Now that we can be sure that cloud computing is a real thing I’ve finally got around to ticking AWS cert of the ‘would be good to do’ list. I’ve been using EC2 for a fairly long time, but AWS is many (and many doesn’t even start to cover how many) things more and certification was a good chance to make sure that I’m across a few of them.

Overall I’m very impressed, to say the least. One of the main things that really shocked me was that a huge lot of the tech that I thought was ‘very expensive / enterprise only’ is vastly simplified and commoditised by AWS, which is really cool! Distributed load balancers (way easier to tweak than your beloved F5), scaling policies, storage systems that take hot snapshots instantaneously, multi-regional deployments, scalable message queue service, all the things that used to be months and thousands of $ are just a few clicks away. And don’t even get me started on serverless )

It was quite tough, especially since I braindead when it comes to networking and it’s such a key aspect of this certification. Stepping so far outside the comfort zone is good fun as well, been a long while since I was actually ‘studying’ something new.

Exam prep was the standard:

• aCloud.guru course — a must have, those guys are awesome!
• Whizlabs practice tests
• AWS white papers
• AWS study guide

And yep, my goal is obviously the Big Data cert, they just don’t allow you to go for it without an Associate cert, we’ll see how complicated that one is :)