Slides from "The Who, What, Where and How of AWS Certifications & their use in the workforce"

1. The Who, What, Where and How
of AWS Certifications
& their use in the workforce
Columbus AWS Meetup - October 2018

2. Agenda
❏ Overview of AWS Certifications
❏ AWS Academy @ CSCC
❏ NSF Cloud Update

3. Presenter: Andrew May
● Senior Solutions Architect & Cloud
Solutions Lead @ Leading EDJE
● 3 years AWS experience
● www.leadingedje.com
● andrew.may@leadingedje.com
● AWS Academy instructor at CSCC
● AWS Solutions Architect (associate)
● AWS Cloud Practitioner
● AWS Developer (associate)
● AWS SysOps Administrator (associate)

4. Record of AWS experience
Image via Mario Lurig (CC BY)

5. Learn about AWS (perhaps your boss will pay?)
From AWS EBook
“Elevate your Cloud Skills”

6. Résumé
Image via FlazIngo Photos (CC BY-SA)

8. Roadmap
● Certifications expire after 2 years
○ Recertification exams are cheaper
● You may choose to take Professional Certification instead of renewing
Associate Certification
○ e.g. SysOps Admin Associate -> DevOps Engineer Professional

9. Foundational
Certifications

10. Cloud Practitioner
● Launched at re:Invent 2017
● Introductory Certification
● Recommended for anyone including technical, managerial, and sales
● Covers general cloud principals, an overview of a range of AWS
services, security, architecture, pricing and support
● Free online training at http://aws.training (~7 hours of videos)

11. Breakdown from Exam Guide

12. Sample Question
Which service can identify the user that made the API call when an Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance is terminated?
A) Amazon CloudWatch
B) AWS CloudTrail
C) AWS X-Ray
D) AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM)

13. My impressions:
● Most questions were “guess the service”
● Too much technical detail for most non-technical roles
● Useful for those working alongside technical staff (e.g. project
managers)
● Introduction to AWS for those with no AWS background
● Free training is a mixed bag

14. Associate
Certifications

15. Developer (Associate)
● Recommended to have 1+ years of AWS experience
● Updated in 2018, content refreshed with significant focus on
Serverless and DevOps
● Focus on security
● Requires knowledge of SDKs and APIs

16. Breakdown from Exam Guide

17. Sample Question
Your web application reads an item from your DynamoDB table, changes an attribute, and then writes the
item back to the table. You need to ensure that one process doesn't overwrite a simultaneous change from
another process.
How can you ensure concurrency?
A) Implement optimistic concurrency by using a conditional write
B) Implement pessimistic concurrency by using a conditional write
C) Implement optimistic concurrency by locking the item upon read
D) Implement pessimistic concurrency by locking the item upon read

18. My impressions:
(from previous version of exam)
● Most questions are about the details of a specific service
● Know how to calculate DynamoDB read/write capacity units usage
● Know how to optimize S3 keys for performance (outdated)
● New exam has much more focus on Serverless technologies:
Lambda, API Gateway

19. Solutions Architect (Associate)
● Recommended to have 1+ years of AWS experience
● Updated in 2018
● Covers wider range of services
● More focus on combining services, architectural issues (e.g. VPC
design), security and migration

20. Breakdowns from Exam Guide

21. Sample Question
A web application allows customers to upload orders to an S3 bucket. The resulting Amazon S3 events
trigger a Lambda function that inserts a message to an SQS queue. A single EC2 instance reads
messages from the queue, processes them, and stores them in an DynamoDB table partitioned by unique
order ID. Next month traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 10 and a Solutions Architect is reviewing
the architecture for possible scaling problems.
Which component is MOST likely to need re-architecting to be able to scale to accommodate the
new traffic?
A) Lambda function
B) SQS queue
C) EC2 instance
D) DynamoDB table

22. My impressions:
(from previous version of exam)
● Expects a deeper level of understanding about how AWS services work
● Know how to design a VPC
● Wrong answers in questions are harder to spot (especially when you
have to pick multiple)
● Exam has been updated to cover newer services like DynamoDB DAX,
SQS FIFO, EFS

23. SysOps Administrator
● Recommended to have 1+ years of AWS experience
● Updated in 2018, but not very obvious what has changed
● Operational focus:
○ Deployment, configuration, monitoring and security
● Choose between different options for price/performance
○ Understand different EC2 instance types
○ IOPS limits and calculations

24. Breakdown from Exam Guide

25. Example Question
You have been tasked with identifying an appropriate storage solution for a NoSQL database that requires
random I/O reads of greater than 100,000 4kB IOPS.
Which EC2 option will meet this requirement?
A) EBS provisioned IOPS
B) SSD instance store
C) EBS optimized instances
D) High Storage instance configured in RAID 10

26. My impressions:
(from previous version of exam)
● Most difficult of the Associate Certifications
● Need to understand EBS (IOPS, Snapshots)
● Surprising number of questions about Billing
● Some obscure questions that weren’t covered in the training I took
○ E.g. restricting access from a VPC to a single bucket using
S3 VPC Endpoint, Bucket Policy and VPC Endpoint policy

27. Professional
Certifications

28. Solutions Architect (Professional)
● 2+ years experience & Solutions Architect (Associate)
● Requires deeper understanding of AWS services and architecture
● Questions and answers are more complex
● Probably the most difficult Certification to obtain
● New Beta version of exam currently available

29. Breakdown from Exam Guide

31. DevOps Engineer (Professional)
● 2+ years of experience & either Developer (Associate) or SysOps
Engineer (Associate) certifications
● Focus on Automation and Continuous Delivery using AWS tools:
○ CloudFormation, ElasticBeanstalk, OpsWorks, CodeDeploy, Data
Pipeline
● Not yet updated to cover Lambda/ECS/CodePipeline/CodeBuild
● New Beta version of exam currently available

32. Breakdown from Exam Guide

34. Specialty
Certifications

35. Advanced Networking Specialty
● Recommended to have 5 years of Networking experience
● Focus on Hybrid Networks for Enterprises
● Design Networks to support required performance and security
○ E.g. how many Direct Connect links do you need?

36. Big Data Specialty
● Recommended to have 5 years of Data Analytics experience
● Domains:
○ Collection, Storage, Processing, Analysis, Visualization, Security
● Services:
○ S3, Redshift, Kinesis, Data Pipeline, EMR, QuickSight

37. Security Specialty
● Key Areas:
○ Networking (Security Groups/NACLs)
○ Encryption (KMS, CloudHSM)
○ Audit (CloudTrail)
○ Denial of Service, Intrusion Detection

38. Preparing for
Exams

39. Explore AWS
● Pick a service in the AWS Console you’ve never used and try it out
● Check pricing page - there may be a free tier
○ Some services have temporary free tiers, some are permanent
● Remember to shutdown/delete everything when you’re done
● Monitor your costs before you get a bill

40. Read Documentation
● AWS Developer Documentation
○ Often contains Tutorials that you can try out
● FAQs for individual services
● AWS Whitepapers cover a lot of different use cases
○ Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices
● AWS Blogs and Release Notes email cover new services and changes to
existing service

41. Books
Published Oct 2016 Published Oct 2017 Published March 2018

42. Training
● AWS Academy
● Classroom (in-person or virtual) training course available
○ Content determined by AWS, provided by partners, includes labs
● Free AWS Courses on edX
● Online Courses (e.g. A Cloud Guru)
○ Certification specific and more general technology courses
○ Exercises (using your own AWS Account)
● Quiklabs - hands on training using provided AWS account

43. Practice Exams
● Register the same was as for Certification
Exams
● 20 questions for $20
● Same format and software as real exams
● Instant pass/fail result, email with % for
different domains
Practice Test results:
Overall Score: 80%
Topic Level Scoring:
1.0 Monitoring and Metrics: 66%
2.0 High Availability: 66%
3.0 Analysis: 100%
4.0 Deployment and Provisioning: 100%
5.0 Data Management: 100%
6.0 Security: 100%
7.0 Networking: 33%

44. Taking the Exams

45. Registering
● Create AWS Training account and from there select “Certifications”
○ This will create a linked certification account
○ Can use existing Amazon account
● Select Certification, Language, Location and Month and schedule exam
● Multiple locations in larger cities
● Practitioner: $100, Associate: $150, Professional: $300
(Beta exams are 50% off)

46. Test Centers
● Run by PSI
● Lots of different tests being taken in same facility
○ You will probably be the only person taking an AWS certification
● Empty everything from your pockets
○ Limited storage for valuables

47. The Test
● Make sure you’re taking the right test
● Accept NDA!
● Read questions carefully, you have plenty of time
○ Questions can be marked for later and gone back to
○ Timer in top right
● Questionnaire at end
● Pass/fail result immediately, email soon after

48. Benefits

49. From Certification Portal
● These take a few days to become available
● Certification Certificate
● Digital Badge
● Generate a public Transcript to share your Certification(s)
● Practice Exam Credit (not Practitioner)
● Access to AWS Certified Store

50. Questions:
I’ll be available after all the
presentations are completed