Expand Your Career Opportunities – Get Aws Certified

Do you know what is Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV)?

It’s basically “Ethernet over MPLS over GRE over IP”.

Are you impressed?

It’s easy for engineers to get engaged in the complexity of solution design. After all, it’s what they’re trained to do. But for that design to succeed, they need to begin by stepping outside of their silo and understanding what the business needs.

One must answer the following two points while preparing a solution.

1. is it solving a business problem? &
2. can it be further simplified?

These are the two fundamental advantages of working with Amazon Web Sevices. It is very scalable, easy to use, flexible and reliable service. I really mean it. I have worked on simple to complex solution architectures all my career. Either, you are only deploying a pair of firewall or building a 3-tier web architecture, it takes from 3 months to a year to go live, excluding the time required to build the Datacenter. I tried to build the replica of these different designs on AWS. Surprisingly, these complex designs can be deployed on AWS in days.

What about DR strategy, high availability, backup and restore, load balancing, DNS, WAF etc? These are just a few clicks away. Building a DR strategy and roll-out is always complicated and requires forethought. Failover, replication, DNS, global routing, load balancing etc need to be carefully planned. With AWS, you can build DR sites in no time.

And the list of services goes on from big data to IoT to serverless architecture. The full list can be found here,

https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/products/

Let’s move on to AWS Certifications. Expand your career opportunities by working with cloud provider holding more than 30% of the cloud infrastructure market.

One of the most demanding skill as per Global Knowledge’s 2017 IT Skills & Salary Survey

AWS certifications can be followed in different tracks. Details of the tracks can be found here,

https://aws.amazon.com/certification

My focus areas are solution designing and architecture so I followed the Solution Architect Associate and Professional tracks. AWS certified solution architect – Associate (SA-A) is normally the starting point which familiarizes you with different AWS services. AWS certified solution architect – Professional(SA-P) is the toughest exam in the series which tests your knowledge of designing the best fit solution for your customer using a combination of services. All questions in SA-P exam are scenario based.

If you are new to cloud technologies, I will highly recommend you to start your journey with AWS- Cloud Practioner(CP) certification. My recommended resource to prepare for CP exam,

Amazon: amazon.com/Certified-Practitioner-Complete-Training-Practice/dp/198101036X

Below are my tips to prepare for SA-A & SA-P exams,

1. AWS-White Papers: A must read before going to exam. These are very well structured and easy to read documents. I have given my recommended list of white papers at the end of this post. https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/
2. AWS-FAQ: These are important for the exam. There are many questions in the exam coming from FAQs.
3. #https://acloud.guru/: #Ryan Kroonenburg has done a great job in simplifying cloud and AWS concepts. Short videos explaining each of the exam blueprint topics. Videos can be played at 2x speed which really saves a lot of time. Acloudguru videos are great for laying your foundation but it may not be enough as the only source for study.
4. #https://qwiklabs.com/: An excellent resource for hands-on labs especially on technologies which you are not very familiar with. I used this resource to practice and familiarize my self with ALL AWS technologies. At the end of the day, my objective was not only to pass SA and SP exams but to know AWS technologies in and out. There are approximately 100 labs on AWS technologies. I did almost all of them. From IoT to Bigdata to Database Migration and ML – I tried everything. Highly recommended.
5. https://www.whizlabs.com/: These are practice questions. Really helped me in SA-P track. Once you have read about all the technologies, you need to apply them on a different type of scenarios. I could not find any other resource where AWS case studies are put together. Only SA-P has 400 scenario based questions. Each incorrect or correct option is explained. Good resource before attempting the exam.
6. #http://jayendrapatil.com/: Good summarized notes about AWS technologies. Saves time and effort to go through the white papers multiple times.

Hope this post helps you to prepare and pass AWS certifications.

Recommended list of white papers for SA-A and SA-P exams:

1. aws_cloud_adoption_framework
2. AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices
3. AWS_Disaster_Recovery
4. aws_pricing_overview
5. AWS_Security_Best_Practices
6. AWS_Well-Architected_Framework
7. aws-migration-whitepaper
8. Secure_content_delivery_with_CloudFront_whitepaper
9. Security_Storage_Services_Whitepaper
10. AWS Storage Services Whitepaper-v9
11. AWS_Building_Fault_Tolerant_Applications
12. AWS_Risk_and_Compliance_Whitepaper
13. AWS_Security_Whitepaper
14. aws-overview

Good luck.