DEV Community: Karl Robinson

AWS re:Invent 2024 Reflection

Karl Robinson — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 18:17:40 +0000

I attended AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas, and what a fantastic week it was! So amazing that it felt appropriate to share my experience so that others who wish to attend in future may learn what happens at this conference to help plan their own re:Invent itinerary. 2024 was my first ‘proper’ re:Invent experience. I attended with a sponsor back in 2018 and spent most of my time on the sponsor booth pitching their services. I also attended the free online conference in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, so I have had three very different re: Invent experiences. However, attending in person in 2024 was by far the best!

Being an AWS Community Builder and AWS user Group Leader gave much more structure to the event, so I would strongly urge readers to get involved with the AWS Community in some way to get much more out of the re:Invent Experience. Let’s start with the journey to re:Invent - Las Vegas is a long way from Brighton!

Friday

I left home on Friday, November 30th, to stay overnight at Heathrow T5 so I could wake up fresh for our 10 a.m. flight to Las Vegas via Los Angeles. By the time we committed to attending, all direct flight options were sold out. I met my colleague Jon Goodall at Farringdon station in London, and we took the Elizabeth line to Heathrow, where we had a quick dinner and an early night in the Sofitel at T5.

Step Count - 10,159

Saturday

An early start on Saturday - the flight departed on time, and we had a 90-minute layover in LA, eventually arriving in Las Vegas around 5 pm local time. We checked into our rooms in Paris, Las Vegas, and in a vain attempt to beat jet lag (more on this later), we met up with my friend Demi, who lives in Vegas, and she took us to Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart. If you’ve never been, I strongly recommend it - it is an interactive art installation that you need to explore and figure out the back story by interacting with the exhibits - weird, whacky and a bit trippy, especially after being awake for 24 hours! Safely tucked up in bed by 11 pm, I was ready for my first conference activities on Sunday. Check out this short video of my 36-hour journey to re:Invent!

Step Count - 5,355 (mostly sitting in a plane!)

Sunday

Sunday started super early. Do you remember the jet lag I mentioned? I woke at 2 a.m., 3 a.m., and 4 a.m., eventually got up at 5 a.m. The hotel gym did not open until 7 a.m., so I had to do something to relieve the boredom. By 6 a.m., I was out running on the Las Vegas strip, where I ran a leisurely 5K.

After the run, I met with Jon for breakfast in Denny’s - first day in the US, of course, called for T-Bone steak & eggs breakfast to set me up for the day ahead - and we benefitted from free pancakes as the waiter thought Jon looked like Prince Harry!

The main activity for Sunday was the AWS Community Builder’s hike. A bus picked up 42 AWS Community Builders & Heroes and took us away from the madness of Las Vegas, out to Red Rock Canyon, where we separated into groups - short, medium and long routes. Jon and I opted for long, which we were told would be 10Km but ended up being 12.8Km, with some severe elevation! The weather was great - t-shirts and shorts, and it was an excellent opportunity to network with our AWS Community peers, most of whom we had only ever met online. One of the nice things about the AWS Community Builder hike is that everyone brings a snack from their home country to share with others. I brought a tin of Manx Knobs, which went down very well! Jon got some Kendal Mint Cake, which Ran Isenberg seemed to adore! We also had German gingerbread, alfajores from Argentina, Finnish chocolate and much more that I can’t remember! This was a great way to kick off the week in Vegas, beat the jet lag and meet our peers - thanks to all of the organisers, including Johannes Koch, Jenn Bergstrom, Maria Christide Noble, Niklas Westerstråhle, Richard Fan and anyone else I failed to mention.

Check out this short video I created of the hike.

After the hike, we picked up our re:Invent passes and our first bit of swag—a re:Invent hoodie and water bottle. This year the hoodie could be customised with a selection of transfers, if you were happy to wait in another line for that!

Then it was time for dinner in Virgil’s BBQ at The Linq Promenade, where all the hikers reconvened and were joined by Jason Dunn, head of the AWS Community Builder program. It was great to finally meet Jason after having read so many of his Slack messages to the community and successfully guessing how many DVDs he has in his collection to win myself some AWS Community Builder swag!

After the t-bone breakfast, 5 km run, 12.8 km hike and BBQ feast, I slept really well, believing I had cracked the jet lag and got onto the timezone, ready for the conference to begin properly on Monday.

Step Count - 37,615

Monday

After a great rest, it was time to head to The Venetian for breakfast in the AWS Community Hub in Buddy V’s restaurant. The Community Hub is open to AWS Community Builders, Heroes, and User Group Leaders, and it is a great place to get away from the crowds at the conference, get a good meal, and network with peers. It was one of the highlights of re:Invent for me - having access to this space once I eventually found it! I think I had to do a full lap of Venetian and Sands expo center before realising that Buddy V’s is right near the entrance to The Venetian…

After breakfast, I headed straight to my first session on Building the future of cloud operations at any scale. Well, I say straight - I got lost again, but I still made it on time for the session, which was packed out, with standing room only.

Next up was a session on Best Practices for Serverless Developers delivered by AWS Hero Ran Isenberg and AWS Serverless Developer Advocate Julian Wood. Another packed session - we waited in line for an hour for this one to bag front-row seats with Johannes Koch and Jeroen Reijn, who told me he listens to the LogiCast AWS News Podcast on his morning commute - the first of several LogiCast fans that we would meet at re:Invent! I was also recognised in the line by fellow AWS Community Builder Thomas Taylor, who I recruited as a future podcast guest using the Linktree QR code on the back of my iPhone!

After the sessions, I headed back to the Community Hub for lunch and to catch up on some work, where I met more AWS Heroes and former LogiCast guests, including Stephen Sennett (who is much taller than I expected!), Danielle Heberling and Brian Tarbox.

I was also approached by more LogiCast fans - Rejoice Mucheri and Harsh Shah, who wanted photos with Jon and me! This was the most unexpected thing at re:Invent. Of course, we measure podcast downloads, but it was nice to meet some of the faces behind the statistics and get feedback on how the podcast is landing. I particularly enjoyed hearing Rejoice’s story of her 3-year career transition from sales & marketing into tech and how LogiCast has been an integral part of her learning journey.

After lunch, we checked out the AWS Certified Lounge—another cool place for AWS Certified folks to hang out and, of course, to collect some more AWS Certified Swag!

We then went to check out some of the other activities available. Jon tried the Datadog slide and the ‘Fill it Forward’ water-carrying activity, which supports the installation of water filtration systems in Cambodia.

On Monday evening, we arranged dinner with the Chemist 4U team - CTO Martyn Kilbryde, John Hatton, Hannah Parry-Bruce and Martin Meredith. We checked out China Poblano in Cosmopolitan, a Chinese/Mexican fusion restaurant - it sounds weird, but it’s excellent! After dinner, we located one of Cosmo’s speakeasy bars - Ghost Donkey, which mainly serves tequila and mezcal cocktails. But given our jet lag and our busy schedules, we retired pretty early, for another terrible night of sleep in my case, with the early morning wake-ups again!

Step Count - 16887

Tuesday

Tuesday started with breakfast in Sands Convention Center before heading to line up for the Matt Garman keynote at 7 am! A DJ played rousing house music to wake us up and warm us up for the torrent of announcements about to be made - I counted 31, which I summarised in this Logicata blog post.

After the keynote, I headed to the Expo Hall to check out the Community Village, where I volunteered for an hour in the afternoon to spread the word about the various AWS Community programs. Once I had located the community booth, I visited some expo booths and collected swag. We also checked out the AWS Merch Store, which used Amazon’s ‘walk out’ technology, where you could purchase clothing, bags and even dog bandanas!

My slot on the Community Booth was at 3 pm, so I headed back there to be issued with my coveted and exclusive rhinestone AWS t-shirt! The first thing I did was check the AWS User Group interactive map to see if the AWS Brighton User Group was on there - it was! Then, I spent an hour talking to conference delegates who were interested in becoming user group members, leaders, and AWS Community Builders! Leaders from all over the world brought their User Group stickers to swap with other leaders and share with delegates - the Brighton stickers seemed really popular!

After my stint on the Community Booth, it was time to head back to Buddy V’s and wait in line for the evening’s AWS Community Builder Mixer Party. Also in the line was former LogiCast guest Ryan Pothecary and AWS Brighton User Group speaker Ryan Cormack - great to catch up with these guys and while away the time in the queue. There’s a joke there somewhere about The Two Ryans, but most reading this will probably be too young to get it…

We also planned to round up as many former LogiCast guests as we could for a guest alumni photo - this was easier said than done - there were many more guests at re:Invent that didn’t make the photo, but we’re really grateful to those that did - from left to right Amelia Hough-Ross, Jon Goodall, Stephen Sennett, Karl Robinson, Martyn Kilbryde, Andres Moreno, Darya Petrashka, Maria Christidi Noble & Ryan Pothecary.

I also made a bit of a nuisance of myself by roving around the party and interviewing other Community Builders and Heroes about their experience at AWS re:Invent. You can check out those interviews on our YouTube channel here.

Swag tokens were issued to be redeemed at the Swag booth, where we were presented with an Alpaka sling bag containing a dapper AWS Community Builder long-sleeved t-shirt, an insulated water bottle and a flight organiser - great swag!

The highlight of the evening was meeting AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, having a selfie with him, and getting his exclusive AWS Builder Card - this was my first Builder Card, and I had no idea what to do with it, but I would soon find out…

Step Count - 15,412

Wednesday

Wednesday was a bumper day for swag. Anyone with an AWS Community Profile could line up at the Swag booth and obtain a slick AWS bomber jacket with custom flight tags - I got 3 - one with my AWS Community Profile ‘handle’ (@karlrobinson), an AWS Certified tag and a re:Invent 2024 tag. Awesome swag - way to go, AWS!

We had also heard on the grapevine (well on the User Group Lead Slack) that the AWS Builder Cards creator David Heidt would be giving away as many sets of AWS Builder Cards as User Group leaders could carry to take back to play with their user group members. So I headed over to Ceasers Forum (a long walk from the Expo!) and picked up ten base game sets with ten resilience expansion packs for the AWS Brighton User Group. And David’s exclusive card for my now-growing collection! Conveniently, a FedEx kiosk was opposite the Builder Cards booth, so I headed there to ship them back to Brighton. After getting a $450 sticker shock, I decided to take them as excess luggage - it was cheaper to buy a suitcase and check it in on our return flight!

I carried all 20 sets of cards (7KG!) back to the Expo hall, where I met Jon finishing his stint at the AWS Community Booth. We thought it would be a great idea to learn how to play, so I carried them all the way back to Caesar’s Forum, where we sat down with one of the Builder Cards team and played a round. Jon picked the concept up rapidly. I was a little slower but got the gist, then Jon pipped me to the win - I’d have had him on my next strong hand - next time!

After handing Jon half of the Builder Cards, I headed for the AWS Partner Keynote with Ruba Borno. While the room was filling up, we were treated to a string quartet playing 80s, 90s, & 00s pop covers - they were great!

After the partner keynote, I returned to the expo hall to listen Martyn Kilbryde of Chemist 4U deliver his talk ‘Zero to Production Serverless in 8 weeks’, sporting his well-earned AWS gold jacket! If you don’t know about the gold jacket - this is awarded to anyone holding all 13 AWS Certifications simultaneously. It’s an exclusive club with only around 200 gold jacket owners globally! This was a great bite-sized talk about delivering a brand new solution in a very tight timeframe - the technologies used and the project management process to make this happen - certainly a few key takeaways for me.

After Martyn’s talk, it was time to head back to the Community Hub in Buddy Vs for the AWS User Group Mixer, where we had the chance to network with User Group leaders from all over the world. The highlight of this event for me was Brian Tarbox, AWS Boston User Group leader and AWS Hero, wearing his unique AWS Hero cape! And why not? We were also presented with some excellent UHG leader swag - a really cool hooded softshell jacket with AWS User Group Leader embroidered on it, a desk pad and a mug (which I managed to smash carrying it home).

During the UG lead mixer, I was tipped off that some senior AWS personnel I was hoping to meet were at the EMEA mixer party in XS nightclub at Encore. So I said my goodbyes, hot-footed it from Venetian to Encore and checked in to the EMEA mixer. I was greeted with a sea of 2-3,000 partygoers in a massive indoor and outdoor club, and I thought I had no chance of finding the guys I was looking for. But within 5 minutes, I had located Will Tomlins and had a great chat with him about how Logicata is helping AWS customers like Chemist 4U, with whom Will had just met, with their AWS Infrastructure management. While talking to Will, head of SMB for UK Norm Driskell came over - the other person I was hoping to meet! We had a great chat about user groups and the power of community and exchanged contact details to continue our conversation back in the UK. Sadly, I was too late to enjoy Natasha Beddingfield's live performance!

Step Count - 15,662

Thursday

Due to my late night at the EMEA mixer, I slept too long to make it to Werner Vogels’ keynote, so I streamed it live in my hotel room. After the keynote, I headed over to the Venetian. En route, I bumped into AWS Developer Advocate Matheus Guimaraes, who was rushing in the opposite direction to MGM to deliver a talk. Matheus delivered last year’s re:Invent re:Cap to the AWS Brighton User Group, and we’re looking forward to having him back again on 12th February 2025 to deliver this year’s re:Cap in his own inimitable style!

Back at the Venetian, it was time to trawl the expo hall for more swag - mostly socks and t-shirts, and I won a $50 Amazon gift card in an HPE raffle! Then, it was time to hear Cory Quinn’s talk about Best Practices and New Tools for Cost Reporting and Estimation.

Rounding off the conference for me was the re:Play party. We picked up the Vegas Monorail from The Linq station. We headed out to the Las Vegas Festival Grounds to be treated to sets from the re:Invent All Stars, Weezer and Zedd! Some of today‘s step count definitely happened on the dancefloor with Principal AWS Solutions Architect Vlad Nedosekin and his clients. On leaving the party, I got separated from everyone, so I headed back to Paris - probably for the best, skipping any after-parties as we were flying home the next day!

Step Count - 27,795

Friday

As we were flying home on Friday evening, we checked out of our hotel and went souvenir shopping for our families - while some re:Invent sessions were running on Friday, we were conferenced out by this point! As we started the week with my Vegas friend Demi, we finished it with her and a visit to the Las Vegas Underground Mansion - a Cold War-era nuclear bunker home! Another suitably weird Vegas experience to round off our week! After the mansion, we headed to purchase a suitcase to carry home all of the swag collected during the week - the laundry bags I purchased for this were not up to the job!

I slept most of the flight home from Vegas to Heathrow and for 12 hours straight on Saturday night at home!

Step Count - 17,281

Total re:Invent Step Count - 131,192, an average of 16,400 per day!

Summary and 5 Top re:Invent Tips!

re:Invent was an intense but highly valuable experience! When asked what the main benefit was, it was tough to narrow it down. But for me I would say networking - with AWS staff, Logicata clients and fellow AWS Community members. In our world of remote work and virtual businesses, it’s great to get out and meet people face to face, build real relationships and learn from one another. I’ve already passed a business opportunity to someone I met for the first time at re:Invent.

So, what are my top tips for re:Invent?

Tip 1 - book early to secure direct flights if you can

Tip 2 - wear comfortable shoes - check out my daily step count to understand why! I wore running shoes and hiking shoes - alternating between them to give my feet some relief!

Tip 3 - take a suitcase for swag - if you like collecting swag, you can easily fill one!

Tip 4 - stay hydrated - Vegas is in the desert. Drink lots of water and carry lip balm! Some vendors even have lip balm as swag!

Tip 5 - engage with the AWS Community before you go - being an AWS Community Builder or User Group leader gives you access to private areas, great food, great swag and great networking!

So there you have it - my re:Invent 2024 experience. See you there in 2025? I hope so!

My AWS Certification Journey

Karl Robinson — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 21:48:29 +0000

Introduction – can salespeople really get AWS Certified?

In this article, I describe my journey to becoming 4 x AWS Certified to Solutions Architect Professional level in the hope that it might inspire and help any budding AWS fans to achieve AWS certifications of their own. I’m not unique – I am part of a global community of AWS Certified people who will all have taken a different journey to achieve AWS Certification, and some have achieved significantly more than me. Full disclosure – whilst I am AWS Certified, I am not an engineer. I am a business founder and owner who has spent much of my career in IT sales and marketing. I have a marketing degree from Lancaster University, and no technical qualifications or experience other than what I have gained in my career as a technical salesperson. I am however a closet geek. So, if I can get AWS Certified to Solutions Architect Professional level, so can you! Read on if you want to find out more about why I started, where I started, how I learned, and how I ultimately went on to pass 4 proctored AWS Certification exams.

What is AWS Certification?

AWS Certifications are offered as a way to showcase knowledge of Amazon Web Services. There are many courses available both from AWS and from third parties to learn the content required to sit an AWS certification exam. Exams are proctored and can either be taken in a Pearson Vue test center, or in the comfort of your own home with a remote proctoring service – more on that later.

What AWS Certifications are available?

There are 12 AWS Certifications available in 4 main categories.

Foundational (requires 6 months of fundamental AWS and cloud industry knowledge)

AWS Cloud Practitioner

Associate Level (requires one year of experience solving problems and implementing solutions with the AWS Cloud)

AWS Solutions Architect Associate
AWS Developer Associate
AWS SysOps Administrator Associate

Professional Level (requires 2 years of experience in designing, implementing, and troubleshooting solutions on the AWS Cloud)

AWS Solutions Architect Professional
AWS DevOps Engineer Professional

Specialty (requires varying levels of technical competence in the specific domain of the exam)

AWS Security Specialty
AWS Advanced Networking Specialty
AWS Machine Learning Specialty
AWS Data Analytics Specialty
AWS Database Specialty
SAP on AWS Specialty

Why did I want to become AWS Certified?

You will have your own reasons for wanting to become AWS Certified which may overlap with mine or may be completely different. I chose to become AWS Certified for 3 main reasons:

I wanted to learn about AWS services so I can sound knowledgeable to customers and prospects – I am not an engineer so I could not learn ‘on the job’ as it is not a requirement of my primary role to use AWS on a regular basis.
I wanted proof of my knowledge to show to my customers and peers – the Certification badges are a great way to do that, and I make sure I share them wherever possible.
I founded Logicata, an AWS Consulting Partner, and in order to achieve and maintain AWS Partner status, a certain number of AWS Certifications must be achieved and maintained, and I wanted to lead the business from the front before expecting my team to begin their own AWS Certification journey.

Where did I start?

AWS Online Training

AWS has several introductory online courses for AWS Partners with self-paced e-learning and online knowledge check tests. On successful completion of the tests, a certificate is issued.

Business Professional – first I attempted AWS Business Professional – this is, as you would expect, commercially focused training that introduces the basic value proposition of Cloud, the AWS Partner Program, etc. The training takes about 4 hours and the test is fairly easy – it is not proctored and you can continue to retake it until you pass.

Technical Professional – Next I went on to AWS Technical Professional. This course gives a high-level introduction to some of the more commonly used AWS services such as EC2, RDS, S3, etc. Again this is around a 4-hour time commitment and has an online test similar to Business Professional.

The above certifications do count towards your employer's status as an AWS Partner so are well worth doing, and are a great introduction to learning AWS services.

Where to next?

Now I had 2 certificates, and I’d got the certification bug – it was time for me to tackle my first 'proper' AWS Certification – the AWS Cloud Practitioner.

AWS Cloud Practitioner

AWS Cloud Practitioner is the only ‘Foundational’ level AWS Certification, and it builds upon the knowledge you have gained in the Business and Technical Professional certifications. AWS offers free self-paced e-learning courses for Cloud Practitioner, both in traditional slideware format and in a gamified format in the AWS Cloud Quest training. I took the training before Cloud Quest existed, and probably due to my advancing years I would still have gone with the slideware option, but I do have younger colleagues who think that Cloud Quest is a great option for them! AWS Cloud Practitioner has a proctored exam, meaning you need to be observed under full exam conditions to pass this certification. The test is not too difficult and is scored out of 1000 with a pass mark of 700. I achieved a score of 995 which I was super happy about, and it remains to this day my highest score in an AWS Certification exam – it was all downhill from here! (read on for more scores...) Pass/Fail was advised immediately on the day and detailed scoring was provided later.

Buoyed by my success with AWS Cloud Practitioner, I decided to step things up a level and go for my first ‘proper’ technical AWS Certification – AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

Solutions Architect Associate

Now we’re getting technical, and really you need to get hands-on with AWS in order to grasp the concepts required to pass AWS Solutions Architect Associate. Don’t worry, you can learn most if not all that you need within the AWS Free Tier, so you needn’t run up a scary AWS bill (if you remember to clean up after yourself!). One tip I recall from the training is that you need to know how to build an AWS VPC from scratch – subnets, security groups, etc, in order to pass the exam. I took that tip literally and labbed this several times until I could do it without external prompts, and this served me well.

I used the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate training from aCloud Guru which primarily featured Ryan Kroonenberg. The course is hands-on with loads of labs so it will get you up and running on AWS.

The course also has a lot of knowledge checks and a big test at the end to prepare you for the exam.

The pass mark for the exam was 720, again with pass/fail advised on the day and detailed scoring shared later. I was happy to achieve a score of 940!

SysOps Administrator

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator builds on Solutions Architect Associate and focuses on deploying, managing and operating workloads in AWS. This exam was the only AWS certification to include Labs in the exam rather than just the usual multiple choice/multiple answer exams, but at the time of writing those labs were being removed. I did the exam before the labs were added, so I have no experience of sitting an AWS exam with lab work.

I used the AWS SysOps Administrator course from aCloud Guru which primarily featured Faye Ellis

I also decided to take some 3rd party practice tests to prepare for this exam -I used the tests from Whizlabs.

The pass mark for the exam was 720, again with pass/fail advised on the day and detailed scoring shared later. I was happy to achieve a score of 837 - scores starting to slip a little now...

Solutions Architect Professional

Getting serious now, I set my sights on a Pro level cert. I thought perhaps I could do this without any training, so I attempted some practice exams on Tutorials Dojo. They are tough, and I failed, so back to the training I went.

As an AWS Community Builder I was entitled to free access to Cloud Academy, so I followed the AWS Solutions Architect Professional track there, mostly by Stuart Scott. Warning - there are a lot of hours of training to consume - it is quite a time commitment.

I also supplemented my training with the 'Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional' course on Udemy by Stephane Maarek.

Feeling confident in my ability to take the exam, I booked it using my exam voucher from the AWS Community Builder program. As the date approached, I realized I did not feel ready so I deferred the exam for 3 months. As the date approached again, I still did not feel ready, so I deferred it one last time - you can defer twice without losing your exam credit. I knew the SAP-C01 exam was being retired and replaced with SAP-C02, so I thought I had better take the exam before I needed to do yet more training!

Something I found super useful was the AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam challenge webinars run by Rob Callaghan and Michelle Restivo. In these sessions, the trainer breaks down the anatomy of a question and gives you a structured approach to working out the answer. What I learned in these sessions was invaluable, and helped me to answer questions that I did not really know the answer to!

Full disclosure again - I did not complete all of the training before successfully passing the exam.

The pass mark for the exam was 750, with no pass/fail advised on the day - an agonizing wait to find out. Just scraped in on this one with a score of 765 - but a pass is a pass, right?!

Where to sit the exam – online or test center?

So I mentioned earlier in the post that you now have 2 options for taking proctored AWS certification exams – Pearson Vue testing centers and remote proctoring at home or another remote location. I’ve done both so I will share my thoughts and preferences.

Pearson Vue Test Centre

Pearson Vue has over 5000 test centers in 180 countries – so chances are they have one near you. My nearest test center is in Crawley which is about a half hour's drive from where I live. The advantage of going to a test center is that exam conditions are provided for you, so you can just turn up, take the test and leave. A distraction-free workstation is provided, along with an erasable whiteboard and marker pen should you wish to make notes – you’re not allowed to take any notes away from the test center. They also provide lockers for your valuables as you are not permitted to take any personal effects into the examination room, including mobile phones and even watches. The downside is that you need to travel to the test center.

Online proctored exam at home

Since the Covid 19 pandemic, you have had the option to take an online proctored exam at home. This is great if you don’t live within a reasonable distance of a testing center, and allowed people to continue to take exams during the lockdown. Before the exam, you are sent instructions on how to prepare your room. You must have a workstation with only a single monitor – if it’s a laptop, no external monitor is allowed. There can be no paper visible in the room, and no clocks or watches are allowed. You must show the proctor around the room with your webcam prior to starting the exam, and if there is anything that is forbidden they will ask you to remove it before sitting the exam. The advantage of this approach is that you can take an exam from literally anywhere with an Internet connection. The disadvantage if you have a ‘busy’ office like me, is that you may need to do a lot of preparation to get your room prepped for exam conditions. Having tried both methods I can honestly say it is quicker and easier for me to drive to a testing center. But it was great to be able to sit my SysOps Administrator exam during lockdown conditions. What’s best for you will of course depend on your own individual circumstances.

AWS Certification Expiry & Renewal

Like all good things, some AWS certifications do not last forever.

Business and Technical Professional have no expiry date.
AWS Cloud Practitioner has no expiry date.
Associate Level Certifications expire after 3 years (Solutions Architect Associate auto-renews if/when you pass Solutions Architect Professional)
Professional and Specialty level certificates expire after 3 years.

Benefits of AWS Certification

There are many benefits to becoming AWS Certified – I’ve tried to list as many as I can below.

Employability – many employers such as Logicata are looking for verified AWS skills and certifications are a great way to stand out. AWS Partners also need those certifications to achieve and maintain their partner status, so your certifications are desirable. However, certifications alone won’t get you hired – you’ll also need demonstrable experience to land that dream job.
Certificate – you get a nice certificate that you can frame and put on your wall, share on social media, or with prospective employers. It’s important to note that your certification belongs to you, not your employer, even if they supported you to get it. So if you change jobs, you are still certified!
AWS Credits – If you work for an AWS Partner, your employer will receive AWS Credits once a quarter for any AWS certifications you have achieved - £$300 for every Associate level cert, and $500 for Professional and Specialty certs.
Exam Discount Vouchers – Every time you pass an exam, you get a 50% voucher towards your next exam (they know how to keep you hooked!)
Credly Badges – the Credly website is free and offers a great way to showcase your certifications. It also pulls through to LinkedIn so you can show your certifications on your LinkedIn profile, so colleagues, customers, prospects, and recruiters can see them (yes we do look for these when we are hiring!).

Lounge Access & more swag at AWS events – you’ll find AWS Certified Lounges at AWS Summits and AWS re:Invent (and other events I may not have mentioned). These lounges are a great place to recharge – both yourself and your devices – you can grab a coffee, a seat, a power socket, and chat with other AWS Certified individuals (if you so wish, we’re a friendly bunch!). You’ll probably also bag some free ‘AWS Certified’ swag – I’ve collected stickers, pins, and even a 3-way USB charge lead with a light-up AWS Certified Logo! (if that’s not enough to tempt you, I don’t know what is…)
AWS Certified Global Community LinkedIn Group – you’ll gain access to an exclusive LinkedIn group with over 125,000 members – this is a great place to share content, seek jobs, and network with like-minded individuals.
AWS Certified Swag Store – you’ll get access to the exclusive AWS Certified swag store where you can purchase a range of AWS Certified merchandise such as polo shirts, t-shirts, and hoodies. Be warned though – for some reason the fulfillment company does not ship outside the USA. I had to send mine to a US-based colleague who kindly forwarded it on. By the time I paid the shipping fees and UK customs charges, this was very expensive swag! But I did work hard to get access to the store, so I justified it to myself! I also discovered services that will forward packages for you outside of the US if you too are desperate for some AWS Certified swag!

That Gold Lame Jacket! – If you are smart enough and dedicated enough to achieve all 12 AWS certifications and hold them simultaneously (so you must take all exams in 3 years), you will be entitled to the exclusive gold lame jacket so you can really stand out and showcase your achievement! I’ve heard that there may be a few other conditions, such as needing to be in Seattle on a certain day to be presented with the jacket, but this is hearsay…

Signing off…

So, there you have it – my AWS Certification Journey. I am but one of literally hundreds of thousands of AWS Certified Professionals, and each will have made their own unique journey to AWS Certification. I hope I have shown you the benefits of becoming AWS Certified, shared some useful resources, and inspired you to start or continue your own AWS Certification journey. Please reach out to me if you have any questions, connect with me on LinkedIn, listen to my Logicast podcast, or just comment and share details of your own journey. Good luck, and see you in the AWS Certified Lounge!