Some help with AWS,

dony2015

I am an experience IT professional with substantial years of experience behind me. I am in a delinma here with a decision. I have some budget now for training on AWS, the problem is, I don't know what route to take. I am a contractor though. I have some money to train for AWS but, I need to know where I will get ROI back.
I am looking at option 1: AWS Devops, Sysops, Solution Arch, all Associate level.
Also looking at option 2: Solution Arch Associate followed by Solution Arch prof. Which of the 2 options is likely to get me a better return on investiment as a contractor? I am based in London and there is a lot of contract AWS jobs around.

cochi78

Hi there,

AWS instructor and consultant here. Having a SolA Professional will most probably yield more recognition than the three associates. I know of people who passed all associates on the same day, that's not too much of a challenge if you're a good learner. And there's enough mid-twenties in that league around

The Solution Architect Professional on the other hand is really hard to achieve, it's an exam which is exhausting and in my case I'd say the two AWS Professionals were the most challenging of my 40 exams so far. It's not easy to achieve, you should plan 3-4 weeks full time studies for it after attending the official training. In addition you should get the usual acloud.guru prep courses and the Whizlabs practice exams. Preparation for that includes all service FAQs and most whitepapers. Stay away from the official practice exams on aws.training - and go for the "old" SolA associate exam, as 3rd party preparation materials out there mostly are not yet updated for the new edition.

If you're a good learner, you can get from zero to Pro within 6-8 weeks if you allot enough preparation time and use the right tools.

I will be in London myself as the European AWS instructors meet up there Monday to Wednesday

dony2015

Thanks for your valuable info, really appreciate it. I will do the training from a reputable training place. I have already done the Solution architect Associate on my own and narrowly failed the exam due to reasonable preparation time.

cochi78

If you have time for it, try to find out if your instructor is a "yesterday Salesforce, today AWS" trainer-only type or a consultant who does trainings as well. Of course I am biased being the latter, but while the first type probably is (much) better at entertaining and didactics, the second can provide actual use cases/experiences and is more on top of AWS news.

As you probably know, stuff changes daily and I always feel that I'd have to change or insert stuff into the official materials when an Advanced Architecting training is coming up (that's the one best aligned to the SolA Pro exam). Not allowed to do that though, so the audio track has to contain those infos. Get those pens, guys

Crossing my fingers, would love to hear an update.

scasc

Just seen this thread. Just passed my solution architect associate and want to attempt the security speciality cert as my work is cloud security related. Is this as reputable as the architect pro? I’ve seen security is only covered 20% in the pro so refraining from it.

thanks in advance

paul78

@OP - the training materials are pretty inexpensive - you could just do all of them. If you look on Udemy - the ACloudGuru courses run about $10 per course. And they are pretty good. Good luck.

cochi78

Hi there,

the Security Specialty is too new to be really recognized so far. That being said, I think it's a brilliant exam because it not only covers the AWS security mechanics (specifics on KMS, debugging IAM policies and bucket policies) but also operational procedures. Things like "You got a hacked instance, what do you do first" or "How can you mitigate a dDoS with the following characteristics". I can only recommend going for that one, as it's recognition will come with time anyway.

Prep materials, like usual, acloud guru and whizlabs plus service FAQs and whitepapers. I'd really recommend basic knowledge on operations, but you seem to have that covered

scasc

cochi78 wrote: »

Hi there,

the Security Specialty is too new to be really recognized so far. That being said, I think it's a brilliant exam because it not only covers the AWS security mechanics (specifics on KMS, debugging IAM policies and bucket policies) but also operational procedures. Things like "You got a hacked instance, what do you do first" or "How can you mitigate a dDoS with the following characteristics". I can only recommend going for that one, as it's recognition will come with time anyway.

Prep materials, like usual, acloud guru and whizlabs plus service FAQs and whitepapers. I'd really recommend basic knowledge on operations, but you seem to have that covered

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Fantastic - many thanks for the advice. Going for the 3 days security ops in aws later this year - that should hopefully put me in good stead.