AWS Training and Certification Blog

Announcing new modern application development Specializations on Coursera

International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts over 90% of new apps will be cloud-native by 2025, yet there’s a significant deficit in employees with knowledge of modern enterprise architecture. Burning Glass estimates there are more than two million programming-language-based developer job openings just in the US, and it expects to see an average year-over-year growth of 29% of developer jobs in the next 10 years.* What this means is if you’re a developer and have today’s in-demand cloud skills, you have a great opportunity to chart your career path.

If you’re a developer who’s new to the cloud, migrating a legacy application to the cloud, or aspiring to be a cloud developer, AWS Training and Certification and Coursera are pleased to announce four new AWS Modern Application Development Specializations on Coursera to help you gain the skills you need to build modern, serverless applications in the AWS Cloud.

About the Specializations

Designed for developers and DevOps engineers with fundamental to intermediate coding experience but no prior knowledge of AWS, each AWS Specialization allows learners to develop skills specific to their preferred programming language or platform. By completing the AWS Specialization, you’ll earn a certificate of completion to share your accomplishment.

When a learner dedicates an average of three hours a week to the course, the AWS Specialization can be completed in four months. At the end of the AWS Specialization, you’ll be able to build scalable, modern, serverless applications on AWS to help you deliver faster to market, increase innovation velocity, improve reliability, and reduce costs. The AWS Specializations feature hands-on learning with multiple labs in a real AWS environment.

Learn more and enroll:

Why modern application development in the cloud matters

Organizations are shifting to a modern application development approach to increase agility with microservices, simplify management with serverless technologies, automate testing procedures with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), and lower costs of a pay-for-value pricing model.

“As organizations are migrating applications to, or building more native applications in the cloud, they’re facing a real skills gap. Managers expecting to hire their way out of skills problems face a shallow candidate pool. Now is the time to rethink their approach and invest in training existing IT talent,” says Maureen Lonergan, director of AWS Training and Certification. “With these AWS Specializations for modern application development for learners on Coursera, developers can build new skills to help drive business innovation and growth at scale as well as advance in their careers.”

Modern applications empower developers to safely experiment with new features without the fear of causing major disruption, as components are independent of one another. While experimentation is a core part of learning, informed experimentation can be more productive and efficient.

“To stay professionally competitive in any field, but especially a rapidly growing one such as cloud computing, individuals must continually learn new skills,” said Betty Vandenbosch, chief content officer at Coursera. “We are pleased to collaborate with AWS to provide learners with high-quality learning content taught by cloud development experts across several programming languages, helping learners develop the most relevant skills for their unique roles, organizations, and interests.”

What you’ll learn

New to AWS? The AWS Specializations begin with the foundational technical and cloud knowledge that you need to build in the AWS Cloud. In the first course, we introduce several AWS compute services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS storage and database offerings (e.g., Amazon DynamoDB), AWS networking capabilities, monitoring capabilities, and the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service.

Maxim Masiutin, a learner who rated the course with five stars, said, “Great material; a great way of teaching. Valuable reading: concise, explains in a friendly tone, and provides good references for further reading. I liked the quizzes for the following. If the answer is incorrect, there was an immediate explanation of which variant is correct and why.”

The second course of the AWS Specializations explores how to build an API-driven application using Amazon API Gateway for serverless API hosting, AWS Lambda for serverless computing, and Amazon Cognito for serverless authentication. “Very good content, not very deep into technical Python perspective but gives a very good idea of the general environment to construct serverless apps,” remarked Martin A. in his review, who took the Python version of the course.

Modern applications require a modern database; therefore, the third course introduces NoSQL databases and the challenges they solve. You’ll dive deep into Amazon DynamoDB, a key-value and document database, to explore multiple topics and best practices. Tien V. rated the third course five stars and commented, “Great course! Right amount of theories and practices to help me understand and start with DynamoDB.”

The Python and Java versions of the Specialization feature a bonus, fourth course, which helps you learn how to use Amazon CodeGuru. This AWS developer tool is powered by machine learning and provides intelligent recommendations to improve code quality.

Start today

To enroll in an AWS Modern Application Development Specialization on Coursera and earn a certificate of completion, learners may subscribe for $49/month. After completing any of the Specializations, learners can continue their AWS skill development with more AWS courses on Coursera or at aws.training. For developers seeking to add an industry-recognized AWS Certification to their credentials, consider preparing for the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam.

One more thing…

AWS and DeepLearning.AI recently released a third course for the Practical Data Science Specialization. This AWS Specialization is designed for data-focused developers, scientists, and analysts familiar with the Python and SQL programming languages who want to learn how to build, train, and deploy scalable, end-to-end ML pipelines—both automated and human-in-the-loop—in the AWS Cloud. Join the more than 3,700 learners on Coursera already enrolled.

*Burning Glass: Labor Insights (July 2020 to June 2021). Job growth and openings data represent the U.S. only.