Zero to AWS Certified in Ten Days

You can get from “Amazon Web Services is cloud stuff, yeah?” to AWS capable and fluent - and Certified! - in ten days. Here’s how…

I’m pretty good at figuring things out. Self-study and on-the-job training work for me. But whenever I’ve tried to crack Amazon Web Services that way I hit a giant wall of “Oh wow this is a lot of stuff.”

I have no “cloud” on my resume. I have tonnes of infrastructure support and systems integration experience. And I got all that experience working in a customer support center.

So “customer support” is what recruiters and interviewers notice and the first three conversations I have with most prospective employers start like, “Gordon, right? … Have you ever worked with anything ‘high tech’?”

A couple weeks ago a friend told me to get fluent in AWS and suggested that, bonus!, an AWS cert would bump up my street cred. So I moved that ‘Learn to use Amazon Web Services’ card back to the Doing list.

Here’s what I should have done first…

0. Read this thread

Learn what to expect, what to look forward to, and how to give and ask for help while you’re learning to use Amazon Web Services.

Here’s what I did…

1. Learn how to use Amazon Web Services

• Take the acloud.guru class, follow the labs and do the quizzes

This acloud.guru class takes you through all of the main features and capabilities of the AWS platform and helps you learn to use them. Play along. Do all the exercises. Try everything. Ask questions. Find answers.

2. Get familiar with the best practices

• Review the FAQs
• Read the recommended AWS whitepapers

There was some trivia on the test that I missed because I didn’t spend enough time studying the FAQs and whitepapers.

Research everything that stands out or seems interesting or unfamiliar. Look it up. Sign in to AWS and try it. Re-watch the class video that covers it.

3. Pass the exam

• Schedule the exam - Plan ahead, you may have to schedule a few days out
• Take each acloud.guru quiz and test until you get 100% every time*
• Pass the exam

* The mini and final are intense. I did these until I got over 85% consistently.

Some links

• Exam blueprint and example questions
• AWS certification prep page
• The acloud.guru course is likely more current and may have better resources and practice tests, but …
• The acloud.guru course is also on udemy.com
• Do the qwiklabs quest for extra practice

Caveat

The acloud.guru course is fantastic and could probably get anybody through the certification exam. I wanted to learn about Amazon Web Services and acloud.guru is fantastic for that, too.

When I say you can get from zero to certified, though, I mean zero experience just with AWS. I’d like you head on this track with some system administration, networking, and Linux experience first. Honestly answer these questions :

• Do I know why people use AD?
• Do I know what a subnet is?
• Do I know what ‘yum update’ does?

If you answered “No” somewhere, or you’re still thinking about what year it is, then maybe re-evaluate why you want to learn to use AWS.

Other Caveat

I had a week off of work while I did this. If you’re working a full time job and have a family or other sort of life, probably give yourself more than ten days.

That said, I was pretty relaxed about getting through all the learning and lab exercises .. maybe challenge yourself: Crank the video playback up to 2.0x with the labs side-by-side, see if you can do it in five days!