Amazon web services certification is one of the sought after certification courses in the cloud computing domain. Out of all cloud computing providers, amazon plays a major role in the cloud industry. Getting certified in Amazon web services will boost your IT career.
If you are looking for getting your foot into cloud computing domain, it is better to start with amazon web services. It offers a one year free trial to learn all about their services. Their one year trail includes almost all their services. with the trial account you can start playing around with virtual machines, database instances, elastic search, load balancing and much more. So, to get AWS certification, trial account is more than enough to get hands on training with AWS.
In this post, I will explain some tips to pass AWS certifications ( Associate and developer).
Amazon Web Services certification tips:
To pass AWS certification, you should have
- Sound knowledge about most of the AWS services ( EC2, VPC, RDS, Cloudfront, S3, Route53 etc,)
- Hands on experience with AWS services.
- Good knowledge of disaster recovery, security and High availability architectures.
If you do not have prior hands-on experience and knowledge or you have little knowledge about AWS services, it is better to take an online course. If you already have experience in architecting solutions on AWS it is not necessary to take an online course.
Best online course for AWS certification:
1. AWS certified Solution architect Associate(2016) Ryan Kroonenburg
This course by Ryan Kroonenburg covers all the necessary services for certification. This course is good and affordable when compared to Linux Academy Courses.
2. AWS certified Developer Associate Level (2016) – (Ryan Kroonenburg)
Check discount for these courses here: AWS course discounts
This course gives a good coverage for preparing AWS associate developer certification. Once you learn all the AWS concepts, you will have to learn how to work with AWS services using API’s and CLI’s. This course will teach you to the required topics and API’s which are needed to connect to AWS services.
There are other AWS certification courses like CBT nuggets, cloud academy etc, But if you are a beginner and learn all the concepts needed for certification and your work, I would suggest you to go with Udemy course by Ryan.
Read The recommended White papers
Read all the recommended white papers by AWS. These white paper will give you good knowledge about AWS security compliance, best practices in architecting AWS solutions etc,.Following are the recommended white papers for AWS certification.
- Overview of Amazon Web Services
- Overview of Security Processes
- AWS Risk & Compliance White paper
- Storage Options in the Cloud
- Architecting for the AWS Cloud: Best Practices
Learn about AWS architectures
AWS has an architecture section wherein you can learn about in which scenario a particular service can be used. AWS exam questions are scenario based, so just by knowing about the service you won’t be able to pass the examination. You should know under which scenarios a particular service can be used. These questions are tricky and you will be confused in a second if you are not fully aware of the service architecture. So, it is good to understand various scenarios before appearing for the exam.
Read all the FAQ’s
Each AWS service has a FAQ section. Two or three days before the certification, read all the FAQ’s of important services like EC2, VPC, RDS, S3, SQS, SNS, CloudFront, and Route53. This will clear most of your doubts with AWS services and you can answer confidently in the examination.
Watch all AWS re-invent videos from youtube
AWS reinvent youtube videos have really good information about AWS services. Watch the latest reinvent videos of the important services.
Practice with Trail Account
To know more about the services, you should practice on the trial account. You can get hands-on experience with most of the services without spending a penny. For instance, when you try setting up a cloud front distribution for a website hosted on s3 with rout53, you will learn about s3 permissions, cloud front URL setting, signed URL concepts, DNS settings, DNS configurations and much more. So, hands on with services is a must.
AWS exam practice questions
cloudacademy.com provides AWS exam quizzes to equip yourself for the certification. Once you have learned all the AWS concepts, you can try their quizzes to gauge your knowledge about AWS services. If you have subscribed to Udemy course, then it is more than enough for the certification.
If you follow all the steps mentioned above, you will have the certification in your hand. Leave a comment below for queries and your experience with the certification exam.
