My journey so far in AWS and how Certifications helps in starting it…
From Last few years we all have been hearing a lot about AWS certifications and companies moving towards cloud adaption. I am no different and also got attracted towards cloud and then eventually to AWS.
My cloud journey started in September 2019 where my first interaction with it was with Google Cloud and for that I bought Linux academy subscription for year.
Being a developer in my whole career I found sudden jump to it overwhelming and realised its probably not for me and gave up.
Later my organization announced partnership with AWS for cloud movement and with no choice this time I moved to AWS for learning. This time my company had a tieup with Linux Academy(Now A Cloud Guru )so started my journey from there.
Then pandemic happened and I got some free time to give full attention to cloud learning. I did my first Certification with AWS Cloud Practitioner in June 2020 and then continued with SAA in September 2020, DVA in Jan 2021 and SOA in Feb 2021.
At this time I was on cloud9 and felt I am now AWS expert and can do wonders. Well !!!! as its rightly said, having certs is way different then actual experience. Certs did help me in getting cloud engineer role in organization and I was among first few individuals who got that opportunity.
When we started onboarding new AWS account, it took a while to understand how IAM role and permissions actually impact work. While preparing for certs we are all administrators :) whereas in actual world you as developer or Architect will never be Administrator. You have to provision individual permissions /roles and should understand how decode-authorization-message works ( even this requires permission ) and filter aws cloudtrail events when something is not working from service end.
Every project is different and in our use case EC2 provisioning is easy but installing the application can’t be bootstrapped. User data is not allowed by security as well as AMI are created every 45 days. So we had to go with CICD pipeline and Ansible Towers to install applications.
We eventually progressed and moved into using Kinesis Data and Delivery streams, Lambda, S3 storage, DynamoDB, Aurora Postgres, ACM, etc. And not to forget cloudformation.
I was lucky to work on DynamoDB for performance tests and got good handson on loading 800gib of data from onprem key-value pair file with partitioning logic. Did multiple runs and loading of data to test different performance solutions and produced the metrics.
Aurora Postgres usecase was assigned to DBA team where they used DMS with SCT to move onprem Oracle database to Aurora postges. As a developer it was change in SQL statements and endpoints.
Reason I mentioned specifically about above two is just to show when we prepare about certs and actually implement them, we may not use services as expected.
Post working in AWS for 11 months, I thought of looking for advanced Certs and I landed up preparing for AWS Database speciality. ( I would blame DynamoDB for it :) )
It took me 4 months for preparation and able to pass it in April 2022.
Overall my two cents on certifications
They are great —
- To get familiar with cloud and how services interact with each other
- Options to compare with onprem and processes which can be replaced on cloud to get best out of it.
- Hybrid solutions and migration plans
- Speciality certifications focus in details on corresponding group of services
Where it doesn’t help —
- We don’t do hello world and basic webpages when deployed in real world.
- Not all are administators in real world. Access with Least privileges are the most important part when working on any cloud provider. Understanding IAM is crucial for any project.
- We can’t understand performance meaning without doing actual handson on real project.
- We can achieve certs just with 30 to 40% of knowing about each service in question.
- eg: We may use 10000 WCU’s /RCU’s and still get bad performance in DynamoDB if paritioning mechanism is bad. For certifications preparation, we will see scenarios around sub-ms response times but not how to get it.
- In real world we don’t use all services. We only use specific services required for project.
That was about AWS short journey so far and Certifications I achieved during the timeframe.
Courses I took for certifications -
Cloud Practitioner — https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-new/learn/lecture/20056508?start=0#overview
Solution Architect Associate — https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-saa-c02/learn/lecture/13672688?start=0#overview
Developer Associate — https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-developer-associate-dva-c01/learn/lecture/12203064?start=0#overview
Sysops Associate — https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-aws-certified-sysops-administrator-associate/learn/lecture/12957284?start=0#overview
Database Speciality — https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-database-specialty-dbs/learn/lecture/21286136?start=0#overview
Practice Papers from Tutorialdojo helped in preparing for exams and questions pattern.
My Achieved Certifications —
