How you can start your AWS Certifications journey for free ๐Ÿ“š

How you can start your AWS Certifications journey for free ๐Ÿ“š

ยท

4 min read

First of all, I would like say a huge thanks to @andrewbrown for providing his courses and resources to the Cloud community.

(โš  You would still have to pay for the certification fee.)

Where should you start? ๐Ÿคฉ

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner So the Cloud Practitioner is the fundamental and entry-level certificate for AWS, it covers the principles of cloud computing and introduction to the fleet of cloud services AWS provides. In AWS's own words "The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner examination is intended for individuals who have the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively demonstrate an overall understanding of the AWS Cloud, independent of specific technical roles addressed by other AWS Certifications." Also, here is the official exam guide There are some free resources, and you can totally rely on them.

What's Next? ๐Ÿค”

Now you can advance to the AWS Associate certificates! So you can with either Solutions Architect Associate or Developer Associate certificate, I personally went with Solutions Architect first. Also passing the Cloud Practitioner would give you 50% for you next exam.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect This is a bit advanced level certificate and AWS recommends to have at least 1 year of hands-on experience, you might be thinking how I am gonna get 1 year experience as beginner? Well this is where you should start building your own projects and get your hands dirty with AWS Free Tier. Wondering what all services you can play without a huge credit card bill, here you can check out what's included in Free tier. In regards to what is covered in this exam, since we already are familiar with the fundamentals of AWS architectural principles and services, in this, we will deep dive into each of the individual elements: IAM, S3, Cloudfront, Storage Gateway, Snowball, EC2, Cloudwatch, CLI, Lambda, Route 53, RDS, Dynamo DB, Redshift, ElastiCache, Aurora, VPC, SQS, SNS, Elastic Transcoder, Kinesis, API Gateway and so on.

AWS Certified Developer Associate This certificate for an intermediate-level professional who is familiar with the fundamentals of Cloud computing, and introduces you to an in-depth curriculum on developing, deploying, and maintaining applications โ€” especially Serverless ones โ€” on AWS. So basically it's for anyone who wants to learn how to build applications using AWS. In AWS's own words, "The AWS Certified Developer - Associate examination is intended for individuals who perform a development role and have one or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining an AWS-based application." You can refer to the official exam guide here For the resources :

Why you should listen to me?

Well, I went down the same path and currently I am preparing for the Azure Fundamentals Certifications, and after that, I will be continuing my AWS journey with the SysOps Associate Certification.

You can follow me on Twitter to be part of my #AWSCertified and #AzureCertfied journey.

I also highly recommend to check out these Youtube channels that Andrew listed in his article.