Starting out with AWS certifications

It's important to understand where I come from when reading this advice. I take industry certifications (certs) pretty regularly and find that, for myself, they're a great way to focus my learning in a specific area. The times that I use or have used certs in an attempt to further my career have been and continue to be infrequent. The advice I give here is coming from the perspective of someone who uses certs as a tool to quickly learn about specific topics or technologies.

Where to Start

AWS offers a multitude of certifications, and while they offer some basic guidance on where to begin, deciding for yourself can be a bit confusing. So, based on my experience I'd like to offer some additional insight.

Technical Background

If you're deciding on your first AWS cert and are approaching it with some technical experience, whether that be an undergraduate degree, a technical job role, or homelabbing experience, the best cert to start with will be the Solutions Architect Associate (SAA) cert. It covers how to get started with all of the core AWS services. Another important topic it covers is how you can build read-world applications with AWS, and how that differs from using more traditional tools and infrastructure like on-premise servers, hypervisors, etc.

Nontechnical Background

The cert I'm going to recommend for less technical folks is NOT one that I have taken personally, that being the Cloud Practitioner (CLF) certification. It's meant for building foundational knowledge of the AWS cloud ecosystem. I've seen a lot of people in sales or management roles with this one. It's meant to cover the fundamental knowledge required to participate in conversations about AWS.

If you're in a sales or management role, studying for this one is a good way to quickly get up to speed. However, if you're in that type of role and came from a technical background or have some good technical knowledge, I think the SAA cert is still the way to go as it is more in-depth.

Second Cert

If your first AWS cert was the Cloud Practitioner cert, then I would definitely recommend the SAA cert as a next step, since it covers such a wide variety of information at a useful level.

For those that took the SAA first, the Developer Associate cert is one that I see suggested pretty frequently. I haven't taken that one yet myself, but based on what I know and input from others, I think that would be a solid next step for software developers or those who are looking for another generalized exam.

The Security Specialty and Machine Learning Engineer Associate certs are a good choice if you specialize in cybersecurity or AI/ML. Do understand that neither of those certs cover the entirety of what you should know as a specialist in either of those fields when operating in an AWS environment.

Advanced Certs

So far I've taken two AWS certifications that I would consider to be advanced, meaning the difficulty was a big step up from previous AWS certs. Those two are the Solutions Architect Professional (SAP) and Advanced Network Specialty (ANS). Though I haven't taken it, I would also lump the DevOps Professional exam into this category, based on my experience with the SAP cert (though I won't be commenting on it specifically).

I would suggest you do the SAP exam if you're looking to do an advanced certification. It covers a large amount of AWS services, but more importantly, it assesses your knowledge on how AWS services interact with each other. When it comes to building applications on or securing AWS infrastructure, the SAP exam brings you closest to that in my opinion. It will be useful no matter what kind of cloud role you're in.

The ANS exam was even more difficult than the SAP exam, in my opinion. There's lot of minutiae and important details that applies to networking, and that's no different on AWS. If you intend on doing a lot of work with the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service and its accompanying services, studying for and passing this one gives you a great starting point for designing and managing operating complex networks on AWS.

Some General Advice

I have two pieces of broad advice for taking these certifications.

The first one is to get some hands on experience with AWS. There are many little nuances in how services are configured that become ingrained once you start setting things up yourself.

There's a free tier for AWS that makes many services available to tryout for no cost and offer a great starting point for learning. If you're doing one of the developer exams or learning about infrastructure as code for another reason the VPC resources are a good way to experiment. Many of them come at no cost (subnets, security groups, network ACLs, routing tables, etc.), and scaling them is both straightforward and indicative of real-world scenarios.

My second piece of advise is to learn how services and resources interact with each other. All of the AWS certs that I've taken have had many questions involving multiple services, and knowing the ins and outs of how those services work together is often key to answering them correctly. This is especially true for the solutions architect exams, as I've alluded to before.

Resources

Here are some of my favorite resources to use when studying.

  • Tutorials Dojo Practice Exams: These practice exams are probably the most useful resource I've found. The majority of them reflect the questions on the exams with a high degree of accuracy for both the content and the wording of questions that you'll find on the actual tests.

  • Stephane Maarek Udemy AWS Courses: Always wait for Udemy courses to go on sale! The "normal" prices are not actually the normal prices, as the courses are almost always on sale. That said, Stephane's courses are comprehensive and if you like the PowerPoint/presentation style of teaching, these are excellent courses.

  • AWS Certification Prep: AWS provides some free cert prep materials online. Some of these materials can be hit-or-miss in my experience, but many of them are free. I find that reviewing the exam guides is helpful. They give you an overview of the tests, including a percentage breakdown for each question category.

In Closing

Certifications aren't going to make you a cloud god. Like other tools, they're helpful when used correctly.

To summarize my recommendations for a first time AWS cert taker:

  • Start your journey with the Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect Associate exam.

  • Try to do some hands on work in AWS.

  • Understand how the services work together.

I hope you found this helpful, and good luck on your AWS journey!