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Studying for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam

on AWS, learning

A Goal

I like to have goals. They give me drive & direction. Recently I have been doing more work with AWS, and quite frankly I've found the learning curve to be insanely steep. There is so much to the platform, so much to learn and understand what each of the services do, how they all hook together, and how to even begin using it to achieve what I want to do.

Until my most recent adventures into AWS, the most I had done was set up a public website hosted in an S3 bucket, and make it available via CloudFront (and subsequently CloudFlare, as all of my sites go through CloudFlare). A month or so ago I wanted to setup CI/CD so that my code would be built, deployed, and made hosted all on AWS. Where to even begin? With so many services on offer, I personally found it really hard to filter out all of the noise and focus on what I wanted to get done. Because I didn't know what was noise, and what wasn't.

Do I want to use ElasticBeanstalk, Lightsail, EC2, CodePipeline, something else? Who knows.

Well I do, now.

The path to enlightenment

That confusion, and lack of knowledge, set me on the path to seriously spend some time focusing on and learning AWS, and what better way to help me down that path then with a rewarding goal at the end. Namely, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification. This forms the basis of most other certifications on the AWS platform, and provides a foundation knowledge of the AWS offerings. Don't let the word 'foundation' put you off though, it absolutely does provide a solid understanding of the platform (which is worth it in its own right), and with it being foundation it will be invaluable for future certifications (in which I fully intend on pursuing the AWS Certified Developer - Associate path) as the future pathways will build upon the knowledge gained from previous certifications.

Learning Resources

I used a variety of learning resources on my road to certification. Sure, its possible to learn the content via YouTube, or reading the AWS documents on each specific area, but for me I didn't know where to focus my effort. As I said earlier, there is so much noise, what do I filter out? Structured content is exactly that, structured. It focuses on the content you need to focus on, filtering out the noise. It's just what I needed.

Cloud Academy

Cloud Academy was my primary source of delivered learning. It has pathways tailored towards the exam content itself, so you know where to start, and lectures on different subject matter outside of the pathway to deepen your knowledge. I would absolutely recommend Cloud Academy as a platform to use for your learning.

Book

I bought myself the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide, which once again, was structured towards the exam. It went into more detail than the Cloud Academy content did. But I also found that it had areas which were lacking, that Cloud Academy did cover. It is a great additional resource.

AWS Documentation

Obviously the best place to learn about the AWS services is via the AWS documentation itself. Once I knew what I needed to know, I could look at the AWS documentation to focus on what I needed without letting other areas cloud my mind.

Hands-on

Even with all of the structured learning, there is no better way to learn than by getting your hands dirty and actually doing. Deploying applications to AWS, and having a play around with the free tier provides a great insight into how it all works and helps to solidify the previously learnt content.

I wouldn't use just 1 of these resources exclusively, but with all of these resources together, I felt prepared to take the practice exams and subsequently book myself in for the real exam once I was confident my learning was on the right course.

The Exam

I'm sure I don't need to talk about 'the current situation', but it only left me with the one option to take the exam, which was via PearsonVUE proctored exams. This involved taking pictures of my desk, my ID, and clearing all other applications on my computer so that the only application which was running was the OnVUE exam software. With my webcam connected an invigilator completed my check-in and started the exam - the webcam keeps running to keep an eye on things, but other than that its the same as taking the exam in an exam center (except its in your own home).

A couple of hours later (it took about 45 minutes for me to even be able to start the exam as I was waiting on an invigilator to be available - I imagine they are busy with things how they currently are in the world) I was all done and had the pass mark, although I am still awaiting detailed results which should come through in a couple of days.

All in it was a fairly smooth process and allows for exams to be taken whilst everything else seems to have come to a standstill. If you want to take an exam, I would recommend the PearsonVUE Protcor exam route.

Benefits of getting certified

In addition to being able to prove your abilities with AWS, there are 3 main additional benefits to being certified.

  • Free Practice Exam

  • 50% Exam Discount

    • Both worth it if you want to get certified in further pathways such as the Associated Developer pathway.

  • Certification Badge

    • You get a badge which you can put on your content, to show that you've achieved a certain certification.

aws certified cloud practitioner

The benefits of being certified mostly lead towards further certifications, so if that's not your thing then taking it in the first place most likely isn't for you (and I'm honestly impressed you've read this far in a blog about certification).

Next Steps

Well, as I mentioned above I want to start exploring the Developer pathway, but I think before I start down that route I'm going to tie up a couple of projects and remove the cognitive load of having those 'unfinished' projects on my mind. All in due course.