Introducing new AWS Serverless digital learning badges

This post is written by Josh Kahn, Tech Leader, Serverless.

Today, we are excited to announce an all-new way to demonstrate your AWS Serverless knowledge and skills: a verifiable, digital badge. The new digital badge is aligned with our Serverless Learning Plan now available in AWS Skill Builder.

You can earn the digital badge by scoring at least 80 percent on the assessment associated with the Learning Plan. The badge proves your knowledge and skills for AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and designing serverless applications. You can celebrate your achievement on your resume, social media, and AWS re:Post with the verifiable badge distributed and managed by Credly. The badge includes metadata to verify the issuer and skills demonstrated by the holder. The Serverless Learning Plan and digital badge assessment are now available, for free.

Ready to get started or want to jump immediately to the assessment? Start here. Continue reading to learn more about the details of AWS Skill Builder and our Serverless Learning Plan.

The Serverless Learning Plan

Our Serverless Learning Plan has been designed to help you get started building with Serverless technology. AWS experts designed the content to provide a clear learning path to help you develop the skills you need quickly.

The Learning Plan starts with an introduction to the “Serverless Mindset” and introduces key concepts to help you design architectures and applications. It discusses how to best take advantage of the event-driven orientation of serverless computing.

Next, the course “AWS Lambda Foundations” covers the fundamentals of AWS Lambda, an event-driven compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You’ll learn foundational concepts, including how Lambda works, security and permission models, and best practices for writing Lambda functions.

The Learning Plan also includes four courses that span the lifecycle of building Lambda-based applications. In “Architecting Serverless Applications,” you learn about common architectures and patterns for serverless applications. We explore how to build microservices, data processing workloads, Alexa skills, mobile backends, and automate tasks in your AWS account. The course also discusses the trade-offs in selecting from the various compute options available to you.

The “Scaling Serverless Architectures” course discusses concepts such as Lambda concurrency and how Lambda-based applications scale. We briefly explore optimization opportunities for Lambda functions and trade-offs. While this course is not a deep dive in optimization across all supported runtimes, it offers a starting point.

In “Security and Observability for Serverless Applications,” you’ll learn how to use services such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and AWS X-Ray in concert with Lambda-based applications. We also discuss the built-in logging to Amazon CloudWatch and considerations. This course also touches on how the Lambda service creates isolation and a security boundary between functions.

There are a number of popular options for deploying and managing serverless applications. In “Deploying Serverless Applications,” we explore the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) and the AWS suite of developer tools. You’ll learn best practices for deployment, including how to automate deployment using a CI/CD pipeline. This course also covers concepts such as Lambda versions and aliases, Lambda environment variables, and other deployment features.

Serverless is more than Lambda. During the Learning Plan, you also learn how to use Amazon API Gateway to create and deploy serverless APIs. “Amazon API Gateway for Serverless Applications” discusses REST and WebSocket options available from API Gateway and how to integrate with Lambda and other backends. The course also discusses the rich set of API Gateway features available, including caching, various authorization modes, usage plans, API keys, and deployment stages.

To complete the Learning Plan, we also provide an introduction to event-driven architectures built using services such as AWS Step Functions and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). This course compliments the “Serverless Mindset” course to help you think about how asynchronous processing can improve the resiliency and scalability of your serverless applications.

All courses are available in a variety of languages.

After completing the Learning Plan, take the online assessment and score over 80 percent to earn the digital badge. Our badge assessments are linked to curriculum standards and have been developed by field subject matter experts (SMEs) and content/curriculum SMEs. If you are already familiar with AWS Serverless, you can also jump right to the assessment. If you don’t pass, you’ll be guided on how to fill knowledge gaps and can retake the assessment after 24 hours.

We’re also working to add more courses on topics, such as Amazon EventBridge, and more extensive course work on event-driven architectures next year. Stay tuned.

Our Learning Plan has been designed for you to move at your own pace, from wherever you are. It’s a great opportunity to build new skills or refresh your knowledge. Employers seeking to build knowledge in Serverless can also use the Learning Plan and digital badge to build critical knowledge in the space.

AWS Skill Builder

Beyond our recommended Serverless curriculum, Skill Builder offers a bevy of digital courses developed for different roles (e.g., developer, architect, data engineer) and domains (e.g., storage, databases). Skill Builder offers free learning content as well as subscription plans for individuals and teams. Skill Builder is a great way to advance your skills in areas that often touch serverless applications, including security, observability / monitoring, and DevOps.

We encourage you to check out these other expert-designed courses to help advance your knowledge of AWS. Subscription plans include hands-on labs and certification practice exams. The free content includes over 500 courses and learning plans, all available on-demand so that you can learn at your own pace.

Dive deeper with the AWS Serverless Ramp-up Guide

If you want to dive deeper after completing the AWS Serverless Learning Plan, download the AWS Ramp-Up Guide for Serverless. The guide includes a listing of courses, hands-on workshops, classroom training, and other resources to enrich your serverless knowledge.

Think of the Ramp-Up Guide as a menu of options. Pick and choose the topics that are most interesting to you and move at your own pace. We’ve included digital courses, reading, videos, and workshops to help you learn however is most effective for you.

We’re working to continually update the Ramp-up Guide so that you can easily find up-to-date content to deepen your skills. Check back for updates.

Conclusion

We’re excited to share the newly updated Serverless Learning Plan and all-new digital badge with you. To our knowledge, this is one of the first ways (if not the first) that Serverless builders can verifiably demonstrate their knowledge to the community and employers. Our team of SMEs across AWS Serverless and Training & Certification are excited to hear your feedback on the Learning Plan as well as where you would like to see us develop training next.

The AWS Serverless Learning Plan and digital badge are available now. All courses are available on-demand. Both the learning plan courses and the assessment are free for everyone.

Share your accomplishment by posting on social media with the hashtag #AWSTraining! Get started today at https://aws.amazon.com/training/learn-about/serverless/.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.