Amazon Web Services Certifications

AWS. It’s big. And scary. And the 800 pound gorilla for the new Internet economy.

For years, I have kept abreast of developments in the XaaS space. But I never fully wrapped my head around what AWS was doing. I thought they were just another Cloud Datacentre. About a year ago, I started to understand that they were so much more. I think Lambda was my first real glimpse into how drastically things were changing. If you’ve been drinking the AWS kook-aid longer than I have, I’m sure you saw the writing on the wall a long time ago.

Since I’m in-between employers at the moment, I thought that it would be a good idea to get some certifications. I had my CCNA and CCDA years ago, but let them lapse. I went for the CCIE-Service Provider, but just barely missed the passing mark on the practical both times I took it. I just never found that I had enough time / inclination to put into studying for the practical part of the lab, as I was always working on a deal, proposal, or whatever particular fire was going on. So now I’ve got some time on my hands and it’s extremely easy to just kick the tires on AWS, since they have a Free Tier that you can use for 12 months.

A former colleague of mine pointed me toward A Cloud Guru, which has some awesome content to help you prepare for the AWS Certification tests. I have been working on the Certified Solutions Architect - Associate course for about 20 - 25 hours so far and I’m only 36% through. And I watch most of it at a minimum of 1.3x speed, averaging 1.5x. :) I’m fairly confident that when I sit this exam, I’m going to do very well, with these lectures as background.

The more time I spend working in this area, the more it feels like this is what all of my experience over the past 20+ years was destined for. The combination of Servers, Software, Networking and Architecture is all coming together. The irony is that it is coming together in a way that is going to make "server administration" obsolete. We’ll no longer manage full-stack systems. Store some data here, fire off some events there, run a bit of logic wherever there’s compute available, and string it all together server-less. It’s a bit wild, to be sure, but it’s also very exciting.

That’s enough of a break for now. I’m off to study some more. I was hoping to book a time to sit the first exam next week, but being only 36% through, I might need a bit more time. :)