Making a second installment of this should be considered an achievement in itself, I think.
I’m taking a break from the wider learning which will be talked about here to craft the second edition of my Weekly Learning notes. I detailed this a bit more in the first edition, from last week, so without further ado I’d like to talk about this weeks topic: AWS Certification.
On Monday, I am sitting the AWS Certified Developer - Associate exam. I’m fortunate enough to have had this paid for by work, so all I need to do is put in some hours studying, then sit then exam and walk away with a shiny badge, et voilà. The exam calls for either the completion of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, or at least one year of experience developing on AWS (I am covered by the latter).
Unfortunately, that is much easier said than done.
The AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification, I think, covers most of the basics of AWS - such as IAM, EC2, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, and the individual quirks and features of each, plus how to use them together. Perhaps counterintuitively, there is a fair bit of work in getting an EC2 instance to talk to an S3 bucket, or putting a CloudFront distribution in front of an S3 bucket. I am quite interested in the comparison between AWS and Azure or GCP for something like this.
I started by signing up to AWS Skills Builder, using the free one-week trial. I was hoping that there would be sufficient resources on here for me to prepare, maybe take a practice exam, and then feel confident and prepared before I sat the exam. That did not turn out to be the case. I found AWS Skills Builder to be lacking, and, although there was a practice exam, the surrounding content seemed quite thin, and I never felt like I would be able to learn enough for the entire exam.
I started having a look around, and ended up signing up to Pluralsight, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Pluralsight recently acquired A Cloud Guru, who I understand are one of the go-to training providers for cloud certification. As such, most (not all) of the A Cloud Guru content is available on Pluralsight. I have been ploughing through the associated course and I do feel much more prepared than I did previously, although I still have some way to go (and the exam is less than 72 hours away 🫣).
As mentioned, I have one year of working with AWS since I started at the DVSA, and I thought this would carry me most of the way to the certification. I have not yet sat the exam, so I can’t say for sure, but there is so much I have covered on the Pluralsight course so far which I didn’t know, and am grateful that I’ve learnt prior. Admittedly, I haven’t yet covered the sections on things like Lambda, Cloudwatch and API Gateway, where I am much more familiar with the services, but even with things like IAM and S3 - there is loads I didn’t know.
Off that, I’d highly recommend the Pluralsight course (or the A Cloud Guru course, I’m not sure if you can still subscribe there?). The lectures are interspersed with demos, for which I used my own AWS account (and have incurred $1.27 charges so far 🙄), which are really useful for actually putting the taught content into practice. Of course, I haven’t yet finished the course, or sat the exam, so perhaps my judgement should be reserved until Monday afternoon, but I certainly feel much more confident than before.
Cloud certification is something which has been on my radar for a while, and has been made possible by Cabinet Office coordinating Cloud Certification October - a public sector initiative to get people certified. I think that my desire is driven by a lack of other formal qualifications in the software sector - I do not have a relevant degree, nor did I complete a boot-camp - and I often find myself looking for some validation or approval of what I know or what I can do. I would like one day to pursue a Masters degree in software or Computer Science, but that is some time away, I think. In the meantime, qualifications and certifications like this one not only look good on my CV or LinkedIn, but will also prove to myself that I do know what I am doing, and am quite capable of it.
If I pass 😅