AWS Training and Certification Blog

Resources to navigate your AWS Cloud learning journey

Editor’s note: This blog is meant to provide those with an interest in keeping their AWS Cloud skills fresh—in particular, cloud architects—with tips on trainings, interactive learning options, reasons to get AWS Certified, and how you can reinforce your learnings.

Do you want to sharpen your Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud skills and stay on top of the latest AWS Training and Certification offerings? Not sure where to start? We can help!

There are several resources to help you hone your craft as a builder and stay up to date on the latest and greatest AWS developments. The three of us come from different backgrounds, ranging from mechanical engineering to computer science. We came into our roles over a year ago with little to no cloud experience. We completed Tech U, an AWS Education Program that focuses on career-development acceleration for recent graduates starting technical roles at AWS. After a year of supporting customers of various sizes and industries, we wanted to share the wealth of information that’s helped us keep our AWS Cloud skills sharp, including trainings, certifications, experiential learning options, open communities, and events.

Keeping your skills sharp

Training is a building block but also an essential ongoing component to understand all the AWS Cloud has to offer. AWS Training and Certification can help you harness your skills, improving your effectiveness and ability to innovate in the cloud. The content is created by AWS experts and updated regularly so you can keep your cloud skills fresh.

AWS Twitch Training

In addition to a variety of training in both digital and classroom formats, AWS Training and Certification also offers training content via Twitch. We suggest you check out AWS Power Hour: Architecting, which is an interactive, livestreamed six-week series. AWS experts guide you through the content with demonstrations and real-world examples covering key aspects of architecting on AWS, like security and storage. There’s also a live Q&A to help you connect with subject matter experts regarding architectures you’ve been building on AWS. There are several other purpose-built training series on Twitch too, including AWS Power Hour: Machine Learning and AWS Dev Hour: Building Modern Applications.

AWS Blogs

To strengthen your learning, dive deeper into use cases across more the 40 AWS blog channels. You’ll find a variety of content from machine learning (ML) and media services to architectural patterns and updates on AWS Partner solution integrations with AWS. AWS blog posts can also be shared with customers to highlight best practices and provide updates on new features. For example, we’ve shared blog posts with customers about everything from high-level tips and guidance (i.e., Ten tips for multi-tenant, multi-Region object replication in Amazon S3), to blogs that update customers about new features and how to enable them (i.e., Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering – Improved Cost Optimizations for Short-Lived and Small Objects).

The AWS Training and Certification Blog is also a great resource for additional information. The following posts are a great place to start:

Reinforce your knowledge with interactive tutorials and labs

Courses are just one aspect of keeping skills fresh. You’ll also want to build your expertise by doing. Let’s talk about a few different ways to do that.

AWS Free Tier and Tutorials

Log into the AWS Management Console to dive deep into how something works. Many of the services are offered on a trial period in the form of an AWS Free Tier, allowing you to experiment and get a feel for how it all comes together without worrying about costs. We spent hours testing different services, such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon Sagemaker, to get a better feel for how our customers and Partners use the services.

Tutorials walk you through common design patterns. This can be especially helpful in strengthening your understanding of the use cases for AWS services and how best to build with them.

AWS Quickstarts Page

The Quickstarts page includes 300+ automated deployments, built by solutions architects and our Partners, to help you deploy popular technologies on AWS. They help reduce many of the manual steps required to set up new services and get you building faster, in addition to having built-in security and high availability.

One of the Quickstarts we really like is the IoT Device Simulator. Even if you don’t have a physical IoT device, you’ll be able to build a large fleet of virtual connected devices from a user-defined template and simulate the publishing of data at regular intervals to AWS IoT. Quickstarts are a great foundation as we add services or write additional code to provide additional functionality for the specific use case we’re building for.

AWS Well-Architected Labs

We find it helpful to reinforce our knowledge with self-paced labs. For instance, the Well-Architected labs help you learn how to build in accordance with the AWS Well-Architected framework. The intermediate and advanced security labs are a great place to improve your current security posture and learn more about managing your infrastructure.

If you’re eager to start building ML models on AWS, check out the Amazon Sagemaker Workshop. It walks you through the entire ML pipeline of building to deploying models at scale.

Test your knowledge with AWS Certifications

As you gain confidence building on AWS, test your knowledge and skills by earning an AWS Certification. With 11 AWS Certifications targeted at different domains and roles, you can choose the certification that’s right for you. We recommend starting with the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exams as a foundation and then choosing the ones that are most applicable to your interests. AWS Certifications will also help you stand out professionally by validating your cloud expertise to the world. To get started, you can check out the multitude of preparation resources, including AWS Certification exam guides.

Engage with peers and leaders

You can stay up to date with new releases and continue learning in other fun and interactive ways. Here are a few suggestions.

AWS Communities and Events

The AWS Community Builders Program offers technical resources, mentorship options, and networking opportunities to AWS enthusiasts and tech leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community. Anyone who’s over 18 years of age and passionate about building on AWS is welcome to apply! Membership terms last for a year, but members are welcome to re-apply the following year to remain in the program. Members join virtual calls, participate in mentorship opportunities, and share or produce educational and technical content.

There’s a plethora of AWS events and webinars for current and future builders, developers, business leaders, startups, Partners, and public-sector customers. Some events we’ve found particularly valuable are AWS re:Invent and AWS is How. Other events we recommend include the online AWS Summits and AWS re:Inforce.

AWS Summits happen twice a year in the spring and fall, and re:Inforce typically happens in August. The summits include sessions delivered by solutions architects and Partners on different topics, such as compute, ML, containers, IoT, security, and much more!

We recommend you plan to attend AWS re:Invent, if possible, either in person or virtually. It takes place November 29 through December 3, 2021 in, Las Vegas, Nevada, and you can also view content online for free from November 28 through December 10, 2021. At re:Invent, you can learn about architectural patterns and best practices, sign up for bootcamps, participate in interactive labs, and even take an AWS Certification exam.

AWS on Social Media

You may also want to check out the AWS YouTube channel. You’ll find all sorts of different series to expand your knowledge across tech domains and industries where AWS is making an impact. Our personal favorite is This is My Architecture because you get to see AWS customers whiteboarding their company architecture live while walking us through their major design decisions. It’s a fantastic way to get more insight into building optimally on the cloud. There are a plethora of other great channels for enhancing your learning as well, such as:

Love podcasts? Check out The Official AWS Podcast. With over 400 different episodes, it’s perfect for on-the-go learning of the latest news and trends in storage, security, infrastructure, serverless, and more. We suggest the AWS Industrial Insights Podcast for use cases and technology advancements that may be more relevant to your industry and Conversations with Leaders for insights on how our leaders think and collaborate.

For bite-sized updates on what’s new and upcoming with AWS, we recommend following Twitter and LinkedIn. Some notable leaders to follow on LinkedIn and Twitter include Andy Jassy, Adam Selipsky, Werner Vogels, Jeff Bar, Francessca Vasquez, and Allie K. Miller. Also, check out the Amazon News and AWS re:Invent Twitter channels.

What resources will you use?

We hope this blog has shined a light on some of the many ways in which you can strengthen your AWS Cloud knowledge. The learning truly never stops, and we wish you all the best in your journey!