My Road to AWS Cloud Practitioner Certificate
Driven by the ever increasing use of cloud resources in general and on-premises systems migrating to the cloud in my present company, I started exploring ways of getting an extensive picture of the resources that AWS offers, and there are a lot! To do this, I decided to pursue the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner path. In this article, I would like to highlight the resources and approaches I used to prepare for the exam.
Rationale..
Apart from data engineering on the cloud starting to take front and center in the data-tech world, I being a data scientist by trade, always had a curiosity regarding how to not only set up my projects/codes for re-usability but also to be scaled to the cloud. And if there is a conversation regarding cloud usage/deployment, questions involving computational/storage requirements, security and cost effectiveness immediately come up. Accordingly, coming up with well-rounded arguments and rationales regarding which cloud based services suits our needs- I find that to be a very relevant skill to possess.
Resources..
To understand and develop an intuition about the services that is examined in this certificate, the most useful ally has to be the AWS Free Tier which allows for up to 1 year of usage of primary services from the day of signing-up. Though there are some billings involved with implementing some of the services, in major part, experimenting with compute, storage, networking and cost explorations can easily be done while using the Free Tier in AWS.
In terms of courses, the first would be to going over the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course that can be found in (after logging in):
https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/
To get hands-on practice as well as doing some experimentations with the services, I found it best to search the AWS documentation website (this also helps get used to looking solutions for very specific problems) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/, as well as following the plethora of videos on YouTube which guide a viewer with step-by-step follow along. Amongst these, the most comprehensive one has to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTamWNgDKc
In terms of courses, I really didn’t need to subscribe to any specific courses as the resources available freely sufficed.
Exam Experience..
As this was my first AWS exam experience, I didn’t really go in with any idea of what to expect, but the first feeling I got after the exam was that this exam aims at not just testing ones knowledge, but also wants to test us to the business level questions we are likely to experience at our jobs. Hence, I found the exam experience very enriching, unbiased and real-world based.
The part which I found to be the most confusing (and many people have mentioned this across the web) was that AWS has a lot of services with similar names and and getting them mixed up can lead to completely different solutions to the questions asked. Hence, being really comfortable with the acronyms and the knowing their differences would be of a lot of help.
Final Words..
In todays world, especially if one is involved with data and machine learning, some level of cloud training has become essential. Between AWS, GCP and MS Azure, one would rarely find any company which doesn’t use the services of these CSPs. So, if exploring and developing an understanding of the cloud is your aim, then this certification certainly is a great place to start.
I prepared some slides, just for my own reference (Parts 1 and 2):
