What I Discovered After Passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam

 

I worked at Microsoft for seven years. Signing up for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner test seemed strange and, to be honest, a bit treacherous.

I've used AWS - I've utilized their free tier as well as some of their interesting offerings, such as AWS Device Farm. I've also left things on, gone over the free tier, and received a charge I couldn't afford!

However, knowing (and demonstrating) a thorough grasp of the leading cloud provider is a vital aspect of my profession, so I joined up.

I allowed myself three days to plan ahead of time.

The Preparation

I began with a sample test. How difficult could it be? I instantly recognized I needed to study after receiving 50% (70% was required to pass).

I vowed to perform all of the research myself. I'm not interested in A Cloud Guru (although several members of my team have passed using their 13-hour course and swear by it). My study strategy: While flying, watch the 6-hour video course and study whitepapers:

Amazon Web Services Overview (94 pages)

AWS Best Practices for Cloud Architecture (50 pages)

How Amazon Web Services Pricing Works (22 pages)

The breadth and depth of AWS's offerings astounded me.

Did you know they provide a service for managing satellite communications (AWS Ground Station)?

And did you know that AWS provides a service that injects customized films into high-quality video streams (AWS Elemental MediaTailor)?

There are many services to remember and many things I want to go back and play with.

I also improved my grasp on the "shared responsibility model." Amazon simplifies the areas of security for which they maintain responsibility in the video course, while making it clear what the client is responsible for on their end.

AWS, for example, owns the hardware, network, and hypervisor on an EC2 instance. After that, they can't even see what the client is doing with it; everything else is the customer's responsibility. AWS has no idea what operating system a user selects for an EC2 instance, for example.

Finally, I was surprised to see that AWS acknowledges that their price is difficult to comprehend and anticipate. "Projecting rates for a use case, like as web application hosting, may be difficult because a solution frequently utilises numerous features across different AWS products, which means there are more factors and purchase possibilities to consider," says a spokesperson. according to their pricing whitepaper (page 19). Another reason AWS opted to work with Apptio Cloudability.

The Examination

AWS recently announced that you may take the Cloud Practitioner Certification from the convenience of your own home. Several people of my team took the test in this manner and swear by it. That option was not available to me because I took the test this summer.

I went to a Pearson testing centre, handed up all of my belongings, sat at a terminal from the 1990s, and took the exam on what seemed to be Windows 3.1.

I passed with a score of 88 out of 100.

Or, as Apptio's Chief Revenue Officer Larry Blasko put it, "just a B+."

Do you know what they name the medical student that comes in last in their class? “Doctor.”

The Following

The information and street cred I gained by studying and passing was well worth it.

For example, the data breach at Capital One (another previous employer of mine) occurred just a few weeks after I took the test. While researching the consequences, I discovered that a little-known AWS service, AWS Macie, may have avoided the whole thing from happening. AWS Macie employs machine learning to detect and notify you to potential threats.

Later, I spoke with a customer about re-architecting some of their workloads and migrating away from EC2 to a new architecture based on AWS Glue and Amazon Athena. I understood precisely what they were referring to!

Finally, the ancillary advantages are excellent. You get a badge for your email signature, and at re: Invent, there is a special lounge with food and wonderful goodies for individuals who are AWS certified. While I like mixing with 60,000 of my best friends at re: Invent, it was good to relax in the AWS Certified Lounge!