Written by 2024-06-25

How I became AWS Cloud Practitioner

AWS . Certification Article

Today I have passed AWS Cloud Practitioner Certificate exam. You may wonder – why did I choose foundational certification? There is much more to this story, so if I have caught your attention – keep on reading.

Senior dev revisited

My experience with IT certification is going back… long back. It was on my first blog, where I have shared my learning process for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam (anyone remember that?). Recently, due to changes in my career, I have decided to refresh the basics with SeniorDevRevamp project. At the very beginning I have taken a detailed look at my knowledge and experience, trying to figure out what am I missing, when it comes to recent IT world’s developments. It occured to me, that what I lack actually, is more broad view of the tools that I am using. Ok, fine, AWS and the cloud concepts are part of my everyday work. However, it was mere usage of the magical sword, rather than being an accomplished wizard (yes Gandalf, I am looking at you). Everyone knows what S3 is, how EC2 has families, and that you can use SDK to access every AWS service that is there. Have you heard about partitions in AWS*? Or maybe about real, physical internet connection between on-prem and AWS? I definately did not. It is not that lack of that knowledge hurt my everyday performance. But this feeling of something lacking – not the most pleasant one. Impostor syndrome kicking hard (as usual).

What did you learn today?

Therefore, I have decided to start small. For some time I was resting. Hanged out-of-work IT activities, in order to get some fresher perspective and just to enjoy my free time. Unfortunately – unused muscle has a tendency to shrink, and the same applies to our learning capabilities. The topic deserves its own blog post, but to keep things short here – I just needed to reboot learning side of my brain. I came to realize, that trying to shoot right for the moon would result in a failure. That is the main reason, why I started with the foundational exam. I was pretty sure, that the total amount of knowledge won’t be a problem. From two weeks perspective – I can tell that I was right. Despite assembling quite huge ANKI flashcard deck, the difficulty and scope wasn’t overwheliming. After a couple of warm-up days, using flashcards became very natural (again!), and part of my daily routine. Spaced repetition, and staying in the sweet-spot for learning, is the best approach to learning in the long term.

Enough talk, show me te specs!

What have I used for learning? Well, my path was pretty streightforward. I concentrated only on the freely available materials. There will be time to get access to hands-on excersises, labs and mock exams. However, for the AWS Cloud Practitioner, I did not go that far. Below you can find a full list of sources I have used.

All the knowledge was assembled by me in the separate ANKI flashcard deck. Its base was formed by freely available ANKI deck, but I have extended it tremendously, with a lot of additional information. I could argue, that mastering this deck should be enough for passing.

Tips and more

I am writing this post with a fresh eyes – I passed the exam not even three hours ago. When it comes to the exam (except for some technical troubles at the exam centre), everything went quite smoothly. The only tip that I can share here, is to take your time with the questions, and what is more – try to learn (even if it is only the name and short description) as much AWS services as possible. Sometimes the questions were simple, but only if you knew what are the specific services doing. There is way more to AWS than just S3 and EC2, believe me 😉

What now? Possibly next certification that I am going to pursue will be AWS Certified Developer Associate. As usual – everything will be documented here, so please, stay tuned 😉

 

 

* Partitions are groups of regions. At the time of writing there are three – US-GOV, China and the rest of the world. The solution to physically “lay a cable” between your data center and AWS one is called AWS Direct Connect.

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