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AWS Developer Associate: Planning my certification

Some time ago I realised I want to know to make things work in AWS to be a better developer. Or, in general, I want to be savvy in cloud computing. This mission statement is pretty vague, so I thought that certification would be a good credential and a good test of my knowledge. Luckily, I didn’t have to go too far: Amazon not only provides a certification but also a lot of preparation material to set me up for success.

Still, getting certified is also a big task. Below is my analysis of the resources available, and finally a step-by-step plan, zero to hero.

Amazon Exam Prep Resources

I thought it reasonable to just start with the official free resources. Luckily, there are a lot of them available.

I started at the AWS Certified Developer — Associate homepage. The most important piece on that page is the “Prepare for your Exam” section. The rest of the resources on the page I’ve found to be either duplicated or irrelevant.

There are three sections that have valuable links:

  1. Exam review
  2. AWS training for developers
  3. AWS whitepapers

FAQ is also valuable, but I think those to be reference material that I’ll reach for when I need help.

Exam Review

Exam review covers two important areas: what to expect in an exam, and how to figure out if you’re ready for it yet.

Expectations are set with two PDFs:

To understand if you’re ready, there are two tests you can take with AWS Skill Builder (turns out Amazon has an education platform):

The exam readiness test is estimated to take 2 hours, which suggests it will be representative of an actual exam.

There’s also a webinar. Looks like they are scheduled regularly, but the content is a bit of a black box to me. I’ll just have to attend and see if it’s useful.

AWS Training for Developers

This section is built from AWS Skill Builder courses entirely. There are 7 free courses and a paid one. I’m only focusing on the free stuff for now.

I’ve enrolled on all seven available courses:

By the Skill Builder’s estimate, they will take around 8 hours to complete. I’m not sure if I’ll be completing them in any particular order: more on that when I get to it. For now, I’ve just logged the 7 courses as a TODO.

AWS Whitepapers

There’s seven links. One is very different from the others: the AWS Well-Architected framework.

Unlike the other whitepapers, AWS Well-Architected Framework is big and important enough to warrant a dedicated learning resource: Well-Architected Labs. Looks big enough to deserve its own TODO as well.

The rest are whitepapers: big, long, technical documents, that I’ll have to read and understand at some point. Like the Skill Builder courses, I think think there’s a particular order in which I’ll need to absorb them, so logging this as a separate TODO.

Note: the links on the certification’s home page pointed me to archived documents. I’ve found the recent versions of the same documents by using the Whitepaper Search.

Plan

After looking at all of the resources available, my plan looks as follows:

  1. Go through the exam overview docs: exam guide and sample questions
  2. Attend the amazon webinar on getting ready for a certification
  3. Go through AWS Skill Builder courses (7 courses)
  4. Go through the Well-Architected Labs
  5. Go through the whitepapers (6 items)
  6. Take readiness tests with AWS Skill Builder
  7. Sign up and take the certification exam

That’s it! Will keep you folks posted on the progress 🙂