How I get my AWS certification

AWS is one of the best cloud provider build with robust features. I took the Cloud Practitioner Certification to learn more about the AWS products.

Why?

As an aspired software engineer, I have worked on various software projects and find that deployment is really a big part of software development. Hence I decided to take up the AWS certification to strength my knowledge about the different cloud services available to aid my future development

What can I be

Surprisingly, the AWS certification give a wide variety of career opportunities.

There are many specialty certification to be good in one specific that you are interested and you can take advantage out of AWS’s product.

For example a database speciality can use AWS’s redshift for data warehouse service, he can also use dynamodb which is a nosql database with an excellent excellent query performance.

Even though amazon allow cross level certification — user can take a higher level certification without a lower level certification as prerequisite. I still decide to take the cloud practitioner certification first since I am really new to this.

How I get it

Now is the most important part, I spent about a good 3-4 days studying for it to make sure that I pass the exam.

Video

I started with a 13 hour long youtube video from freecode camp

This video gave me a very good overview of what are the services provided by AWS. With hands-on guidance on where to access it in the AWS dashboard. He also place enough emphasis on core concepts like shared responsibility model.

Some of the contents

Benefits of cloud

The products that AWS is offering

The best practices that one should take in order to prevent potential exploit of the services.

Responsibility of usage (the client’s responsibility or AWS’s responsibility)

How companies can utilised AWS’s service to bring value to their business

Practice Questions

I have done about 600 question and 3 simulated exams. Then i go through all my saved questions and wrong questions 2 times and i am ready to go.

These adds up to a total of 1000 questions that I finished in 2 days

The exam

The exam question are multiple choice and multiple select question. A minimum score of ~72% should be obtained to pass the exam.

There is a total of 65 Questions with 15 non-graded questions (amazon include them to see if they are feasible question choice for future exam takers).

The duration of the exam is 1.5 hours, can leave early if complete the quiz early.

The quiz is not that difficult with enough preparation, can be finished in 35-45 mins.

Online exams are also possible which make the whole thing much more convenient.

Conclusion

Due to the sheer amount of services that AWS has to offer, I feel like after this certification I only study whats on the ‘menu’ of AWS.

I did not really go in depth about how to use them in code and what are the actual benefits that I can get out of each of the specific products.

Hence, I think I am going to build some of my apps using AWS and then take the next certification to strengthen my knowledge