Which Cloud Certification to go for

sajag83

Hi Guys

I want to do the cloud certification and join the cloud crowd. I wanted to know which certificastion to go for as i am confused which one to do Microsoft Azure certification, MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure certification.or Amazon AWS. I am looking something which be in demand job wise in future. As i did Mcsa in server 2003 and have worked in IT desktop support for 12 years now. So want to change my career now.

Clm

sajag83 wrote: »

Hi Guys

I want to do the cloud certification and join the cloud crowd. I wanted to know which certification to go for as I am confused which one to do Microsoft Azure certification, MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure certification. Or Amazon AWS. I am looking something which be in demand job wise in future. As I did MCSA in server 2003 and have worked in IT desktop support for 12 years now. So want to change my career now.

You have two routes to go.( disclaimer I have drunk the amazon Kool-Aid ) that being stated AWS has the market share in the cloud space and I believe will be the leader for a while. so I chose AWS CSAA to start
But you holding MCSA server and years of experience I think will get you close to MCSE Cloud easily. or you can do both AWS-CSAA is only one test and you probally will only have to take two test for MCSE. And as cloud is adopted more a lot of enterprises will stick to what they know and that Microsoft.

sajag83

thanks clm for the reply. Another question i had was i spoke to 2-3 training providers and they said I have to do Comptia Cloud+ first before i can do any of these 2 as i dont have any could experience so i cant just do AWS or Azure certification. Is it worth spending money and doing the Cloud+ certification

trojin

Cloud+ will build a solid base for other certs

cyberguypr

Training providers wants to sell you crap. You can do AWS or Azure as you wish as there are not "requirements". If you want a good foundation, Cloud+ or CCSK are good vendor neutral solutions. For foundational stuff you are certainly better on your own that paying a few thousand for a class.

Clm

cyberguypr wrote: »

Training provides wants to sell you crap. You can do AWS or Azure as you wish as there are not "requirements". If you want a good foundation, Cloud+ or CCSK are good vendor neutral solutions. For fundational stuff you ar ecertianly better on your own that paying a few thousand for a class.

Cyberguypr is spot on!!

My personal advice is that you can pass the AWS Exams without the two basic exams. There is nothing wrong with taking the other exams but know you dont have to.

Im currently studying the CCSK because I'm building the resume and I have a few extra dollars to splurge. The information is rock solid so if you want to be in the cloud space definitely learn the information and read the NIST docs. but if I had any restraints I would do the AWS Architect Associate first. The exam tests you on how Amazon does cloud and you will know it well.

sajag83

I am confused still. I spoke to my brother in law on sunday. He completed AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate 2 months ago and is preparing for AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. He said AWS is the one to go for as it is the market leader and will be in the future.
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Clm

AWS is the leader I have two AWS certs will get two more next month. so you can go wrong with it but Azure is also another great choice considering you have so much windows experience

kiki162

CCSK will provide a good foundation, Cloud+ is worthless IMO, and going for MCSE 2016 is worth it. AWS is the gold standard when it comes to Cloud, and having Azure experience will also help you out. Below is the order in which I've done it.

MCSE: Cloud -> CCSK -> AWS SAA -> AWS Dev -> AWS SysOps

BTW, if you ever wonder if a certification is worth your time, look at the job market. Stuff like AWS, Cloud, Azure, DevOps, Containers, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc... are all key words to look for. Get yourself an account with either Udemy, acloudguru, or Linux Academy, as all of the above certifications can be easily obtained through these sites.

mzx380

Clm wrote: »

AWS is the leader I have two AWS certs will get two more next month. so you can go wrong with it but Azure is also another great choice considering you have so much windows experience

CLM
Would study for the AWS associate cloud provide foundation enough to learn cloud or is there value in studying for Cloud+ before reading up on AWS?

Clm

It all depends on you end goals.

I would definitely read up and watch free Cloud+ Material to learn what cloud is . The Nist cloud documents are good. And AWS is the most known cloud provider the clear leader, cheapest exams and overall worth it. so i would do AWS Architect Associate

sajag83

Hi Guys

Just to give an update i finally decided i am going to go for AWS then do Azure certification. AWS is the market leader at the moment so i think it will be easier to get the experience once i finish the certification.

sajag83

Hi Guys

Change of plans I am changing jobs and the company i am going to start with are using Microsoft Azure as their cloud technology so will go with Azure as opposed to AWS. As the interviewer was really keen on my plans on Azure certification.

duta74

sajag83 wrote: »

Hi Guys

Change of plans I am changing jobs and the company i am going to start with are using Microsoft Azure as their cloud technology so will go with Azure as opposed to AWS. As the interviewer was really keen on my plans on Azure certification.

You can look at Free Azure trainings from Pluralsight via Microsoft:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/training/learning-paths/azure-administrator/

JemimahR

Hai, Present there many cloud computing courses like sales force, AWS, Azure solutions Architect etc and many others are there. but my suggestion is to go for MS Azure solutions architect because the course and certification are by provided by the Microsoft so it will be a benefit to your resume. And passing for this certification is not a big deal just concrete on the class little bit of effort required for more details go to this link

drakhan2002

If you want to stand out from the pack, consider the CSA CCSK or the ISC(2) CCSP. These are Cloud security certifications (granted, they are advanced certs). The CCSK has a whole body of knowledge available for free download from their website. If you can master the 152 pages contained within, it will change your career.

LeBroke

Been working in the cloud for probably 4 years at this point.  Currently a cloud architect in all but name (official title is Senior SRE).  Never heard of CCSK until I decided to checkout this subforum and saw everyone talking about it.

Checked it out, IDK, to me looks like pretty useless management legalese that doesn't actually teach you anything about the cloud.

Companies want to hire engineers who can do things, not people who know the difference between metastructure or applistructure or can remember factoids from NIST (another framework that's woefully obsolete for anything cloud related unless you work with gov't/defense/energy/manufacturing in which case you have to abide by the requirements).

Cloud is also more or less indistinguishable from DevOps and SRE for now (at least the good jobs, not for people migrating their Exchange server to O365).

You want a better plan:

* Pick up infrastructure as code.  Terraform is the undisputed market leader.
* To understand what to do with Terraform, you need to understand a single platform first.  AWS or Azure are both good choices.  AWS has much better support for code-based management for now, so I'd choose AWS CSA and then SysOps certs.  Doesn't even matter if you take the exam for now, but ACloudGuru course is a must if you're starting from zero.  You can skip the developer cert since it mostly deals with stuff like MQ, Kinesis, or DynamoDB which are more useful to developers than Ops/DevOps.

By itself, this won't be anywhere near enough to get a job, but will set you in the right direction.

If you actually want to work in the cloud space?

1. Learn Linux.  Yes, there's some Windows jobs but it's about 80-20%.  Linux jobs also tend to pay better.
2. You want a job as a Linux sysadmin or something along these lines if you're not a developer working in SaaS.  You can teach a Linux guy to cloud, but you can't teach a cloud guy to Linux.  Remember, AWS is just a platform to run your services in, which will almost always run inside Linux, containers, or even PaaS components like Lambda.
3. When you're working with Linux, you want to learn configuration management.  Ansible is the easiest one to get up and running with, but Chef, Puppet, and Salt are all perfectly fine to use or learn.

People don't deploy servers by hand anymore, at least not in any company that will develop your career long-term.  They run something like Terraform or CloudFormation which strings together some services, some of which are EC2 instances, which are bootstrapped from pre-built images or using configuration management when they start.