Of late, the trend of shifting to the Cloud is creating a lot of buzz. With the sudden advancement of digitalization, cloud storage, cloud computing, and other cloud-related technologies have gained a lot of hype. Most of today’s IT professionals are trying to make their career in Cloud services.
AWS certification is a great way to upgrade both the knowledge and the career of the one interested in Amazon Web Services like VPC (Amazon Virtual Private Cloud), IAM (Identity and Access Management), EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), and many more. These are some of the fields in which one can go for AWS certification.
In any enterprise, the motive behind launching their own certification is to provide better core AWS training materials for the candidates as per their choice. Along with this, such courses also play a vital role in a company’s own internal training path. Many companies are even tying up with other vendor certifications to launch the certification specific to their needs.
Types of AWS Certifications and How to Choose the Right One?
AWS mainly offers two types of certifications which are role-based and specialty-based certifications.
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Role-based certification categories:
- Cloud Practitioner
- Cloud Architect
- Developer roles
- Operations roles
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Specialty-based certification categories:
- Advanced technical skills in networking
- Big data and security
One of the very important decisions one has to make to understand which AWS certification training they want to take in particular depends upon the specific job role they want to get in. Choosing the correct and suitable certification for you is a very precious step that will affect your entire journey in AWS services. To land on a correct decision, you need to check your experience in the field of configuring, deploying, storage, network, managing computers, and database services in AWS. You need to choose the correct certification as per your need and circumstances.
List of Various AWS Exams
- Foundational Level AWS Certification: This exam is for Cloud Practitioners.
- Associate level AWS Certification: This exam is for Solution Architect, Developer, and SysOps administrator.
- Professional Level AWS Certification: This exam is for Solutions Architect and DevOps Engineer.
- Specialty AWS Certification: This exam is for Advanced Networking, Big Data, and security.
Insights of AWS Certification Exams
Almost both the associate level and the professional level AWS Exams focus on the basics of the AWS areas in the initial stages. Talking about the AWS Associate-level exam, it individually focuses on the tools and services compared to the professional-level exam, which focuses on multi-group AWS tools and services.
AWS Certifications in themselves are powerful enough to prove your abilities in the field and evaluate a candidate’s knowledge and skill. They even show light on hands-on experience and best practices to get into the industry. If you are already working and preparing for AWS Services, going for AWS certification can help you achieve your goals much faster. Having more than one billion users, AWS is still at the top in the list of providing choices to the public for cloud adoption.
Out of this one billion, 64% are enterprises, and 68% are SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) working on the AWS Cloud Applications. (This data is presented as per the 2018 Right Scale State of the Cloud Report.) With the continuous expanding performance both financially and in services, along with geographical expansion, indicate that there are still more plans for AWS, and we should wait for that more.
Exam Format
The format of all the levels of AWS certification, either associate, professional, or specialty, is very similar. All of them have a timed exam with multiple choice questions. The questions in these exams are highly aimed at AWS services and tools.
Time duration needed to become AWS Certified?
One can prepare for AWS certification while studying or even along with their job. AWS certification study needs around 80 hours of study in general. When you are preparing along with a full-time job or any other commitments, dedicating 80 hours to the preparation might consume up to two months. But if you are just a fresher to AWS services, you will have to spend around 120 hours that means up to three months for the preparation. To start, you can start with the fundamentals, moving to Solutions Architect Learning Path.
Conclusion
An AWS certification does not restrict you to work only for AWS Services / Amazon / or only with companies implying AWS. Instead, it opens up the entire cloud field as this certification in itself is powerful and reliable enough to authenticate your skills and candidature.