NikCreate

A month ago, I completed my goal of attaining all AWS Associate and Professional level certifications. Despite initially viewing myself as more of a JavaScript and Python program, throughout my career, I’ve ended up deeper and deeper in the AWS rabbit hole, slowly gaining certifications until this year when I took the Solutions Architect and DevOps Professional certifications. Despite working toward this goal since before I started my first tech job, somehow this is my first time writing about anything AWS related. It doesn’t seem too long ago when I was building web apps at Hack Reactor and figuring out how to deploy a server and data base to EC2, having previously deployed to Digital Ocean and Heroku, I encouraged the team to try out an AWS deployment since I had learned at least enough to know that you could run a web server on an EC2 instance, having tried it previously thinking I might be able to host a travel blog on it. We knew then that AWS had a lot more features just waiting to be used, but it would still be a while before I’d venture beyond EC2.

Beginning my initial job hunt with some knowledge of how AWS’s importance, I attempted my first AWS certification as an attempt at a resume boost. At this time, there were only the Associate and Professional level certifications leading me to study for the Solutions Architect Associate. My study plan involved going through an A Cloud Guru course on Udemy at the time, reading over the official study guide and attempting a couple practice tests. All in all, this was probably a one to two week process cumulating in failing my first AWS certification test and feeling bummed out. I started work soon after with part of my job being C# and part being testing out how processes could work in AWS. Despite attempting an AWS certification and having minimal knowledge of what each service did, this was my first time trying out some of them out, mainly API Gateway and Lambda and using them to create callable standalone services. Additionally, I’d get some experience working with container and database services and a small project with EMR. Before, the extent of my practical AWS knowledge was how to deploy a web app on EC2, but now I was getting daily experience working with the platform and learning about various companies’ use cases through local Meetup groups and my first Global Summit in New York City. It was exciting seeing talks showing exciting Machine Learning processes and deplying large scale apps to be quickly available worldwide. Sure, I still didn’t understand most of what I was seeing but I wanted to get to a point where I better could. In addition to talks, being able to talk to AWS employees and A Cloud Guru employees along with various other companies such as Data Dog whose tee shirt I was wearing. After the event I ended up with a video game guide style, Final Fantasy-esque pamphlet showing the path to different certifications such as the new specialty certifications and new Cloud Practioner. Along with the excitement from the Summit overall, keeping that pamphlet at my desk kept encouraging me to try my hand again at getting my first certification.

Having worked with a variety of services at this point, the same materials meant a lot more to me than they had previously and I passed both the Solutions Architect and Developer Associate, which was more satisfying having previously failed. It makes sense though, since previously, all of my knowledge outside EC2 came only from courses so I was relying entirely on what I’d learned in courses. This time I had a combination of experience with different services in additional to knowledge of the other services from my studying, which made even the studying a lot more meaningful since working with a service let me better imagine how a new fact I’d learned would come in. From here, my career shifted to working more with JavaScript and Python with minimal AWS work for awhile. The next time I worked with AWS was trying out SageMaker when working through Kaggle competitions for previous blog posts, before my career shifted again to helping with an AWS migration at which point I was working with tools like Terraform and Ansible to automate deployments and now every day was completely focused around AWS. It always feels like there’s a backlog of tasks I’d been meaning to work on. Machine learning was my task for my spare time for awhile, but all the while I kept thinking it would be good to get another AWS certification and this was a clear opportunity.

This time, I was eager to attempt the Professional certifications but since it had been awhile, I started off taking the SysOps Associate which wasn’t bad given the overlap with the two tests I had previously taken. Immediately after, I started studying for the Professional certifications, going through both A Cloud Guru’s and Linux Academy’s courses along with practice tests and watching various ReInvent talks of services I was weaker on. Even with this having been the most I’d studied, I tried and failed with likely one or two questions away from passing. From here, I doubled down on studying and found Jayendra Patil’s blog to be a great resource for summaries of different services at the recommendation of a coworker. I scheduled the test for two weeks from my failure and passed with a much higher score. I started studying for the DevOps Professional to get the last certification that existed when I started in AWS. The pandemic hit right after, beginning a slow six month long, on and off study practice before I eventually just wanted to get it over with and passed first time, feeling easier potentially due to already having taken a Professional certification or because of being more focused on services which I was working with, having a decent amount of experience building CI/CD pipelines in AWS at this point.

Trying to watch an AWS tutorial at the very beggining of learning to code, only having experience with basic coding language tutorials from Codecademy and TeamTreehouse, I had very little knowledge of web apps and AWS meant very little to me. After seeing more of its use cases after having worked on a couple apps and gaining more knowledge over the years, attaining certifications that seemed far off became closer to, and soon enough, reality. Even now I still have many services I want to gain more experience with and can see the difference when getting a question about one of the serivces I work with compared to one I’ve only learned about through studying. Even with services I’ve worked with such as DynamoDB, RDS, and RedShift in some capacity throughout the years, a lot of my knowledge only comes from studying, such as calculating throughputs or mitigating against different errors. With a service, I’ve used though, the studying seems to gain more meaning

While I’m glad to have reached this goal, I’ve got a long way until I’m an AWS expert. Additionally, there’s been something missing with my process of test taking and the feeling I get from attaining a certification as opposed to completing a story in a sprint or completing a project such as Kaggle competition or seeing code working. When I approach any future certifications, I’m hoping I can work additional projects into preparing for the tests themselves. For instance, when approaching the Machine Learning specialty, trying out and blogging about algorithms which may show up on the test but that I don’t have experience with. Or doing a deep dive into the different database offerings and a project or blog post comparing them, when approaching the Database specialization. For 2020, it was good to spend a lot of time studying and accomplishing goals I’ve had for awhile, but for 2021, I’ll aim to use this blog to solidify my learning more with projects and artices and incorporating AWS more into my side projects.