NikCreate

After years of wondering if I’d ever go through the arduous task of achieving every single AWS certification to find out if Amazon’s Gold Jacket was a real thing, a miracle occurred. Amazon announced that you could now renew certain certifications through their training platform SkillBuilder rather than having to study for and sit through the exams. I needed to renew or lose my Solutions Architect Professional by July 18th and the DevOps Engineer Professional soon after. Amazon took mercy on us on June 23rd.

Still, the news dropped right as I was starting to prepare to renew the Solutions Architect Professional. And now, the task of preparing for two exams were expected to be a large focus for a better part of a month were no longer needed. And instead of simply doing the labs on SkillBuilder and being done with it, I decided to go for the Golden Jacket. I don’t know when I first learned about it. Probably sometime around 2021-2022. In 2020, I achieved my goal of getting the 3 Associate and 2 Professional level certifications available at the time. Sometime, before renewal, I became aware that people were getting a Gold Jacket for completing all certifications. Still, the first time around, I was tired from studying and had no desire to continue to take exams when I felt I already had the highest certification.

Unfortunately, when I retook the Solutions Architect Professional in 2023, my Solutions Architect Associate had already expired meaning it didn’t get renewed. At this point, the Gold Jacket was in my mind and there was some thought of renewing it and continuing, but after renewing the DevOps Engineer Professional a few weeks later, I had no desire to study for a certification test and wanted to shift my focus to working on side projects, using ChatGPT.

2026 came and I was ready for the same grind. The tests were challenging and I felt would always tire me out. Besides, additional certs meant additional renewals. I’d already let my Google Cloud Platform certifications expire since I really didn’t work with it much and it didn’t seem worth having the extra retakes in addition to AWS. But this announcement would be just the push I needed. I was mentally ready to study and prepare for certification exams and just found out I wouldn’t have to. The Gold Jacket has remained somewhere in my mind and popped up whenever I’d think about AWS certifications as something I wanted but thought I’d never do.

And so, the grind began. My June 2026 starting point included the following certifications

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate
• AWS Certified SysOps Engineer – Associate
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional

Leaving me needing to me missing the following

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
• AWS Certified AI Practitioner
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate
• AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate
• AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate
• AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional
• AWS Certified Security – Specialty

I would also need to renew the certifications that I currently had by renewing the 2 Professional ones via SkillBuilder, which honestly took a couple weeks of study for each down to a matter of hours.

Two things, technically CloudOps is the replacement for SysOps. The name changed and the certification is different so I decided to take this one anyway to make sure I had all available and not retired certifications by the time I was done. There is one other thing missing from that certification list which I will get to later.

Now onto the certifications themselves. My reviews are coming from someone who had the Solutions Architect Professional and DevOps Engineer Professional already, which I found to be rather difficult and require a lot of study both times I took them. As such, I found a number of exams I didn’t really have to study for as what I needed for those also covered some of the lower level exams. Honestly, which ones I needed more study for versus which ones I’d pass the practice exam first try surprised me. In addition to it being needed for renewals, SkillBuilder usually offers 2 full practice exams as well as an additional 20 question practice set and many additional questions in it’s certification courses and should probably be anyone’s go to resource when studying for tests.

The Foundational Certifications

Unsurprisingly, these were instant passes. This is a lower level of certifications that didn’t exist when I started taking AWS certifications. Admittedly, I actually failed my first time taking an Associate Exam back in 2017, before starting my first job, so maybe I would have appreciated having an easier option to start with. Still, having done the Professional exams, I took them in the same week in way under the time allotted, prompting an “holy crap, you’re done already?” when I walked out of the testing center after 20 minutes of the AI Practitioner exam. Cloud Practitioner felt easily doable just knowing the basics of which kind of AWS service does what on the broadest level while a lot of AI Practitioners questions were clear based just from using Generative AI and LLMs. While this was expected, I didn’t expect my toughest challenges this time around to come from the next level up.

The Associate Certifications

Solutions Architect Professional proved another easy pass and included the same general AWS knowledge I’ve come to expect. CloudOps was slightly more involved, but ultimately, have to pass the Professionals twice previously made enough of this familiar that these were easy enough passes. On it’s own, CloudOps may be the most difficult, but I don’t think I’m alone in what gave me a challenge here.

The Data Engineer Associate and Machine Learning Engineer Associate degrees both required me to spend extra time with the course material and questions and went into specifics beyond what was covered by my previous path. By the time I was done, I felt that I’d learned a lot about AWS’s data services and transformation pipelines than I’d known before. Data Engineer felt AWS specific, while Machine Learning Engineer was tough but felt like I was being quizzed on Machine Learning prior to Generative AI, answering questions on different kinds of problems, models and how to score them. Of course, there were plenty of AWS service questions as well, but largely the material for these two exams isn’t something that will be picked up simply by doing the other Associates or Professional exams and I suspect many will need to study more here like I did.

The Specialty Certification

With that, there were 2 more certifications to go. The first one was the Security Specialty exam. Honestly, this one I was very curious about as I’d never done a Specialty certification and this seemed like it could be an in depth topic. To my surprise, I immediately passed SkillBuilder’s practice test and I feel like most of what you’re asked about, is already covered in studying for the professional exams. This may be a more difficult exam, otherwise, but I found it on par with the Solutions Architecture Associate based on what I was coming in with. A combination of knowledge of different services and thinking about security principles made this probably the biggest difference between expectation and reality.

The Professional Certification

Finally, there was one left. The Generative AI Developer Professional. I’m not sure exactly how to rank this one. Based on the foundational and new topic, part of me wondered if this one was going to be an easy one for anyone who is at all familiar with LLMs. This did end up being a bit more in depth requiring learning about AWS service which work with LLMs, lots of details about Amazon Bedrock and a good amount of questions about LLMs that weren’t specific to AWS. It was harder than I thought it might be due to the current hype, but at the same time, this was another one where I was passed the practice test first try, leading to an interesting finish.

Takeaways

If I had to rank the exams and their difficultly for me, I’d rank them from hardest to easiest as follows.

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
• AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate
• AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate
• AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional
• AWS Certified Security – Specialty
• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate
• AWS Certified Developer – Associate
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
• AWS Certified AI Practitioner

Ultimately, in the span of a month and a half, I would complete 8 AWS certifications, renew another 4 via SkillBuilder and…

The final challenge

So, there was one more certification when I started. My last step was to wait a couple of weeks for AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty to retire on August 26th. I debated on going for it, but ultimately it would be something that I would have no way of renewing and I was again tired after my 8 certification tests plus renewal. So I decided to wait.

On August 27th, once I had conquered myself and learned the art of my patience, I started figuring out how I’d obtain the jacket. The company I work for at the time of this article is an AWS Partner, which is often cited in other blogs as one way to receive the Gold Jacket, however I’ve seen other blogs mentioning community advocates who can be reached out to assist.

The path I took here was to reach out to the AWS team members associated with my company and tell them that I’d achieved all AWS certifications and wanted a Gold Jacket. Then I crossed my fingers and hoped that I wouldn’t hear back that it wasn’t an official thing and that I was out of luck. Instead, they verified my certifications and helped me to order one. The following week, the Gold Jacket arrived.

I do like this little card it comes with.

If this isn’t practitioning AI, I don’t know what is…

I hope this always remains the article of clothing that required the most spectacular achievement for me to obtain, but time will tell.