Cloud Academy has three courses to help you achieve the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification. On top of that, we’ve also released some great new content to prepare for all AWS certifications, visit Cloud Academy’s AWS library for the latest.
As you probably already know, Amazon offers a set of certifications for its Amazon Web Services products. They currently feature three different paths for Solutions Architects, Developers and SysOps Administrators, and all of them for the basic level of certification, which Amazon calls “Associate Level”.
AWS also offers professional certification for Solutions Architects and DevOps Engineers with the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional” and the “AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional” exams. The price for sitting a Professional certification exam is 300$ . The professional level exams are 3 hours. Either is a valuable certification for anyone’s resume.
I think you should really consider getting ready for these exams and leveraging the certification to your advantage. Most candidates won’t have this area certified by AWS and gaining this should help you advance your career in the Cloud industry. Earning the Associate Level Certification is mandatory to access the Professional Level.
Getting ready to it
First things first: prepare for the Associate Level and complete that certification. This is mandatory to access the Professional Level. You will need basic knowledge of AWS products to get over there. “Earning an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level demonstrates you have the ability to identify and define requirements for an AWS-based application, as well as follow best practices for building secure and reliable applications on the AWS platform.”, Amazon says. The exam blueprint outlines that 60% of exam questions are likely to be on how to design highly available, cost-efficient, fault tolerant, scalable systems so understanding how to design solutions on AWS will be a core focus. Questions may span from basic services like VPC, EC2, S3, Route53, RDS, to more specialized services such as CloudFront and Simple Queue Service. CloudCareer, our exclusive product for AWS Certifications, might well come in handy for this purpose: we’ll talk a little bit more about it later. It is included with all our plans, Growth or PRO, and actually, you can start using it without your credit card, with a 7-day free trial.
Things get harder with the Professional Level certification, obviously. Amazon recommends 2 years of hands-on AWS experience, and the exam blueprint goes into full details. .Not only you will be asked about advanced usage of Amazon AWS products, but also advanced skills in networking and IT, like multi-tier applications, large-scale distributed systems architectures, loose coupling, and stateless systems will be an argument for the certification. As you easily understand, all in all, the exam is rather thorough and comprehensive and will represent quite a challenge for many of those who have the Associate Level certification already.
CloudCareer to prepare for all the AWS Certifications
When the time comes to do some serious preparation for your exam, you need a platform that will help you to simulate it and will let you immerse into the feelings of the exam itself. A platform that helps you assess your knowledge in the very same topics you need to master to get over the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Certification and that let you learn about the things your mind is not that clear about. In one word: CloudCareer, a product included in all the CloudAcademy’s plan, Basic or Pro, and specifically designed to prepare for AWS Certifications.
CloudCareer helps you study and test your cloud skills, and has paths for all the AWS Certifications now available from Amazon. It’s available in two versions, the basic version for those who are already experienced and only need a final verification with a good review of content, and the pro version for people with limited experience who want to learn about AWS from the ground up. our AWS Certifications tool can really be your perfect companion along the path of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Certification, check it out on its dedicated page.
UPDATE: this article has been updated on May 21st, 2016. CloudAcademy.com has AWS Certifications preparation paths for all the available certifications. You can start a free trial to try it.
