AWS Certification tips from an AWS trainer
The Trainers Profile
The Trainer here is an AWS trainer, visiting faculty at Symbiosis Institute Of Digital And Telecom Management teaching AWS, working on AWS and Azure as a free-lancer and also a first-generation AWS user with experience with AWS spanning around 10 years.
So we interviewed Anshuman Sen, who has been training multiple students on AWS and Cloud technologies and has many students who have been able to crack AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certifications.
Q1 — Why is AWS certification so hot in the Market?
Industry 4.0 and the rush towards Digital transformation in every sector has meant there is a huge demand for cloud services. The new-age cloud providers are not just infrastructure providers anymore and have a plethora of additional services and microservices which make business processes simpler and deployment of products super quick.
Amazon Web services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure are aiding this massive shift.
AWS has the first-mover advantage and has been able to make inroads in many organizations. Due to this AWS is quite hot in the market and most IT jobs look for AWS certification to add value to the CV.
Q2 — Is it worth investing time and money and getting AWS certified?
IT organizations and IT operations are heavily dependent on cloud services. Be it development and Quality assurance with Devops, or business analytics or the complete set of business, data and IT operations. All aspects of these functions are being deployed on the cloud. AWS has many specific services in all these fields and hence makes a lot of sense.
Q3 — What are the key services of AWS that I should focus on?
This will depend on what certification you are looking at. For security specialty, Amazon KMS, IAM, ACL. VPC and security groups are important. AWS organization is another aspect one needs to understand.
For Solutions architect you need to get a clear hang of IAM, storage (S3, EFS, and EBS), compute( EC2 and Lambda), Database (Aurora, RDS, Redshift), Networking and content delivery (CloudFront, VPC, Route53, and ELB), Security and most importantly the deployment with Autoscaling, etc. Cloudformation. ElasticBeanstalk also forms an integral part of a solutions architect profile.
Enterprise architecture would connect to the infrastructure via a VPN, so understanding the various gateways and VPC in dept is important.
The Solutions Architect course covers most important and basic services from each category, necessary to create and deploy any application using AWS.
If you are looking at DevOps then you would need to understand ECS, Elastic Beanstalk and custom AMI’s and of course the complete security environment.
Q4 — How can I prepare for the AWS certification exam
If you have been working on AWS services then you will be comfortable with appearing for AWS certification. However, it is very unlikely that you have worked on all aspects and services of AWS which are part of the certification program. It is best to either do an online course. However, if you are coming from an non-aws background then joining a classroom program is the best option.
Q5 — What are the Opportunities after doing AWS certification
AWS certification could mean different things to different people depending on where they are in their careers.
For a database architect or an application architect, it could mean a move to a Solutions architecture role.
For a sales guy, it could mean better opportunities. Developer, QA etc would enjoy a different perspective of the infrastructure and cloud.
Sysops and Administrator roles will be able to assist Digital transformations better.
Q6 — What the top challenges faced by students appearing for AWS certification
AWS certifications are very scenario-based. They can be tricky. The solutions given at times can be very confusing and seem very close to each other. One needs to have a very deep practical understanding of each of the services and also how various AWS services interact with each other.
Q7 — What are the 5 tips you will give to students for mastering AWS
5 tips, well.
- Understand the basics
- Focus on practicals
- Redo the classroom practicals thrice
- Attempt as many practice exams as you can
- Pick up case studies and try to design architectures of various popular applications.
Q8 — Finally, what is your message to the students
Well, AWS is constantly evolving. They are adding new services and updating the basic ground rules for many others. These are exciting times for cloud professionals. Keep learning!
Originally published at https://blog.thinkcerti.com on March 10, 2020.
