Building credibility and getting certified

It is hard to argue that the cloud is not an important technology shift. We have established that AWS is the clear market and thought leader in the cloud space.

Now, enterprises are eager to adopt cloud technologies because they do not want to fall behind their competition and become obsolete. Hopefully, by now, you are excited to learn more about AWS and other cloud providers, or at the very least, you’re getting a little nervous and have a little FOMO yourself.

We will devote the rest of this chapter to showing you the path of least resistance for becoming an AWS guru and someone who can bill themselves as an AWS expert. As with other technologies, it is hard to become an expert without hands-on experience, and it’s hard to get hands-on experience if you can’t demonstrate that you’re an expert. The best method, in my opinion, to crack this chicken-and-egg problem is to get certified.

Fortunately, AWS offers a wide array of certifications to demonstrate deep AWS knowledge and expertise to potential clients and employers. As AWS creates more and more services, they continue to offer new certificates aligned with these new services. The following are the available AWS certification listed on the AWS website as of April 2022.

Figure 2.10: AWS certifications

In the screenshot above, you can see that AWS has certifications for everyone. If you are starting out or working in a non-tech domain, it’s better to go for foundational certifications. To gain further knowledge, you can choose associated certifications and become an expert by gaining specialist and professional certifications.

AWS continuously updates existing certification exams to accommodate all new services and feature launches. Let’s review the available certifications and how they fit into your career aspirations to enhance your current skills in the cloud.

Building a non-tech AWS cloud career

You may see working with the cloud as a very tech-savvy job. However, that is not always the case. Several cloud roles don’t require deep technical knowledge; just a basic understanding will get your foot in the door to start a cloud career. For example, anyone from a sales and marketing background can thrive in cloud marketing, cloud business development, or a cloud sales role without deep technical knowledge. Similarly, program managers are required in any industry where basic cloud knowledge will help you get started in the role. However, it’s recommended to build cloud foundation knowledge to prepare yourself better, which you can gain from an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification. Let’s look into more details.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner – Foundational

This is the most basic certification offered by AWS. It is meant to demonstrate a broad-stroke understanding of the core services and foundational knowledge of AWS. It is also a good certification for non-technical people that need to be able to communicate using the AWS lingo but are not necessarily going to be configuring or developing in AWS. This certification is ideal for demonstrating a basic understanding of AWS technologies for people such as salespeople, business analysts, marketing associates, executives, and project managers.

The AWS Solutions Architect path

Solutions architect is one of the most sought-after roles in the cloud industry. Often, solutions architects carry the responsibilities of designing a workload in the cloud and applying architecture best practices using the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The following AWS certifications can help you kick-start your career as an AWS cloud solutions architect.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

This is the most popular certification offered by AWS. Many technically minded developers, architects, and administrators skip taking the Cloud Practitioner certification and start by taking this certification instead. If you are looking to demonstrate technical expertise in AWS, obtaining this certification is a good start and the bare minimum to demonstrate AWS proficiency. However, to demonstrate proficiency in architecting IT workloads in the AWS cloud, you should pursue the Solutions Architect – Professional certification as mentioned below.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional

This certification is one of the toughest to get and at least five to six times harder than the Associate-level certification. Earning this certification will demonstrate to employers that you have a deep and thorough understanding of AWS services, best practices, and optimal architectures based on the particular business requirements for a given project. Obtaining this certification shows potential employers that you are an expert in designing and creating distributed systems and applications on the AWS platform. It used to be that having at least one of the Associate-level certifications was a prerequisite to sitting for the Professional-level certifications, but AWS has eliminated that requirement.

You can refer to Solution Architect’s Handbook 2^nd Edition available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1801816611), for more details on the AWS solutions architect role and to gain in-depth knowledge of building use-case-focused architecture on the AWS platform.

DevOps is one of the key components for operationalizing any workload. Let’s learn more about the DevOps path in AWS.

The AWS Cloud DevOps Engineer path

DevOps is a critical engineering function that makes a development team more agile by automating the deployment pipeline. Automation is key to adopting the cloud and using its full potential, where a DevOps engineer plays an essential role. Gaining the AWS certification can help you navigate the DevOps path with AWS.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate

This certification will demonstrate to potential employers and clients that you have experience deploying, configuring, scaling up, managing, and migrating applications using AWS services. You should expect the difficulty level of this certification to be a little bit higher than the other Associate-level certifications, but also expect quite a bit of overlap in the type of questions that will be asked with this certification and the other Associate-level certifications.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional

This advanced AWS certification validates knowledge on how to provision, manage, scale, and secure AWS resources and services. This certification will demonstrate to potential employers that you can run their DevOps operations and proficiently develop solutions and applications in AWS. This certification is more challenging than any Associate certification but easier than the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification.

The AWS Cloud Developer path

Developers are central to any IT application. They are builders who bring life to ideas, making developers vital in the cloud. However, software developers are more focused on programming languages and algorithms but build software in the cloud; they need to be aware of various development tools that cloud providers facilitate. The following is the certification to gain the required cloud knowledge for building software in AWS.

AWS Certified Developer – Associate

Obtaining this certification will demonstrate your ability to design, develop, and deploy applications in AWS. Even though this is a developer certification, do not expect coding in any questions during the exam. However, knowing at least one programming language supported by AWS will help you achieve this certification. Expect to see many of the same concepts and similar questions to what you would see in the Solutions Architect certification. AWS doesn’t have any professional certification for developers, but it is recommended to pursue AWS DevOps Engineer certifications to scale and operationalize your software application in the cloud.

While we have talked about the generalist career path in the cloud, several specialty paths are available where AWS has certifications to validate your knowledge. Let’s look into the AWS certifications overview if you have expertise in a specific area.

The AWS Specialty Solutions Architect path

While generalist solutions architects design overall workloads, they need to dive deep into certain areas where more in-depth knowledge is required. In that case, specialist solutions architects come to the rescue; they provide their expertise to apply best practices for a specific domain such as security, networking, analytics, ML, etc. You have seen in the Well-Architected tool sections that AWS has domain-specific lenses to optimize specialty workloads and engage specialist solutions architects. The following are AWS certifications to validate your specialty knowledge in the AWS cloud.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty

This AWS specialty certification demonstrates that you possess the skills to design and deploy AWS services as part of a comprehensive network architecture and the know-how to scale using best practices. This is one of the hardest certifications to obtain, like AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. To pass the networking specialty exam, you have to put in additional effort.

For most exams, you go through online courses on famous learning platforms such as A Cloud Guru/Udemy and take practice exams before attending the actual exam. But for the networking specialty certification, that will not be enough. You need to go through other resources such as AWS whitepapers, blogs, and AWS re:Invent videos and take notes. You must review multiple resources until you are clear about concepts and keep revising your notes. We will discuss learning resources in more detail later in this chapter, under the Learning tips and tricks for obtaining AWS certifications section.

AWS Certified Security – Specialty

Possessing the AWS Certified Security – Specialty certification demonstrates to potential employers that you are well versed in AWS and the ins and outs of AWS security. It shows that you know security best practices for encryption at rest, encryption in transit, user authentication and authorization, and penetration testing, and are generally able to deploy AWS services and applications in a secure manner that aligns with your business requirements.

AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty

This is an excellent certification to have in your pocket if you are a data scientist or a data analyst. It shows potential employers that you are familiar with many of the core ML concepts and the AWS services that can be used to deliver ML and artificial intelligence projects.

AWS Certified Database – Specialty

Having this certification under your belt demonstrates to potential employers your mastery of the persistence services in AWS and your deep knowledge of the best practices needed to manage them. Some of the services tested are these:

• Amazon RDS
• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon Neptune
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon QLDB
• Amazon DocumentDB

AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty

Completing this certification demonstrates to employers that you have a good understanding of the concepts needed to perform data analysis on petabyte-scale datasets. This certification shows your ability to design, implement, and deploy analytics solutions that deliver insights by enabling data visualization and implementing the appropriate security measures.

AWS Certified SAP – Specialty

SAP specialty is a new certification exam that became available starting in April 2022. The AWS SAP specialty certification is for SAP professionals to demonstrate their knowledge of the AWS cloud. It shows your ability to implement, migrate, and support SAP workloads in AWS using AWS’s Well-Architected Framework.

While AWS continues to add new certifications to validate your cloud skills, they also retire old certifications that are not relevant over time; for example, AWS had a Big Data Specialty certification, which checked your knowledge of databases, ML, and analytics. Over time, as the use of databases and AI/ML increased, AWS launched separate certifications called AWS Database – Specialty and AWS Machine Learning – Specialty. In April 2020, AWS deprecated the Big Data – Specialty certification and renamed it the AWS Analytics – Specialty certification to focus just on data analytics services. Similarly, AWS retired the AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty exam on March 23, 2021.

Let’s learn some tips and tricks for obtaining AWS certifications.