"Everything I wish I knew about AWS Certification" with Andrew Brown (@AndrewBrown)

thanks everybody for for showing up we'll get this thing going i know there's a lot of people in a bunch of different time zones so we want to be uh cognizant of you staying up late and make sure that you get all the goodness that mr brown has in store for us without uh without staying up too late so welcome to the aws portsmouth user group now that we are in pandemic times it feels weird saying that because we have a lot of different attendees from all over the world our presenter tonight is in canada yeah oh yeah yeah yep and uh and we've got we've got people as far away as uh oh india awesome i like i love the web um so uh welcome welcome folks uh we're gonna we're gonna get right to it um if you want to uh join join us on our slag channel if you go to awspug.org you can follow us on twitter at aws pug and our slack channel is awspug.slack.com all of that can be found through the website through awsblog.org links to the slack and all of the goodness and information we are in the process of updating the website but the links all still do work so you can find us there quick shout out to our sponsors thank you so much for um giving us um in pre-pandemic times uh space beer money and pizza in post-dynamic times funds to keep keep the zoom running and uh keep the lights on so thanks to liberty mutual uh sea glass technology partners o'reilly media and of course aws for all the sweet sweet compute credits um with that uh tonight we are going to talk about everything i wish i knew about aws certifications this is a topic that is going to be that is near and dear to my heart i'm currently studying to reset the sa pro again um i've i've taken it three times now uh once took two re-ups and once for the for the original so i'm curious to see all the changes that have happened since last time i took it and our presenter tonight is aws hero andrew brown he actually is the founder of exam pro so he knows a lot about certifications so with that mr brown i will turn over the power to you are you ready to start sharing oh yeah for sure all right there you go great and you'll have to do me one favor and just give me some access to that screen share there so that one extra step zoom likes to impose oh yeah it's a great security feature they have there you go it wasn't me this time that's the great part all right so everyone can see my screen we're all good awesome yes we can see great hey everybody this is andrew brown your abs community hero based out of toronto canada and this is everything i wish i knew about aws certification as you can see the banana made it onto the screen everyone demands the banana so you get it uh so for our agenda today this talks a little bit different from what i normally do a lot of times i'll have like a box time of 30 minutes to an hour and i'm just speeding through it with a lot of information a lot of slides i want to take it nice and slow today and give the audience an opportunity to ask questions in between uh and to make a little bit more interactive uh and so i encourage you to ask questions so those are the consideration there's no end time for this talk for done in 30 minutes an hour to two hours that's great unless uh chris wants to go to sleep um you can ask any questions during this talk uh the way you're gonna do that is i believe if you hit that reaction button you can raise your hand we'll try to watch it i'm watching chat but you know i'm presenting the same time so i might miss it i'm just going to open up my chat here so i can see nice and clear and this is uh i mean the talk is everything i wish it was certification but i always like to present things that i haven't really publicly presented before so i kind of this is this kind of like loose ends about things about abe certification you might not be hearing about and this is kind of a soft talk so i want to talk about certification and things around it that you need to succeed uh in the industry for cloud and so our general outline for today is we're going to be looking at the certification roadmap i've showed this multiple times before but just to kind of give you an idea to help you start thinking where should you go with these certs uh how about certification will help you get a job if it does and to what degree we'll look at it as course providers and supplementary content i have to be very careful here because everyone's sensitive about their content but i want to make sure that you're aware of all providers out there so that you can figure out what is the best combination for you we'll look at study habits some tips i've noticed i've had thousands of thousands of students and i collect those analytics and i i can tell you some information that might help you uh save yourself some trouble and then we'll look at how it was certifications fit into your cloud journey so that's thinking uh not just about okay i want to pass a certification but how how does that actually work within my whole scope of what my end goal is so that is our agenda so let's just jump into the certification roadmap and so let's just take a look at what is on the table so we got the ccp our three associates our two professionals and a bunch of specialties i'm a bit sad that the lexus skill builder certification uh has gone the way of being a ghost um i think that was a great certification just misplaced in the specialty category uh they should have moved over to associates so aws if you're listening bring it back just make it an associate okay hoping for a service certification in the future i think that's a really popular one that would be uh good if they release that so when you're looking at all these search you got to say okay well what is my strategy going forward and there's a lot of different routes that you can take and so i'm hoping that i can just expose you to um some uh kind of titles to help you start thinking about that and so here i have an overlay and this is kind of uh through the sys ops i have different variations on youtube if you find them there's one through every single one i'm not going to go through all them today but i just want to give you an idea of where you can go so imagine you took your ccp you went for the sysops now you're you're a cloud engineer or junior devops you can go there and do those specialties okay and so let's just talk about some of these roles i really want to see if people have heard of these rules before if they have any interest in these rules if they have any questions so we'll work through some here and then i'll stop and see if we can get any questions okay so the first one is called a cloud engineer this involves the same responsibilities as a web developer but places a great emphasis on making use of cloud services cloud engineers focus more on the implementation details of developer solutions rather than infrastructure solutions and so to me um this is probably the most entry-level title that i can think of is cloud engineer and there's a lot of people that have a background in web application in web development and i think this is the most easiest transition to cloud so if anyone's thinking about being a cloud engineer raise your hand or make a comment in the chat i'd like to see that another very popular entry-level role would be a junior devops engineer this is also known as a systems administrator not as popular term or a cloud support engineer could be something that's similar they're responsible for reacting to incidents that occur so if a web server goes down in the middle of the night you're the on duty systoles person and you're gonna be the one waking up to fix it so similar to cloud engineer role but it's more not dealing with the web app it's just dealing with the infrastructure okay trying to react to maintain that another role that you could see would be a cloud security engineer and we see daniel has an interest to be a cloud engineer that's great if you have a background web development love to hear that a devops engineer that'd be more your professional role there so you could see yourself uh transitioning from a junior devops to a professional devops engineer and that's gonna involve automation and things like that um and then we're hearing that uh your ball is working towards a junior cloud engineer that sounds pretty cool antonio uh oh anto you are a devops engineer okay we'll call that for that uh their site reliability engineer this one is a very very very popular role i'm finding especially if you have like practical skills uh so this role focuses on implementing strategies for disaster recovery fault tolerance high availability uh it's for boosting performance uh both develop of the developers on the team and the infrastructure itself so you know imagine that you are uh you're really good with databases and you need to you need to tune that thing so it works really proficiently and you got to make sure that you have uh good disaster recovery or maybe you're working on global availability so it's kind of like a specialty within devops there then we'll look at data engineer data engineer is is a very popular role this is where we are looking at um uh we're looking at uh devops but it it but specifically for setting up data pipelines maybe you're working with a data scientist maybe you're working with a data analyst can we go a little bit deeper on the differences between sre and devops it's still not overly clear as to me most things fall in between i think antonio's asking that so when you look at sre and devops sre again is the specialization it's a devops that specializes in reliability right making sure that the the site remains up uh so it's just that's all it is it's just a subset um so it and again like i think a really good example is if you look at dev they have an sre and they talk a lot about the kinds of uh things that they have to do to keep the site reliable so that's a probably a good source to look at then you have dev tech ops this is becoming a lot more popular uh i think a lot of people complain about the terminology of everything being put in front of ops i don't know if i can think of any other creative ones but that's one that's uh very popular and one able certification in specific is specialized for that we'll talk about that when we get to the professional section uh and then there's cloud networking engineer again these are just specializations do uh let's see if i can i'm not sure i can get annotation i'm in single presenter mode so i can't pull up my annotation today oh maybe i can right click here no i can't that's fine but like when you look at these a lot of these things are derivatives of the devops role so sysops uh this is specific the devops role uh for those particular ones okay now does anyone have any questions about developer rules banana ops yeah that's one um that's one i wish i i wish i could get a job in but i just don't have the skills yet there sorry i had to do it want to talk about where there is sap uh i don't know much about sap honestly oh maybe the main solution architect professional so we're talking about bruno okay sorry i think when i think of sap there's like an initialism for the azure search i don't know what it even means it's some kind of service or something um i'd like to know where their their sap uh where the sap is on the rolls could you talk a little about it we'll just go back to our certification roadmap here again i wish i had my annotation uh but uh you know like you'd be seeking a solution architect professional probably if you want to go into actual consultancy like with the larger companies up here in canada uh we have things like annika and well i guess they're rackspace now um what's the other one guru ops and uh a few other ones like that but like that's the only time i ever see anyone getting the solutions arc professional is when they're going for those consultancies for those roles and a lot of times these solution architects are being hired to do pre-sales um so they're going into the field talking to customers trying to architect things rapidly and and come up with a pricing schema to get adoption uh for a contract and things like that do we have any other questions here looks like we're good okay cool so that is our road map there and we'll just skip on through there and so here's a question how that's great okay so how how about certification will help you get a job i don't know if anyone's ever seen this commercial i don't know if it's from what is it from the 70s the 80s i don't even know um but um the idea is uh this is a question that i get asked a lot is how many adapt certifications does it take to get a job in cloud and i would ask the audience can you tell me how many do you think you need one three a three eleven i'm gonna wait i'm gonna enter some numbers in here three oh and the crunch too good job chris oh yeah we got three we got zero we got two what else come on we got a lot of people here i can get more numbers i'm gonna put 13 in there all of them you need all of them all even the legacy ones even the retired ones there if you don't have alexa you're not getting a job that's true okay great so let's take a look here so we'll see okay zero you need zero aw certifications to get a cloud rule um even aws like when they're hiring they don't require you to have any adwords certifications okay but that doesn't mean that uh certifications aren't worth anything but let's just talk about that so in certification by itself is not enough to obtain a cloud role and does not demonstrate the ability to perform the job but the ability to select determine identify describe and choose have you seen these terms before have you noticed them anywhere before i'll show you got a big old list of links over here right and i'm just going to pull up an exam guide for you okay i'm just going to go over to google and what we'll do is go ahead and grab one here oh look at that won't let me do it that way that's fine we'll just go grab we'll go to the source here any specialties in mobile app engineers no there is not um aren't they starting to make a specialty for iot i don't know i don't know about iot one okay i know azure has one [Laughter] but uh you know like when you look through the exam guide here this is the stuff you're seeing you're seeing design design shoes identify select choose and that is really what you are that's the skill that you're gaining right you are gaining that muscle memory to say that you know something we go back to our presentation style that you know something about aws right of certification proves that you are capable of self-study and upskilling and you know if you go for a job that that is a quality right like you want to you want to know that the app the candidate or the applicant in front of you can learn up on the job because when you're dealing with cloud you're constantly being bombarded with new stuff i turn my back and something changes right it's just it's just the nature of it so i do think that it shows that quality there but when you look at the full resume that's not going to be enough to get a job um one thing uh one thing we'll talk about is the amazon partner network you probably heard this a lot um if you've been re or been learning about what what application these certification have so the apn is when companies go through a formal process to be partnered with aws being part of apm brings in more business for technology consultancy companies and uh in order to be part of the apn you got to pay a membership fee you got to get a specialized training and you have to have a certain number of certification requirements to meet a particular tier i thought it was both consultancy technology but last time i checked i think they only have it as a requirement for consultancy companies but they actually have a hard requirement of how many unique people have to hold certs so if you're working with a pr uh premier uh tier like a company uh that they have to have um 10 people holding the ccp and then the 25 with a minimum of 10 professional on specialty i'm just going to pull that up as well here so you can see so i have we'll take a first look at consultancy here so just pull this on down and we'll pull up a link here so yeah if we just go over here and give this a scroll on down you can see under experience requirements um or maybe it's knowledge requirements here so it talks about foundational certifications and technical certified individuals okay and so just to give you kind of an idea of job opportunities if we go back to the partners page and we scroll on down we say find a nativist partner these are all the partners of aws and i think you can even sort by tier i haven't been on this page in a while so it may have see there there's that sap there i can't remember what that stands for but there's a certification for azure for it um and so i think there's a way you can search for partners and i could say toronto um and we just hit search there and it used to let you yeah it does so you can say show me all the consultancies right and then you can even say the tiers you can go select tiers and stuff like this so this could be a great opportunity for you to know where to apply where you know your certifications are going to be uh valued right but it really depends on the size of the company right so select here you can tell they don't need as many certs but if you the premier uh partner does if you've ever gone to an uh uh an aws event i've had uh vendors say hey andrew could you uh do you want to be on our payroll so we can get our we meet our certification requirements it's happened to me before um but you know if you want those opportunities you got to go those events you got to network uh and and you too can be uh on payroll uh so someone who keeps their uh tier level there i don't think anybody's probably like that but it's true um so i'm just gonna go open this back up here uh and so you know will an apm consultancy hire you if you have a lots of certifications yes and no i want to give you a really good example so this was in toronto i had a friend of mine and they had every single animal certification that's called having your gladiator belt i don't know where the term came from but if you have every possible available certification it's called uh being a gladiator okay and they were friendly and charismatic they were hired as a solutions architect with a well-known consultancy their essential duties was to engage in pre-sales with customers but when it came down to it they weren't confident and assertive with their proposed designs with team members they lacked clear communications and emails to customers they lack the ability to persuade customers their time management skills were poor they acted too slow to uh to produce a design in time to close sales so they were just fired from their job as a decision architect and and and those are soft skills right you can't like an idibus exam at this point right now cannot give you those skills right so how would you obtain those uh you know you might be able to get that through mentorship or through a um some schools have career services that kind of help you coach you on that kind of stuff or maybe you go to school or you just have to kind of figure it out by yourself and so that's the thing is that i just want to really tell people like getting every single certification like you might trick a few companies to hire you but they're not going to hold on to you unless you gain these uh soft skills okay anyone have any uh questions right now uh no questions right now okay but i will i will i will say i heartily agree with that oh yeah um as as a as an architect myself with uh you know in in the var space uh we we look at the certifications to get them so that we can satisfy our apn status um but the soft skills are are big um and you know the confidence to be able to sit in a boardroom talk to the executives you know design something on the fly on a whiteboard and talk to both the technical people and the business folks is um that's that's a skill that you have to you have to work out cool uh so let's just talk about your learning path so there are a lot of learning providers out there for you to help you get involved certified uh we you may need to mix and match to find your own right combination for you what i set out to make a certification platform to help you learning i thought i really thought that i could have the end-all be-all solution but i found that it did not matter what i built people just learn differently and there's a lot of different ways to do it and no single provider can really give you the coverage that uh each individual has so really at the end of the day it's like you know every single cloud provider wants to be like a complete solution but i just think that it's just very hard to serve that as the market right so what you got to do is pick the condiments that work for you and make your own hot dog for your own journey okay um and so let's just talk about course providers a really easy way to kind of see them all on screen here is i just chose the a mid-tier certification course like the solution architect associate uh and we'll just go down the list here um and just kind of give you an idea of price pricing kind of helps people to understand where they can spend their money some are priced higher because they offer more features and some are lower because they have less um and all all about them but if we go down a list here if you haven't heard these i just wanted to make you aware of all of them because some you just do not get exposure to because maybe you come in through reddit maybe coming through linkedin or twitter or you see an ad and so you know i think that again all solutions are great but you got to find out what works for you and i just want you to see the full list so at the top we have a cloud guru and so for them i don't know if they have individual pricing of their courses i think they did originally because they were on udemy but um again by the way they're the largest one of all of them and they have a very very large catalog and they're about 39 a month i say that because um there's some fluctuation in that price i'm not sure if it changes when you visit the page um but it was a bit hard to nail that down there but again they have basically everything that you'd ever want in there then you have digital cloud training uh they are charged per course it's 24.99 for there they have courses and practice exams i believe that if you just wanted practice exams i think they might charge less uh for just part of it so if you just liked one portion you could do that i believe they have digital uh downloads like ebooks so if you need an ebook on the go um uh if it wasn't if it was another time you're uh taking the train to work that might be useful for you we have adrian catrill um he uh charges forty dollars for his uh mid-tier one i believe that his professionals are eighty dollars he's extremely comprehensive he really likes to be extremely thorough uh so if you're looking to go beyond just above certification you wanna really know a lot of stuff uh i hear his courses are long and thorough there's me in the middle so exam pro my courses are 21 dollars per course my focus is really just to help you get certified um and i i talk fast and loose as you can tell uh and i i'm people seem to really like my cheat sheets i'm not sure why that's like the last thing i ever think about but people say man your cheat sheets really save me last minute so that's one thing that i guess i'm known for uh there's cbt nuggets and the the concrete for that is bart castle um i really like bart because he uh he like i never show up on my videos but he's always on video so if you've ever been to like a live instructor uh a kind of like training um it it's very personal uh and that helps you learn uh then i think he's really good for that they have a full catalog so in order to get access to um their aws certification content courses i think you'd have to pay the monthly and that's 59 exactly then you have stefan he is only on udemy he has a website but it'll just go to uh the um the udemy there i could not tell you exactly what the price of the course is i think it's fifth around 15 that's going to be my guess there the reason it's hard is because udemy will say a course is 200 but we discounted it for you for 17 or something like that and they change it per region right so i saw it in canadian dollars i had to kind of uh finagle it over to usd dollars but i think that if you had udemy it's called udemy business or they have a subscription model with udemy i think you might just get it part of that as well uh so there's that and he's also an aws uh he's a native is data here i believe so he's also part of the hero family you have um john bonzo from tutorial dojo i think i have a spelling mistake there oh no there's an s there okay because it's in the domain and he's really really really really well known for his practice exams uh i believe he has video content which is part of it's like adabus training videos like aws has their own training videos and uh it's bundled in with the stuff so i think those videos are free but they're part of this system so if you go there they're they're there complimentary there he has a lot of practice exams uh like probably the most out of anybody um then you have mike chambers he only has an awesome machine learning uh certification course but um uh it's priced really high but like database machine learning is really hard to teach so i think the price might be justified there uh there's that then there's hiro she only has um the certified cloud practitioner and it's on linkedin learning if you don't know anything like i mean like nothing you know nothing you really want to get in the cloud and you need things really as simple as possible she nails it perfectly right like i can't even explain things as simple as her you have pluralsight um what i really liked was the fact that their pricing was so low for a subscription it's like 29 and it was so simple too it's just like there's the number press the button you get it so i really like that i can't really speak to the content itself i'm not even sure who the instructor is for that but um i i like the fact that that was so easy you got wizlabs they have a lot a lot of practice exams uh yeah i last time i was there last year they did not have much abs content yeah they have some right but um i don't think they have like when i say full catalog i don't mean they have a full aws catalog i just mean that they when you purchase it you get everything in whatever catalog that they present uh but they do have they do have some content there uh then you have whizlabs they're 99.95 per course and i think it kind of like fluctuates sometimes it's not 9.95 what's interesting about them is that they have a video course but i've never heard of anyone using it so i don't know the quality of it but they're known for their really inexpensive practice exams i think that they're probably not the same quality as john bonzo john bonzos are a lot higher quality there but they have a lot of them so if you're looking for volume you're going to get it there last one is cloud academy scott stewart i believe he's an abus community builder and i he does the solutions architect one and i think he does the security one uh but to get access to those it's 49 and so the pricing is really complicated you really got to go investigate all these links yourself and to see the offering but everything is a little bit all over the place so you might like certain instructors from the way they do it but you also might like just the feature offering and i think i have a good example there if there's any other ones that i'm missing i'd love to know i i don't like to miss anybody else if anyone in the chat knows of anything missing um but yeah i don't i don't see any mention i think i got the full list if you're looking for supplementary youtube learning content there's a lot on youtube we've got free code camp stefan has videos foobar serverless uh sandeep das bart castles myself uh namrata digital cloud training be a better dev be a better dev used to be called uh simply um it was like simply aws and and he has really really good free videos like they're really really good but for whatever reason he seemed to pivot into uh development or dev stuff which is more broad i'm not sure why that's the case but if you haven't seen these videos they're really good you should go check them out uh and then you have uh chirog and he's a clock he's a cross-clouder so he does everything like he's he's alibaba certified i can't keep up with him and i really like his stuff because like he really gives you like a very rounded uh a rounded uh perspective on the cloud he does a lot of um like he takes the exam and he tells you how it went and he gives you kind of like a fast track like a a preparation guide not a full course um but i think that it's a really good starting point if you haven't seen his content okay uh one resource that i think is really really really useful and no matter how old they are um are eight of us deep dive so uh abuse has been producing deep dive talks at reiman for years they go beyond the documentation explain the underlying infrastructure they're normally one hour in length and are essential study materials for professional uh certification if you're struggling with any particular aws service all you got to do is go to google uh youtube there and type in aws deep dive whatever it is um it's like really interesting like if you listen to um when they talk about like how um like how they came up with their virtual subnets and stuff like that like i don't i can't even i can't re-articulate it but it's just it's it really helps you uh remember long-term uh things you need to know and you don't need to do the associate level um but um at the professional level you're going to want to do that and again it doesn't matter how old these videos are because they're kind of a snapshot of how the infrastructure was at one point right so you get an understanding of the evolution over time and so i think that is extremely useful information but again it's very time consuming so you have to decide whether uh it's the right time for you to do it okay uh one thing that people are very concerned about is content going stale right like when you're looking to choose a course out there that is a huge concern um and the thing is i want to tell you that yeah i've talked to my other uh cloud con or cloud provider friends that also make content and i say ma'am i'm worried my content is going down they say they're like my content's still too don't worry about it because basically as soon as you release it uh aws has changed something on you you know i remember when i made um i think it was the uh the developer um i was shooting a video for the introduction like how do you actually create an account and that was the time when they added that additional field so i shot it and then after i released the course the next day there was an additional field at the login screen and it's just you can't keep up with that kind of stuff and honestly like that's basically what aws is like right when you're using it in the field it changes all the time on you so i don't think it's a bad thing that content's a bit stale but there really is no content out there where you're going to end up with like content that is too stale that you can use and if if you're that worried about losing a few points in here and there then maybe you need to adjust the way you study um because at the end of the day if you put a lot of effort into practice like actually implementing what you learn it's not going to matter you know there's a lot of content out there that is still good okay another issue i see a lot is um uh overstudying so people come to me and they'll be like hey andrew i got 950 or something really high and i'm going oh how much time do you spend like oh four months but i got a really good score and and for me it's not something i want to hear because i want to hear that people are getting through the content as fast as possible to advance their career i don't want to see people taking all three associates and taking the entire year to do that um and so some strategies i say is like you know if you get the associate maybe you should move directly to a professional next um if uh if or you know if you want to do all three associates and you really want to have all that knowledge study them in parallel and then set the exams back to back and that's what i did when when i when i got the associates i sat the exams um like three days apart because the questions are very similar but the issue is just like you don't want to spend too much time at the associate level because like it's your the the information you're getting is marginal like it's marginal additional information yeah you're getting more familiar with other services but you aren't advancing your knowledge um uh so that it's gonna really help your career does anyone have any thoughts on that yeah people are always paralyzed about studying i that's why i tell people like for the ccp i tell people always to book their exam ahead of time i just say go book it one week ahead because that thing is like really hard to fail it's very very hard to fail um but yeah you just book it ahead of time for the associates i say like i say a month ahead sometimes three weeks it really depends on the initial assessment uh for for uh you in particular uh but again it's like where do you want to be in a year right yeah three weeks yeah so antonio's saying he usually commits to three weeks for professionals it's a lot more risky but like you could say you could say one month or two months it's really up to you uh but in the day it's like no one's ever ready you just got to jump in there uh and again i don't want to see 900 scores i want to if the score is 750 i want to see you get 751 okay um one really good resource is the aws documentation uh basically if you didn't have any money whatsoever this is the best place to learn it might take you a bit longer but this is actually the way i make my content so like when we see a bus lambda i i i look it up and i i literally go through every single page and then i summarize information i'm bringing you basically any of this documentation summaries if you if you look at a lot of providers they do the same and if you start exploring the documentation you might notice like verbatim words that are are copied and pasted to you and you go why aren't i just reading the docs to begin with when you actually go get your uh your uh your um your job down down the line there you're going to be digging through docs anyway you know so it's something that you should get familiar with and spend some time in um does anyone like the above stocks does anyone not like the adidas docs oh the suggested experience so chris is asking about um uh the suggested experience six months before ccp one year before associate that's uh that's nonsense like imagine spending six months studying for the ccp it's one week right i don't know where they come up with those estimates um maybe it's the lowest common denominator i'm not i'm not particularly sure on that is hands-on experience needed for professional certifications daniel asks absolutely 100 percent like a lot a lot of hands-on it's it's it's the fact that it's like if you do it you'll know all the caveats to the services because when i present information to you in the associate um you know it it's like it looks good on paper but then when you start digging into things you just find things don't actually work the way as promised or in variations right so like um like you know sometimes you find out you're using cloud formation and some parameter store values don't work with it so you have to use secrets manager or you find out that like parameter store is uh you like it's not cross region so you'd have to replicate another stuff so you have to use secret manager in that case using code build and code build uh integrates with um github but it doesn't there's just all these caveats right or or like code code code pipeline so code pipeline has multiple steps you're supposed to be able to pass um variables onto different stages but for whatever reason you can't pass variables from a code build to code deploy right and this might not be something that i i might highlight in the course i'm trying to do it more often like practical things like that um but like at the associate levels just like kind of get glossed over so you think that you know code deploy can or code pipeline can do all these things but in reality there are some restrict limitations around that kind of stuff um another person saying i used to work at abs but again from the deaf point of view i hardly ever have to do networking stuff like vpc configuration or revit d3 stuff my background is not networking if you want someone that actually knows a lot about networking i believe uh bart castle does uh and so probably his material is really good if you have a gap that but like for me i came as a developer cto and i transitioned to cloud uh and one of the nice things was i didn't really need to know networking that uh that much but at the end of the day like it really did help me to know it eventually so i i didn't know too well at the associate level but once i went to the professional specialty i had to buckle down and get better knowledge there actually one of the largest obstacles for me moving to aws was the fact that um i just didn't want to have to set up virtual networking i was like i was like why do i have to set up a network why can't i just launch a server you know you think of like lynnoid or digitalocean uh and so for years i would i just didn't use it but when i started hitting the the um the limits of those uh single like single service providers uh then it became obvious to me like oh you really do need to have this kind of a level of control right whether you want to do it or not um so that's that's that on there uh aimless white papers and guides uh eight of us has stopped putting in there i gotta show you this i don't know why they've done this i think maybe they're just getting tired of updating their uh their exam guides but if i go through here they do not recommend white papers anymore they used to give you like an exact list of white papers you should read um and they don't they don't do that anymore another thing they've stopped doing other white papers is putting on a time on it they used to say like july 2020 when it was last updated and they also don't i'm going to pull this up here they don't make it as easy to download the pdf here so i have it in pdf format here right um sorry this is the exam guy but if i go over to here and we go look at a popular white paper we'll talk about white papers here in a moment and we'll go over on the left hand side we'll click white paper well architecture framework and i'm just looking for our standard one here there it is they've html kindle used to have a pdf option so if you want the pdf you go to html now and you got to click on pdf up here um but anyway so a white paper is a persuasive authoritative in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution and eight of us has over 200 plus white papers so when you're saying for the professional certifications these white papers become essential study to write out your knowledge they are definitely pulling questions from these white papers because i've had questions and they've read exactly from some sort of white paper the ones that you really care about is the well architected framework and the five pillars there's some additional ones that are interesting usually the way you know is you go back here we go up the top you click on white paper you got introduction ones these are pretty good like how pricing works um devops overview of web services the wall architect frameworks over here so all of these are really good in the in the introduction level here and then the methodologies are all really good as well so those are the ones i would recommend to read and there's a lot of white papers that are uh not applicable but um you have to give them a read uh before associates you didn't have to read any white papers now part of the solution architect associate uh reading the well architect framework is essential if you wanted easier time uh kind of digesting the walkerton for framework you could also look at the well architected tool because it kind of puts into practice it eh maybe i could just log into aws here and give it a quick show here i'm just seeing if i have a oh i do there we go so i do have an account open so if we go over to um well architected tool and we'll say define a workload my amazing workload or banana workload right um and it's gonna make me feel in everything i know it okay banana oh it's not let me type i'm just gonna paste that in there it's giving me some trouble today but i think i can just cheat i will say all regions can i go next here uh has launched supporting for tagging oh you know i will say production oh look at this they have more now i didn't even know this this is what i mean you go in aws and they just add things so there used to only be well architect framework now there's these three were those four and if we go into here um and we click into questions here oh they change this interface as well wow but you can go through here and they'll ask you questions right and what they'll do so here's all the questions and you can go ahead and even read up on each one right and so this is kind of a cool way to put it into practice i mean if you're studying you're not going to have a lot application to apply how to read the white papers do we need to know every single concept described or to have a good general overview that's what daniel asks i'd say a good general overview at the associate level is pretty much it most most content providers out there is gonna are going to summarize the well architecture framework for you just because it's essential uh the other ones you just kind of have to feel your way through to determine what information that you want um but i at one point i was making um uh walkthroughs for um these things i would actually make a video and highlight all the points but i just couldn't keep up with the amount of white papers uh and so i just kind of abandoned that kind of support for that uh but yeah you're just gonna have to feel your way through today but it's a shame that aws does not tell you which white papers anymore in the um exam guide outlines because now you just kind of have to know from history right maybe at some point i'll just make a list on that so just make your way back here um lecture content so now we're actually talking about like study materials that you could use uh so a lot of times you'll see lecture content that's what i'm doing right now with you i have slides i'm talking at you uh and um you know this stuff will cover services and features and i just want to talk about ensuring you don't sabotage yourself when you're watching lecture videos a lot of people will go on autopilot and they'll listen in the background and watch these videos i have a way of getting around that by having um competency uh checks for every single one in my platform i have like little quizlets so that you can't just watch a video and assume that you're going to move on to the next one but the idea is that you need to try to uh make sure that you're absorbing that information so i would suggest like when you watch a video go reference the aws documentation read up a little bit more add your own notes a lot of people like to print out my they really want my slides they take screenshot of my slides and they'll add notes onto my slides so whatever you can do to kind of like start writing or thinking about what you're doing not just watch stuff right so pause after every video and try to put some effort in there okay uh hands-on so hands-on labs or follow-alongs i like to call them follow-alongs because i'd like you to follow along with me these are video tutorials utilizing aws for practical knowledge uh and so another thing i find that my students do is that they will only watch the videos but they do not follow along again i have another mechanism to ensure that they do i have like these check boxes so that they have to prove that they actually did all the steps but the thing is is that you know you could pass an associate without doing well maybe not anymore because aws has introduced exam lab questions but like with a solution architect associate you could pass without doing any labs whatsoever personally yourself but i don't think that's a great a good idea because if you do want to proceed beyond the associate or even get a career in cloud you are you're going to run into trouble very quickly because you'll find that uh you're not actually able to do the work which is really important but databus is now introducing these exam lab questions uh i think they're introduced i think it's in beta right now i can't remember which exam it's the solution architect associate or if it's the developer or the sys it's one of the associates but what will happen now is that you don't just get multiple choice and multiple select but you might get something like you have 20 minutes to provision rds instance and you'll have to do it either be via the aws console or the aws cli and that's some pretty serious stuff just taking a look over here at the q a here where does that az slide come from uh oh that one here that's just mine that's for my um uh certified cloud practitioner course and i don't know if i have the the um the the uh the rights to use that that image but like you know like you go to google you pull one off there but but no one said anything i just really like that photo eh i i'm pretty sure that uh that's an azure data center [Laughter] you know what when i do my azure certification uh video i just i just flipped the name to like aws or oracle there um and and so we just say my method is is to write notes using pencil and paper and transfer those to google doc and that's a great thing if you can do something more than once it's going to really help your memory right um so yeah if you if you write it down and then write it down again i believe in the rule of three we'll talk about that uh in a moment okay uh so you know because of these exam lab questions we're going to see a lot of pressure for sandboxes so sandboxes are temporary awesome accounts that stage a cloud scenario for you to work in they've actually existed for quite a while uh the first ones to have it i think was quick labs which i think they still have eight of us sandboxes which i probably should put them on the list uh but the idea is that you go in they have a scenario for you you press the button it launches account the account will stick around for about 30 minutes to an hour depends on the scenario for you uh and these are great because you know they get you exposure to exactly where you need to go they're going to give you confidence you're not going to have to worry about over billing for getting to misconfigure stuff but the thing is you got to think of sandboxes like bowling with bumper lanes it does not make you a cloud engineer if you get through it to the end uh and you need to spend time in that gutter and experience the pains uh so you can accelerate your cloud skills and again it's self-sabotage if you if you just use sandboxes you're you're not really preparing yourself all like all the pain that you experience and all the stuff without the uh is very important okay uh and so i mentioned this a bit earlier earlier but i have this thing called the rule of three of practical experience and this is now super important because of these exam labs uh and so if you really want to master something you got to repeat the same task with increasing difficulty so i would say that you know maybe not all your providers are showing you these three ways because they have to make the content three times over and that's just a lot of a lot of effort um but i i would say that if you watch a video and you say okay we're going to do cross-region replication with s3 and the videos in enables console you should on your own go say oh how would i do the cli sdk right and try to replicate that end result and say okay now how could i do do this with cloud formation because you'll find that when you use these things you'll actually you'll actually notice that there's a lot more going on with aws than what you just see right um so like when you spin things like when you launch cloud information uh when you use cloudformation you have to define every single resource and a lot of times there are resources that are there that are that are hidden you don't actually see them right they're just there or they're part of an interface but you don't actually define them as something separate one example i could think of is like user pool client uh for cognito it's not something i remember ever seeing a a button for whatever but that that really does exist and you do need to configure it if you are doing the associate you could just work on the console i try to say do all three at the associate level if you're going for professional you absolutely want to do this all the way through i find cloud information is definitely the best way to really know eight of us inside and out because you have to know every single feature and maybe i'll pop over to claw formation in a moment because i just want to show you what i do with cloudformation here i'm just pulling up a doc so like when i want to find something cloud formation and i'm looking up something let's say i want to set up code build i'll type in cloudformation code build i'll go here and this is i just want to kind of impress upon you why you'll know everything when you use code build so you'll go down here and you'll have to literally read every single one of these and that's what i'll do i'll go through here and i'll read what's an artifact is it required yes i'll have to construct yaml files uh and this is a and i don't i don't ever use these ones i go all the way down through each one of these and sometimes you have to click in so like this one requires this type so you click into here and that has this configuration and so you click into that one and it has this here right you click on that one you know and so you really know every single option available again you know if you just want to get uh it was certified you might not want to go that in depth but if you do think you're going to go all the way i strongly recommend that you put in that time okay do we have any questions here um let's see in practical terms versus search what are your feelings on cloud formation versus something like terraform big topic i realize sure so i think um you know cloud formation is the lingua franca of aws and uh when you're using terraform or cdk or sam you're basically going through that stuff just to generate cloud formation i think you'll generally understand the same stuff because terraform doesn't abstract away too much but i think that if you just want to give yourself the best opportunity for success i really do think you should use cloud formation directly so yeah i would just recommend cloudformation for that okay for practice exams there are paid and official unofficial approximations of the final exam and based on what level of certification you're going for is where i would recommend stuff so foundational is suggested uh you could pretty much get away uh with like if you are experienced web developer and you use cloud a bit uh and you think that you you probably want to go for associate but you're doing the foundational first you probably won't need a practice exam if you don't know anything about cloud you should just at least try the the free one that aws provides um just so that um you know you have a sense of it or even purchase a single paid practice exam just to make sure that you're not fully off base there but if you really are trying to save money um you know you could probably skip it for the associates uh strongly recommended for pros and specialty levels it's essential almost uh almost every single provider has practice exams eye practice exams you'll dave assist practice exams stephanie's practice exams even adrian has practice exams some specialize in it right so i think neil has a lot and um john bonzo has a lot and wizlaps has a lot and they're all different right so everyone has a different style to them um and so uh you're just gonna have to find out what works best for you what people are really surprised is that they get through all that lecture in lab content they get to the end of it and then they're like yeah i know everything i'm gonna be great and they take their first practice exam and they get like 48 to 40 percent and they're just devastated you know what i mean and that's and that's kind of why i was saying like it doesn't matter if your content is like if some content is stale or if you're piecing it all together because your whole world changes when you hit the hit practice exams right to me it's just like you have a lot of stuff you need to learn you just need to get through it to get to practice exams um because you need to build up that vocabulary that uh those um that stuff so you can speak the language right um but the thing is is that you don't want to be doing practice exams and this is like self-sabotage we're talking about here but a lot of people what they'll do is they'll come in and they'll try practice exam right away and they'll expose themselves to like a half of exam and then they'll proceed to study but what they don't realize is that they've now they've now kind of cheated themselves because the next time they go there the human mind's really great at uh remembering things and remembering uh without actually having to know and so once you're exposed to a set of practice exam questions you like you you basically that's like you can't really do them again you know you can do a certain point uh and so uh a lot of providers don't have a lot of sets they might have only like two or three sets uh and so a lot of people have false confidence where they think they're scoring high um but it's actually just because they've you know they didn't follow the proper procedure of utilizing them if you do have practice exams you do not want to um space them out too far apart right so like if you finish your if you finish all your lecture and lab content and it's like less than a week later you start practicing them you want to be doing them one after another and then when you go for your real exam you don't want to leave a big gap in between there as well and again i know this because i have metrics on my students and i just see that those two problems where it's like gaps huge gaps in between practice exams and between the study time there okay uh if you do feel like you need to really know the questions then what you should do is instead of moving on to the next um practice exam set you should focus on the ones you got wrong and really know that you know them very very well before you move on to your next set again my system has a mechanism called the mastery system that make sure that you keep that good study habit in place there but yeah i would say normally for for exams your first one will be 48 the next one will be 74 and the third one will be 80 or higher you want to generally score about 10 percent higher than uh what the the exam is so if it's 750 points you want to get 850 okay uh does anyone have questions on practice exams oh daniel said that he uh for his dev associate he got 35 again that's fine you know it's just it just has to keep on going up but if you're not up by the third attempt i would probably go reach out to somebody and talk to them because maybe there's something fundamentally missing from your uh your learning uh you know and that's that's where things become a trouble someday any questions about prax exams i think we're okay okay i think we're good yeah cool uh so now we're on to uh the last part of the talk here which is the cloud journey mentor map i don't know if anyone saw this i spent way too much time on this graphic but i like it and so what we're talking about uh aw certification we want to and again earlier i said you know like if you want to get a job in cloud it's not enough to get an um certification itself there's these other things you need and this is basically all those other things the only thing i guess kind of missing there would be soft skills we'll say that's the banana because bananas are soft but um uh the idea is like i kind of have a bit of a road map for you to kind of follow what you should be doing between your certifications so that you prepare uh and so we'll talk through that on the wings you can see we have your journal and your community volunteering we'll start from there the first thing is your uh your cloud journal so i you know i really do believe that it's important i mean this again these are soft skills but documentation communication are two essential skills that you'll need uh coding or or setting up a cloud infrastructure is not the end all to be all uh and so the only way you're going to build up these skills is by doing them right and it takes time so i think that you should start as soon as possible and do it throughout your entire journey and i strongly recommend that you do it in public because the great thing is that if you do it in public you might someone might provide you some critical feedback which you might not like but it will it will help you grow uh and there are a lot of different platforms out there that you can use you can yeah you can go on dev you can go on hash node you can have a self host to paste it on github pages you can uh have a medium page and you can even earn some money doing that and one thing that i think is like highly highly untapped and i don't see anyone doing this and i should be doing this but i just don't have time on making courses is linkedin articles so linkedin uh you make posts but you can also make articles and if you don't cross-post them you just do them on there uh linkedin has this thing called top voices i have a couple friends that are there that are top voices and so every year uh linkedin looks at who like makes really good articles on the uh the platform and they deem them a top voice and then overnight they have like 400 000 linkedin connections right so i'm not saying like that should be your goal here but i'm just saying that uh that's an untapped opportunity there eh by communication what do you mean with articles well you're writing the articles right so it gives me an idea like your ability to communicate clearly if that helps for that the other if you're not sure what to write about um i've tried to help you out here uh with the hundred days of cloud so uh those who may have not heard of it 100 is a cloud started out as a hashtag challenge the idea was to document your journey for a hundred days and this was a great way to um you know do that kind of journaling there uh and the way the hundred days cloud helps is we have a discord so you can share your progress there keep motivated uh but another thing is that i have a lot of examples for you or i should say we have community examples for you so what i'm going to do is pull that up here for you just to give you an idea what that looks like and so we will go here just give me a moment all right so here we are the hundred is a cloud and we have cloud ideas uh and again we're always looking for more uh but the idea is that we go through here and you know if you don't know what to do right you need a big list you go here and say i want to do serverless and here's a step like create a lambda and add two numbers up and so here what we do is we say this is the difficulty this is estimated time this is the cost these are the things that you need to do here are the references here's some ideas and here's some tips i want to give you an example of someone that completed the challenge uh and i believe that uh after their hundred days of cloud i think after their second round they ended up getting a job uh a cloud role which was their goal and so here's stephen and he he filled it all out and so you can go in here and some are different than others right but imagine you know imagine you give this to employer they can exactly see your evolution right like when you take a certification i don't really know how you studied right i just know that you passed uh but this really gives me kind of a snapshot on your learning journey uh and it might help you get a job um and it also helps build up those soft skills that you really need right um so you know i strongly recommend that you do that and we also have a template here so if you go to 100 is a cloud template um you can create this template here there's like a clone button i'm not sure where it is yeah here's the template it has instructions here so that's one opportunity for you there but there's a there's a lot of things you can do you can do it on hash note wherever you want that's a recommendation for me there another thing that i think is really important is doing community volunteering i'm a really large proponent of uh of being a volunteer if you've never heard of the community builders i think that's a great program to network and to meet like-minded people i think presenting an edwards user group is very important as i'm doing today i think there's a lot of user groups that are lacking content right now so you have a great opportunity to get get in where you might not normally be able to have that opportunity locally it was developed developer advocates are always looking for help and i be i mean that in the sense that they make a lot of content it doesn't get shared they don't get a lot of feedback on it they love comments they love hearing whether people use it and stuff like that uh being present in social media so twitter discord slack stuff like that um you know share your journey tell us that you're doing this as well motivate other people you can contribute to the database documentation this is something i did really early on is that i just went through and i just started to um chris is sharing his twitter um and uh um and so you know like i think that's i i think even john bonds i think he contributes to the docs as well but like i went through and i contributed to a lot of the ai services where like they didn't have any ruby code example so i provided them and that's a great opportunity for you to you know just interact with other aws employees and you know help the community there and there's a lot of open source projects so like if you use a service or like a a tool like amplify or it was sam or stuff like that and you're having issues with it or you have questions just go out and reach because when you post those questions maybe other people have the same questions and you're helping them out too okay so those are the two things i think you should be doing throughout there and you should utilize those uh one thing uh we're now talking about uh back to aos but the number one thing i would say is do not skip the cloud practitioner okay people think that this exam is worth nothing because it's so so easy but i'm going to tell you since the ssa co2 um and the fact that they dropped it was a cost optimization one of the it was they dropped one of the domains in the exam the ccp is like one of the few that actually talks about billing and governance and you know i know i've known like senior cloud consultants who are just trying to like beef up their uh or like fill out the amount of certifications they had and after they had their professional their specialty they went back and took their a cloud practitioner and they didn't realize that they didn't know what it was inspector was they'd never heard of artifact they didn't know about wall architecture tools there was some building stuff they didn't know about and they were in consultancy right and so for them it was just like oh i shouldn't have skipped this thing uh so that's one reason um why i would not recommend yeah organizations right um that's that's a really that's yeah they don't really cover the other ones but i wouldn't say that you have to um implement it practically even though i think in my course i do but it's the only one that actually talks about it right uh with the exception of the security certification um and the thing is your certificate like aws certification is very stressful like when you doesn't matter what exam when you go for it it's a really it's really stressful if you've never experienced the entire process end to end like going to a test center or even the online experience uh like anything can go wrong right um and i remember like i was taking a a professional certification a couple of months ago with uh pearson vue and uh one issue was like my computer was heating up really really bad because i didn't have it plugged in i forgot to do that and so it caused a lot of stress because you're not allowed to get up and move so i had to try to finish as quickly as possible because it was heating up my hands but the thing is like if you go for an associate that costs more and is even more stressful uh and you don't you don't realize like how there's like the environment can factor into it my first time i ever took an abs exam i was almost late for it and my uh i found out like two days before my um uh my uh driver's license was expired right she had to show two pieces of uh identification and so i was so glad that it was just my ccp right because the the price point is like only a hundred dollars uh and it's and you know like to do that at associated professional level would not be fun um so you know i recommend that you try to go gain confidence by taking the ccp just don't get too confident okay [Music] uh so there's that there uh so on to the next part of the cloud journey there's these foundational skills that you need to know and uh you know you might already have them from your prior job so like for me i like i was a web developer or cto slash web developer so i already had really good cloud programming skills and linux skills i had a gap in networking uh and my security was okay and some people come in and they don't have all these four skills i don't have a solution for you as of today there are like courses like there's linux certifications and there's like uh foundation like foundational uh knowledge in networking but the problem with these courses they're like 300 right i i think maybe there was like one i don't know if it was um it's not uh linux plus but i think there was one linux cert that might have been a hundred dollars but i i really wish that somebody and maybe i'll i'll be the one that does it but i wish someone would make like a 25 or 50 course on these four things just for cloud to really help people because a lot of people are really really scared about not having programming skills and i wouldn't say that it's hard but you have to have a lot of general programming knowledge right so like it's not about like i need to know python really well it's like i need to know all these languages generally good enough to use the aws sdk right so there's things like that eh so yeah you just have to piece those together uh yourself but those are four things you should be focusing on either before you start the associate or during your associate okay um and then we'll talk about the associates here um so there are three of them and a lot of people are never too sure which one to take i'm gonna tell you that the one you should take is whatever you feel like because they're pretty much all the same level difficulty and you know i just kind of believe that like people really worry they really really worry at the stage they're just trying to make the right decision but it just doesn't matter because you need to know everything anyway like you need to know all these three so i just think that it's good to get one of them and then move on to the professional level or if you do want to do them do all three of them at the same time uh so you can set them back to back because when you move to the professional level the the level of difficulty is ten times harder than what these are right uh so you know i just think that you need to go and advance there does anyone have any questions about the associate's certifications or which service is there a dog that's oh yeah there's one there eh one one that goes there that is code star i'm always making i'm always making fun of the code star i don't know why but uh but anyway sorry uh was there any questions uh there was a question about um so there was a question about taking tests now during covid uh you can't you can take tests at home now oh yeah yeah so pearson view has it and i also believe uh psi has it like that's what i used to go through was psi yes um and i i really like the test center that i go to um but um i i've always heard not great things about pearson vue but now that psi has one i've heard even worse things about pearson's views online experience so now i'm not too sure i haven't done the psi one myself i don't know if you've done that one yet chris have you um the last time i took one was two years ago i i got i got another wire for the three years so i don't remember which one i took i think it was pearson dew okay so that's but that was that was not it not in my house okay i see um i heard the developer is basically a solution architect plus 10 percent more stuff is that correct um no so the solution architect associate is basically a a mixed bag of everything uh the dev the developer associate is focusing on deployment and a lot of a lot of um elastic bean stock uh is in there a lot and a lot of dynamodb um so uh solution architecture is just kind of a mixed bag of everything um but the thing is like if you study any of these i can't remember i used to have a percentage of it i don't know because the exams have changed a bit but um it used to be like if you study the solution architect it you should you could tack on a week or two like a week each for each other's certification right um so they're not there's a lot of overlap between all three of them eh uh just look for other questions boto three is good to learn if you're doing uh python yep so uh someone actually today asked me if they're like if there's any boto3 uh courses out there and i do not have one um that's something that there is one on linux academy oh there is oh i'm sorry oh i guess i guess it's it's i guess it's a cloud guru now well there you go so i did they make it do they make it free or is it part of the uh subscription do you know it's part of the subscription okay and i believe that they do rotate out free courses so maybe just check in there maybe they might make it free i don't know um i thought that was going to be your opportunity to plug some of your v brown bags i think there's been a couple of a couple of those out there as well um but i think boto 3 is great and then just just know if you're looking at python that that's what you want to look at but for other languages that might not be the solution you need well and also like the sdk is pretty transferable to all three of them or like all languages so if you learn in ruby or node.js the the naming is pretty much the same it's just the syntax of the language is different so it's not so much boto3 it's just you know you gotta get a handle of that language right um but uh you know you don't need to know too much how do you choose between the developer engineer professional associate professional we'll get there when we get to the professional slide okay um i think one of the questions i saw come up here was someone was asking i i think the crux of the question was um for ccp there's not much things to add to my github is there any advice on that and so i think you know when you were looking at some of the resume um or the cloud challenge uh stuff there you know those were good things to work on in github any code suggestions for cloud practitioner or not so much because it's less dev focused yeah it's not very dev focused i think what's really good at that level is to uh get familiar with organizations so set up multiple organizations know how to log in between uh two of them uh and again explore more like governance tools um so like look at database inspector it was artifact just i have familiar familiarity with them but like welcome to another upgrade all right there we go sorry about that but but i would say yeah we got some links in here for uh brown bag stuff for boto3 but you know i would i would just say like there isn't a whole lot for you to do at the ccp level it's more so knowing about cloud and how to talk about cloud um uh and so it's really a social level where we're actually uh applying our knowledge in the cloud there um we'll talk about real world projects i didn't really spruce up this slide because instead i wrote a big big um readme file which i'll pull up here in a moment but i was just showing this here prior over here um but i you know i believe that you know the accumulation all your knowledge should go into one big real world cloud project i i was hiring for a cloud engineer as of this week for a company that i work with and um out of all the 900 applicants we only had four people that held eight with certifications right so they made my short list it was for cloud engineers the cloud engineer we only had four people uh and uh from out of the four they all had the same project which was they had their resume hosted on static s3 website hosting right and that's great but it's not enough right um and so like to me actually you know you're just asking me what would be good a foundational certification challenge i think would be that would be to like host your resume on s3 with cloudfront or rough 53 i think that'd be an okay challenge but if you want to get a job you know you're going to have to go a little bit farther than that and so people said well what does that look like and so i had to go ahead and write one up so that's what i'm going to pull up here for you right now um if i get my mouse over here over to this one and so this is on the hundred days of cloud so nowhere else to put it uh but what i've done and i'll fill out this more i only spent like 30 40 minutes on it but uh the idea here is that um you propose a scenario so right now we're in github and i really like code commit i love code commit because it's it's cheap and it's secure and it integrates with a code pipeline so easy and other services but it doesn't have any issue tracking and that's really sad to me you can use codestar with jira to kind of get tracking it's really weird um but for me it's really sad and so it's kind of my way to trick people into making a github issues but also give them a really good project to work on and so you know i i just thought about all the things that i have to actually do with exam pro uh and so i just kind of made a whole list here and it's not even done and so the idea is that you that's why you always want a very simple project because you're gonna have all this stuff underneath so don't focus on features like get some simple thing and then go deep on all this stuff but we have like solution architecting so under here we talk about making a technical technical diagram i would love it if i was hiring somebody if they showed me an architectural diagram that they could build one i'd love to see that right having a technical roadmap so technical roadmap is where uh you kind of say like okay we're going to start using uh you know an rds instance but when we get to this size we'll move over to amazon aurora and i like to see that with cost analysis so you say okay well i re i you know i budgeted out to this and maybe we only have for the few first few months we're using that 300 dollars of usd credits or maybe we only have this amount of money at this stage so just show me that you can budget and and make sure you're going to cost somebody uh you aren't going to make the company pay a lot of money for that kind of stuff research and development so like up here in canada we have the shred program i don't know if the states has one but we get money back if you actually um have really good documentation right and you go explore technical uncertainty so that's a good skill to have we look at devlops like everything i do is everything is through uh cloud information right because then you have a very good governance or an inventory of all the resources that you're running you can easily apply tags and then from tags you can apply you can put them into a resource group and that means that you can go apply a um roles directly to resource groups so you're only giving access to that kind of stuff um golden image so maybe if you're using ec2 you always have to make sure that your ec2 image is up to date so you'd have to use like code bill or automation and run commands stuff like that playbooks and run books these are kind of important in the off world or the security world streaming your logs all to one central location doing multi-cloud monitoring so i mentioned earlier i really like azure monitor um i think it's good that you get exposure to something that's in another cloud and bring that over there a log analysis so just because you're collecting logs you need to be able to read them as well so that means like investigating cloudtrail investigating cloudwatch logs maybe make a a alert where when you incur a 500 error it's going to send you an email or it sends something to an endpoint for general development you should know how to send out emails you should be able to use queuing to decouple the applications you should have code management skills again like hiring cloud cloud engineering role 900 applicants and some people never had never ever used github before and for me that was shocking right like you got to have that as an essential skill um globally available distributed database it's really interesting once you start thinking about rds and you're going okay i need to place it other places like one thing i discovered is that amazon aurora only has rights in a single region right so you can have reads in other regions but like if somebody is you have some in tokyo they're using their their app and they're making a right action it's gonna have to go all the way back to usc 1 right and that might not be a good solution but you wouldn't know that unless you explored that and and you were going down that route right um uh principle of least privilege a lot of tutorials just go admin access uh all so like building up that skill knowing how to write um really good uh permissions is very important look at compliance programs uh this is really important uh for a lot of companies like sock two uh stock two is really really expensive i think it costs like eighty thousand dollars to like become stock comp it really depends on on on your company but um you know like looking at how much does it cost what you have to do become compliant what is the process you don't necessarily have to go do it but you know become more familiar with that so that you can uh understand how to align your skills you're starting being proactive in stuff some places maybe go use mfa hardware device plot application firewall uh again you know i just at the end there actually have more up in the list there but there's a lot of stuff i think that uh multi-account like once you go multi-count everything changes like chris do you agree like multi-account is just like a whole different world no yes i was muted yes i absolutely agree that's that's the difference between associate and pro in in my brain it's like once you once you've gone from single account to multi-account that's when complexity amplifies you know the iam roles all of the the interrelational things it's but but that's that's what we got i mean we are now in a multi-count world we are um so like to me it's just like that's super important i'd love to see someone with multi-count experience for myself but just kind of give you an idea because that's you know most people are getting certified they're trying to get a job where they're trying to upskill so hopefully that gives you an idea i'm already multi-cloud without a single cert like chris chris says there well that's good um does anyone have any questions about the real world cloud project do they think it's a good idea a bad idea do they want to see more graphics would anybody will be willing to do it see any comments there we'll see if any trickle in there but we'll make our way back to our slides i'm really excited about that one so i'm hoping people like that i'll put more energy definitely yeah uh and so we're looking at that um there's another stage i think is important we'll go all the way back here how do you build a portfolio you just build one big app you know like i don't believe in portfolios like building like a bunch of small little applications because they don't really reflect real world usage right if you go and you build out a real world app like the way i'm suggesting you're going to be encountering the exact same things that companies are experiencing if you build a toy app you aren't getting far enough for it to be useful to anybody right you know what i mean it's just it's not enough so that's why i suggest put all your effort in there don't think about trying to make the perfect portfolio just build one big app and and you'll have all the knowledge you need to obtain that job but we're over here and we're looking at right of passage and that's part of your cloud identity so we'll go back over here and so a writer passes which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another when you return you become of cloud age and you now hold a new social status i hope i don't lose my aws community hero status for this but what i recommend is that you go and leave aws not forever just you go over you check out gcp oracle alibaba openstack vmware something anything because you will get tunnel vision if you stay with aws because a lot of stuff like is geared towards their platform one thing like i didn't know when i did the azure cert uh the az900 uh i i didn't realize it was capex and opex and that kind of helped round out my understanding like how to communicate costs and things like that or the fact that everybody's using active directory you know what i mean like aws you can do active directory on there it's not a huge component of certifications and stuff like that nobody's talking about this stuff if you're not working in large enterprise you might not be exposed to how important it is but you go over these other ones and that's all they're talking about right and you don't even realize that you go over to oracle a lot of their services are dependent on um they're they're not managed services like you go use kubernetes you need to know everything about kubernetes it's bizarre but my point is is that um you get a better a better perspective and and i didn't even say appreciation like um you know i used to complain about the universe documentations i went other places and i went wow they have really good technical writers over at aws the support is really really good and you just don't know that if you don't go to other places so you know that's something i think that you should go check out um okay another thing you need to do is uh figure out your cloud identity so from for myself you know i i would say that i'm developer focus that i'm into security that i'm into serverless and i'm into edtech if you can define those things that might help you to figure out what kind of cloud project you should build and also how to market yourself right so i think that that's important that you really try to narrow down what you like to do don't try to align yourself to what the market wants because at the end of the day you have to be the one that sticks with it figure out what it is that you like to do and then broadcast that and people will find you but well but yeah there are a few exceptions where things are just too niche but um you know generally speaking like you know you have to kind of figure out what it is do you like working with containers virtual machines serverless like what is it that you like right and then narrow that down and just you know focus on that and the the work will come to you right i think that's the big concern people have they're just saying i'm open for anything but that's just that's that uh what's that thing they say you know trying to catch all the fish you don't have any fish chris do you know it um uh jack of all trades master of none thro so there's there's there's a lot of yeah some of some go fishing some some some fishing kind of some kind of fishing stuff in there so um i'm from i'm from the north we're all fish we're talking about fish from professional certifications i don't have a i don't have a lot of text here but a lot of people kind of sweat over which one to take and whether they should actually go after that the only people that i see going for these are really at the consultancy level um especially the solution architect i've been at events where uh i've talked to like um social architect they're like you're not a real developer like you're not whatever unless you have a professional i'm like okay and i roll my eyes because like like i like to me it's like the solution architecture professional is is difficult uh it definitely tests your ability to summarize information there's value there but at the same time it's just kind of like you know i mean like i i don't think it trumps actually building a real project so unless you're you know you're working with an amazon partner and they want to see those certifications to me i don't value these as much as a real project but you know if you want a challenge you can go ahead and do them out of the two i find the devops engineer more interesting more practical more something that you can apply to your job assistant architect professional uh i just feel like it's torture you know because they give you like next to no time and tons and tons of text right and so you're developing a particular skill but i don't know i don't know if that necessarily makes you a good uh professional i don't know if other people agree with me chris how do you feel about that that that to a that test is extraordinarily hard it's no in no way does it reflect the real world there there's there's no time that you're going to be so the essay pro is for like you know as as you described for people that that are going to be in that in that consultancy space and and you're never going to get put in front of a cto and say okay you've got 30 minutes to create you know an end-to-end solution without any without google or documentation it's it's not it's not a uh it's it's it's deliberately tough and i mean it really stresses your brain you really get to know things but but it's not it's not the real world so yeah if you if you like pain go for it um so i think or or you work for avar and you have to get it like me so yeah exactly right um so but yeah at the top of there i have a banana again that's soft skills i don't have a slide for that and we're i think we're basically at the end here uh and yeah we are so there's any questions i'm ready for them uh some agreement on the essay pro the torture that is oh um while the questions are still coming in i did make a couple of posts on twitter and adrian cantrell and cloudbart are willing to do a panel discussion bring them in with with you and hero uh here on sure on on um on some of on some of the uh so i've been tweeting out you'll catch up on it with it later but um i i think we might have scheduled a little panel chat for the for the four of you to talk about some cool certification stuff cool do you want any other uh clock you want the panel to be bigger i could probably absolutely yeah more than probably wrangle some people it might it might get heated though that's the that's the best kind that is the best kind of panel discussion is it though no it is it really is you're canadian though you're very nice so yeah that's what i'm told anyway so oh somebody did mark i thought you said marking didn't work you mark i i don't know i think i did i just do it no i think somebody else did just uh oh you know what maybe down here right yeah oh look at that see i'm trying to draw no i can't draw yeah um see if there's any questions should we continue to ask questions here or chat i don't know if anybody wants to come on audio and say say hello yeah this is gene from uh stoner massachusetts how you doing hey right now i'm good thank you thank you yeah i'm the one who marked the screen i was trying to find where to type a question oh i see and then it came up and i put that up there yeah i'm i'm new to all this and i just want to say thank you um for what you put out there and i just stumbled on this link at meetup and signed up for it i mean it's way more than i expected and i'm delighted that i did find it i'm actually scheduled to take the solutions architecture um on april 5th yeah i i did it because uh i was too scared and i decided to i just scheduled the test and then get ready to take it in a month so so this is a godsend i mean you everything you put together was what i needed to hear and uh you really pointed me in the right direction and i just want to say thank you for everything oh that's great to hear thank you you know and i i don't think i mentioned this but i actually fail exams all the time all the time even ones i've already made the content for it just falls out my ear i i believe that sometimes fail failure is part of the journey so people who get really stressed out about i say well you're good just imagine that you've you failed you know that's just part of your journey that's just what it's going to be but you just got to do that and then you'll have to do it again you know um you know and the scary part is like i don't have any of the background that you mentioned yeah i'm uh actually doing a change of career um and um so i went for this the ccp i got it back in august 2020 and then um i got caught up in work try to make some money but i decided that this is something i want to do so i have no background in programming and all the things you mentioned okay so the roadmap is really awesome i'm going to work hard on it to try to have all these foundational skills and stuff i mean it's a little overwhelming that there's so much to learn so i don't know what to expect but i'm excited to learn something new and see what happens well i'm hoping thanks again oh thanks i'm hoping one day i can fill those gaps there for those essential skills because i realized like it's i hear it so much like they're like i'm like i don't know dude for programming and i go it's not that hard in the gap they're like i don't know where to start it's like where do you even go that's the hard part but uh kim's got a great question sure do you have any advice on how to study when your brain is so tired at the end of a work day oh uh i don't have an answer for that one let me know when you figure that out because right we could all use you some of that advice i you know i think there's i think there's still value like if you're tired and you just don't feel like you absorb information um you know you can go through the motions of it you know what i mean i still think there's value like we talked about sandboxes and things like that um i i believe that you know if you haven't been exposed to a particular service like let's say elastic container service or fire gate or or whatever and there are sandboxes you go through the steps at least you can go back and say okay i didn't know what i didn't have the energy to absorb that information but i remember going through the steps and so the next time i go there i'll be ready to learn it when i do have more energy so that's probably about all you can do uh in those in those kind of situations uh but it's really hard uh when i was when i was starting out like it was like three uh three and a half years ago i was in in transition and the only time i had to study was on the train and i had uh this is going from uh from a suburb into toronto and i had and i had uh it was not even a very good book it's the study books um i don't know if anyone's seen them it's like they still produce them but it's basically like imagine they took the idioms documentation they just printed out in a book but it's even more it's more unfun um and it just wasn't easy it took me like months and months and months um books were terrible they're so dry yeah but um but yeah there's not much you can do do about it's just you have to just deal with what you have you know what's more valuable certification or functioning app using those concepts there's value in both of them right um it depends on the level of sophistication of your application i think that uh building application always trumps certification uh certification just shows like um uh you ever seen that show like so you think you can dance and there's people that are like street dancers and they're really really good and so they get on the show but then they then they have issues working with uh like advancing skills because they don't have that general coverage that's why i think both kind of really matter right um so i think you need both but like if you only had time for one i would probably go after the certification but trying to build out a real project that's that's me like like selling certification content telling you not to tell you not to go for it yeah sounds like one topic before you sleep you retain information better right before you sleep just a small part of nothing uh nothing big yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure what's better uh if you do it before you sleep some people like to wake up early and that's when they like to study that's just all over the place there uh another question for bruno uh enjoyed the talk i see a lot of your videos talking about doing the solution architect associate and the other ones uh the other ones did you agree with this i recommend the solution architects again i don't think it really matters which one you start because they're all pretty much the same level but you know if you if you wanted the easiest possible one the solution architect associate is because it has the least amount of hands-on and has the broadest amount of knowledge so if that's all you can do that's going to be really good one also you have a lot of transferable knowledge from the ccp to the solution architecture associate directly so that's another thing that's really important about that there and bart and i have talked about this on um twitter before uh where uh i recommend if you aren't going for the architect association i recommend the developer to start with he recommends the sysops and it has to do with our backgrounds right like i for my background i can teach you best developer and i see the most job potential with that one and he sees it from the sysops world neither of us are wrong but it's just you know what you want to go after right uh and then al recommends the linux academy for labs sounds great uh so linus academy i believe is part of a cloud guru and so those lab systems are now part of that do they still have the loose academy does it still exist they they still have it but it's the the lessons are currently being imported into the under the acg shield um but the lab but the labs are still there the linux academy labs are really good yeah and jp was asking was you know is the best labs out there uh for aws free or paid um you know i don't know i think that it's just what your preference is right so you know there's a lot of reasons if you're a self-learner you might do better just do it yourself right but or if you want those constraints you want that structure then paint could be the way so okay so we need to uh start wrapping this up a little oh yeah for for the folks that have uh taken the survey um we are about to start the drawing mr mr plankey do you have the spinny wheel of doom the spinny wheel of fun chris i'm sorry spinning it's um so if you don't mind uh maybe making myself a host did i not what you might have i'm um i might not be able to share while others are sharing i'm not a super host i'm gonna i'm gonna relinquish my screen to you bananas out of here all right um let me see if i can now so um just double oh we got two more entries right uh right at the last second here so just to be clear uh what screen am i sharing you are sharing the click to spin screen perfect all right that's the right one um it's always a gamble um all right so we got two more entries in here let me just get them in um these are 25 aws compute credits which are great as you're learning uh different services that might be outside of the free tier and you want to do some of those labs maybe in your own sandbox um these can definitely help you out so just seeing um how many entries we have uh i have these all tied to your emails if you entered those so let's give this a roll i'm gonna go for um two two winners today edit vanna i mean chris all right um so uh big man jer at gmail uh i think you're you're one of our winners i will send out one of those credits uh i found that i have been a little lazy on those so it might be this weekend by the time you get it but i promise it will be coming out i gotta get some automation to make that easier uh at the end of these meetups but oh close there all right and 19. [Music] um i can't can't pronounce this uh it looks like nh is in your email starts with a k k and ends with an nh so if that sounds like your email address you're a winner um i will be sending out a credit at the end of um whenever i get to it actually but you'll get a credit i promise and that is that awesome congratulations to to our uh our nightly winners andrew dude this was amazing this this was a fantastic presentation chock full of information thank you very much oh thank you for having me yeah um both both on twitter and and in the uh in the live feed um kudos to you uh people saying that it was fantastic andrew is the man as always i i didn't know oh even my cat even my cat is a big fan yeah okay yeah he's happy too thank you [Laughter] all right uh andrew i'll chat with you offline to uh to maybe get this panel thing going that sounds really exciting uh adrian cantrell brought it up he was like i'd love to have a panel to discuss to discuss uh some of the aspects of the presentation so that that sounds like first first time this this person wants to talk to me is it really oh yeah first time see community heroes man we're bringing people together yeah cool all right uh everybody thanks a bunch um uh next month we will be posting the the schedule on the the aws pug um website and we'll also be talking about it on twitter at awsmug.com so thanks a bunch and everybody have a wonderful night

Channel: AWS Portsmouth User Group

Views: 24,928

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Id: cSky-gP0Upw

Length: 95min 39sec (5739 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021