Anyone AWS certified ?

Like the title says, I'd like to know if anyone is willing to share experiences with the Amazon web services certification.

I've been working with AWS for the first time ever since a few weeks back. I've created some stuff and I'm really liking it, as it has a little of everything, networking/cloud/virtualization being what has kept me on the project as these are the types of technologies I'd like to get more experience on.

It's a startup with funds currently backed by my boss personally, so I have free reign to create things outside the free tier which is very cool as that can be a little limiting.

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--chris--

This is my "fun" cert. As I get free time outside of school & ITIL reading I have been watching the Udemy course on this. If you can get your boss to pay for it, Id say its a very worthwhile course. If not, wait for Udemy to offer 70% off again and pick it up then.

I make it sound like its a rip off at its normal price, this course is not...I am just cheap.

pram

I have the Solutions Architect cert (the only one that exists right now afaik) and it's not a bad test, but it's not great. It's pretty much a standard multiple choice vocabulary test. It's definitely worth it if you'll be using AWS though imo, I did learn a few things digging through the documentation.

Ismaeljrp

Cool. I'm learning a lot of new things, but more because I'm in charge of the entire network/system/cloud deployment. It's a huge undertaking, that requires linux admin skills (which I'm comepletely new to) in addition to the basic networking I already have. I'm new to IT as a professional in general, so figuring out the non-technical stuff is a really nice experience for me right now as well.

pram

They put you in charge of something you don't know anything about?

Ismaeljrp

It's a startup, it's only in testing phases, with no time constraints and no investors yet so they needed someone willing to accept the role without expectations of immediate ROI. You can call it more of an internship. It's a learning process for all of us involved. It's a project right now, not really a full time job.

The details were laid out very well between us, and I always made sure they were aware of my skillset. I've learned and proven a lot in a couple of weeks already successfully implementing some things, with absolute minimum costs. Nothing is in production yet

The Technomancer

pram wrote: »

They put you in charge of something you don't know anything about?

I've made a career out of this. Becoming an "instant expert" is a valuable, marketable skill.

pram

I encountered a lot of mature environments that were seemingly implemented by 'instant experts' when I worked at an MSP. Bad decisions are very resilient, and they compound over time almost pathologically.

Amazon environments are particularly susceptible to poor design. If you don't bake scalability and fault tolerance in at the start it can be difficult to add later. I speak from experience as I am currently managing an environment that has a design intended for physical servers, it's very cargo cult.

Ismaeljrp

You are very right pram, those are good points and it is something I'm taking the time to learn and really understand. Sometimes my boss wants things done a little quicker, but I'm the type that I don't like to do things I don't feel I understand yet. Scalability and fault tolerance is big. Security as well, knowing what resources you need and how to alocate them and auto-scale is are very important topics that I'm still looking into. I have time. That's the plus side.

Corndork2

What about Rackspace? Do you have to go AWS? Rackspacehas a basic cert for free as well. I personally have had really good experiences with Rackspace, though I use Amazon Glacier for long term storage