not significantly changed since the first time the exam was introduced. No AWS Lamdba, no Amazon API gateway, no containers. The focus is still on AWS Pipeline or Amazon Simple Workflow more than serverless technologies. And a few questions still discuss the benefits of Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS), a storage class that is not so valuable anymore.