AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification

This post was originally published on the Leading EDJE website in March 2018.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently introduced a new Cloud Practitioner entry level certification, and I've just completed the free online training and the examination for this certification to try and determine who it might be useful to within our organization. I already hold the AWS Solutions Architect (Associate) certification but I've been trying to evaluate this from the perspective of someone relatively new to the platform.

Amazon recommends that candidates "have at least six months of experience with the AWS Cloud in any role, including technical, managerial, sales, purchasing, or financial". In other words this certification claims to be for pretty much anyone. I was particularly interested in whether this training would be useful for our project managers, business analysts, sales and leadership teams. Having 6 months of experience may make sense for those in technical roles, but for others I would think it's useful to have some training before trying to manage or sell an AWS based cloud project.

The certification is broken down into these areas (from the Exam Guide): Cloud Concepts, Security, Technology, Billing and Pricing, with the largest portion of the questions being from the Technology area. The Technology questions are mostly testing whether you have a basic understanding of what different AWS services are and how they relate to different architectural principles; for example auto-scaling groups give your system elasticity.

There is free training available via the AWS Training portal that you can either create an account with directly (or use an existing Amazon account) or if you are part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) you can access training via the APN portal to ensure that your training is linked to your APN account. The "AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials" course provides about 7 hours of video training.

While this training does cover most of the topics that are in the exam there are some problems with the content:

Update April 2020: These notes were about the first version of the course, there's a newer version of the course now that may have addressed these problems

• Some sections appear to be out of order - Application Load Balancers are covered before Classic Load Balancers with the Classic Load Balancers section containing the fundamentals of load balancing.
• The Bonus Materials section contains some very well done videos on Virtual Private Cloud, Security Groups, NACLs, IAM and encryption. Unfortunately all of these videos are out of order which could make them confusing. They also go into far more technical depth than is required for the exam.
• There's a long section on the AWS Well-Architected Framework that would be more at home in the Solutions Architect training. It's not clear if any of the exam questions are related to this (none of the questions I had were).
• Most of the Core Services presentations start with an overview of a service and then show a demo of using it in the AWS console. These demos are less useful than a hands on lab for technical staff and not useful for non-technical staff.

The popular cloud training provider "A Cloud Guru" also has training for the Cloud Practitioner certification. I've not taken this training, but from reviewing the course outline and reading the forums this appears to take a more hands on approach, with labs where you set up a website.

Both these training courses highlight the main problem with the certification; it claims to be for everyone but the content appears to be an uneasy mix of technical and non-technical content. The exam will ask you about Edge locations (as used for CloudFront), but also expect you to have memorized what's available in the different support levels.

I would be most comfortable recommending the certification for those in a project management or business analyst role where understanding what services are available to better understand technical discussions will be useful, and they will also be involved in decisions about support and billing.

It may provide a useful introduction to AWS for technical team members who want to know more about AWS but aren't ready to dive into the Developer or Solutions Architect training, but for most I'm not sure it's worth spending the time or money to get the Cloud Practitioner certification.

For the sales and managerial teams I would instead recommend the AWS Business Professional Online accreditation that's available and free to APN members. It gives a better overview of the value proposition for using AWS and the available services without going into unnecessary technical details.

Since I wrote this article I've taught the AWS Academy Cloud Foundations course at Columbus State Community College that prepares you for this certification.

One thing I've realized is that infrastructure, servers, Linux etc. (and therefore the Cloud) are not as easy to understand for some developers as I'd previously assumed, especially if they've only ever developed on Windows and had no involvement with deployment. Therefore, for those developers that might be hesitant to dive into AWS by themselves because they find it overwhelming (and it was for me at first), this course may be a good starting point.