With its vast selection of on-demand cloud computing services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) undeniably dominates the cloud infrastructure market. AWS currently comprises over 35% of the global cloud platform market share – considerably higher than rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
And that market share continues expanding every year. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, AWS grew revenue by over 37% to $62 billion. This exponential growth fuels tremendous demand for cloud professionals skilled in architecting, developing and operating AWS workloads.
Obtaining AWS certifications provides the best way to validate your expertise to employers and advance your cloud computing career.
But what are the available AWS certification paths? What prerequisites and experience do you need for each certification exam? And most importantly, how do you adequately prepare to become AWS certified? This comprehensive guide answers these key questions and more on acing your AWS cloud certifications.
We’ll cover:
- The foundational, associate, professional and specialty AWS certification paths
- Exact exam details including format, length, cost and passing score
- Necessary experience recommended before attempting each exam
- Most popular online courses and materials to prep and pass
Let’s get started!
Kickstarting Your Cloud Career – Cloud Practitioner Certification
The recently updated AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner serves as the perfect starting point for anyone beginning their AWS cloud journey.
While no prior AWS experience is required, familiarity with general IT or networking concepts proves helpful before attempting the exam.
Some core knowledge areas covered include:
- Defining the AWS Cloud value proposition and benefits of the cloud
- Using the AWS Management Console to analyze resource utilization and billing data
- Describing the basic architecture principles that guide AWS service designs
- Identifying key attributes of core AWS services for computing, databases, storage and networking
This broad overview covers fundamentals across many facets of the AWS platform – not an in-depth look at any one topic. Passing this exam confirms you grasp the bigger picture view before specializing further.
You can expect mostly conceptual questions testing this breadth of knowledge, such as:
Which AWS offering enables users to find, buy, and immediately start using software solutions in their AWS environment?
A. AWS IQ
B. AWS Marketplace
C. AWS Trusted Advisor
D. AWS PrivateLinkCandidates should possess 6 months to 1 year experience in any IT support or technical services role before attempting this exam.
Typical job titles pursuing this foundational certification include IT support engineers, sales team members, business analysts and project managers.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Details
- 90 minute exam with 65 multiple choice questions
- Online proctored or testing center
- $100 exam fee
- 70% minimum passing score
When it comes to prepping for this beginner-level exam, stick to fundamental AWS training like A Cloud Guru’s Cloud Practitioner course or the self-paced digital course offered directly through AWS.
Leveling Up Your Skills – Associate Certifications
Once you establish an essential AWS cloud foundation, the next step involves obtaining an AWS Associate certification.
These industry-recognized credentials validate your ability to implement solutions and develop applications leveraging AWS tools and services.
The associate certification tier offers three tailored tracks based on common cloud infrastructure roles:
AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
The Solutions Architect Associate certification demonstrates your expertise in architecting distributed systems on AWS.
Solutions architects take technical requirements and design appropriate AWS-hosted solutions to fulfill them. Exam knowledge areas include:
- Selecting AWS services to meet availability, security and cost requirements
- Identifying loose coupling and stateless systems as preferred architectural principles
- Estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control levers for new solutions
As an example, the exam may test your skills choosing services to improve performance for a scenario like:
A company is running a customer-facing web application on AWS that experiences significant spikes in traffic during weekly marketing campaigns, causing high latency. Which combination of services should be used to cost-effectively meet these traffic spikes?
A. Add Auto Scaling rules to the existing EC2 instances
B. Implement Amazon CloudFront and ElastiCache
C. Migrate the application database to Amazon DynamoDB
D. Use AWS Fargate with Application Auto ScalingMost candidates have 1-2 years experience as a solutions architect, developer or systems administrator before attempting this certification exam.
AWS Developer – Associate
The Developer Associate exam confirms proficiency in building secure, high-performing applications using AWS services. Key knowledge areas covered include:
- Implementing AWS security controls and compliance validation
- Deploying solutions using Elastic Beanstalk and CodeDeploy
- Choosing AWS database services like DynamoDB or RDS
Developers ready to sit this exam typically have 1-2 years of recent coding experience leveraging cloud technologies.
For example, you may encounter a question like:
A company deployed a multi-tier web application across different AWS Availability Zones using Elastic Load Balancing. The web tier occasionally returns HTTP 500 errors. How can the root cause of these errors be identified for troubleshooting?
A. Enable AWS X-Ray tracing and analyze the traces
B. Add Amazon CloudWatch Logs and view the last error log entries
C. Use AWS Config Rules to audit configuration changes
D. Enable AWS CodeGuru profiling to identity hot pathsThis demonstrates the developer focus on diagnosing issues in cloud-hosted software.
AWS SysOps Administrator – Associate
Earning the SysOps Administrator certification proves you have expertise operating solutions on AWS at scale. This role focuses on provisioning, securing and troubleshooting AWS environments. Exam domains encompass:
- Implementing application monitoring and logging
- Analyzing operational data for improvements
- Deploying resources through CloudFormation
- Securing platform and application access
Questions assess your ability to choose services improving operational reliability and security:
A SysOps administrator must set up a logging solution to monitor unauthorized API calls across all AWS services for multiple accounts. The selected tools should file user-accessible audit records while minimizing costs.
Which solution meets these requirements?
A. Enable AWS CloudTrail trail logging with an S3 bucket
B. Install the AWS Logging plugin for services needs
C. Use Amazon Inspector agent-based assessments
D. Push logs using Subscription Filters to CloudWatch1-2 years of managing AWS-based solutions proves recommended before pursuing this operations-focused certification.
Now let’s compare key details across the three AWS Associate certifications:
| Certification | Length | Format | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solutions Architect – Associate | 130 minutes | 60 multiple response questions | $150 |
| SysOps Administrator – Associate | 80 minutes | 60 multiple response questions | $150 |
| Developer – Associate | 80 minutes | 59 multiple response questions | $150 |
All exams share a common passing score of 72% or higher.
When prepping for AWS Associate certifications, training should focus more on hands-on scenarios versus high-level overviews.
For example, Linux Academy offers an extensive AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course involving guided lab demos for EC2, S3, DynamoDB and more.
A Cloud Guru takes a similar hands-on approach with its Developer Associate offering. Make sure to leverage free AWS access using the AWS Free Tier as you build sample solutions.
Reaching the Pinnacle – Professional Certifications
Once you establish associate-level knowledge across solution architecture, development or operations, it becomes possible to advance your expertise further through the pinnacle AWS Professional certifications.
Obtaining one of these industry-recognized high-level cloud credentials certifies your skills leading complex technology initiatives on AWS.
The two existing Professional certification paths include:
AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
Achieving the Solutions Architect Professional designation proves unmatched mastery architecting AWS environments.
You must already hold the Solutions Architect Associate certification before pursuing the Professional exam. Additional prerequisites span:
- At least 5 years hands-on experience designing cloud solutions on AWS
- In-depth experience with AWS networking, security, data platforms
- Ability leading teams launching innovative cloud initiatives
Example advanced skills tested reflect real-world architectural tasks like:
Design a highly available and cost-optimized architecture for a SaaS platform handling up to 20 million users. The platform should scale worldwide while surviving an AZ failure. Present architectural diagrams depicting services used and explain rationale for key design decisions. Through open-ended questions and scenarios like these, the Solutions Architect Professional exam validates exceptionally skilled cloud enterprise architects ready to guide strategic AWS deployments.
AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional
The AWS DevOps Engineer Professional certification represents the pinnacle for AWS operators capable of automating and evolving infrastructure at scale.
Typical candidates for this exam boast 2+ years specifically focused on provisioning, orchestrating and monitoring AWS production workloads.
Core skills tested span:
- Automating deployment workflows using AWS Developer Tools like CodeDeploy
- Implementing observability pipelines leveraging CloudWatch and X-Ray
- Securing infrastructure against unauthorized access through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Analyzing operational metrics like system utilization to identify improvements
For example, questions may evaluate your response planning to scenarios such as:
Your company will begin development on over 100 microservices hosted in ECS. As Principal DevOps Architect, plan an optimized deployment pipeline strategy leveraging AWS native tools. Explain how release processes, monitoring, and security should be handled. Passing this capstone-level exam certifies your readiness to design, build and manage complex AWS-based infrastructure powering modern cloud applications.
As the pinnacle AWS credentials, both Professional certification exams share commonalities like:
- 170 minute timed exams with 75 questions
- Requirement of current Associate-level certification
- $300 USD exam fee
- 72% minimum passing score
Even more so than lower certifications, hands-on experience proves critical before attempting these advanced exams.
A Cloud Guru’s Solutions Architect Pro course provides excellent scenarios implementing complex architectures across networking, compute and global CDNs.
And for DevOps mastery, Linux Academy and Udemy offer robust examples of provisioning fleets of AWS resources in code.
Specializing Further – AWS Specialty Certifications
Looking to showcase niche cloud skills in specific solution areas like machine learning, networking or databases?
Beyond foundational and professional credentials, AWS offers over a dozen Specialty certifications tailored to different domains.
Most In-Demand AWS Specialty Certifications
A few examples of the top specialty AWS certifications include:
AWS Certified Security – Specialty
Validating advanced skills managing complex security controls and compliance monitoring capabilities on AWS.
AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty
Proving highly technical networking implementation expertise for AWS and hybrid cloud architectures.
AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty
Certifying skills and experience developing, deploying, and maintaining machine learning solutions on AWS.
AWS Certified Database – Specialty
Confirming fluency administering cloud-native and legacy relational databases running on AWS.
And many additional niche AWS credentials for analytics, Alexa development, DynamoDB expertise and more.
Browse the full spectrum of over 15 specialty certifications here.
Most require holding a current associate-level or professional certification before qualifying to register for exams. This ensures you first establish core AWS cloud fluency.
Following Proven Steps to AWS Certification Exam Success
Here is a step-by-step checklist highlighting proven best practices for AWS certification exam preparation:
1. Choose Your Certification Path
Use this guide to determine the ideal AWS credential aligning to your technical experience and knowledge areas.
New to cloud computing? Start with Cloud Practitioner. Have 1-2 years AWS hands-on expertise? Pursue an AWS associate certification next.
2. Design Your Custom Exam Prep Plan
Review the exam guide detailing all knowledge domains tested. Then compile online courses, free tier hands-on labs, practice tests and other prep resources covering those areas.
Allocate plenty of study time based on your existing AWS skills – from a few weeks for Cloud Practitioner up to 6+ months for advanced certifications.
3. Register and Schedule Your Exam
Use your AWS account to register and pay for your chosen certification exam through the AWS Certification portal. Then schedule the online proctored or testing center exam on your preferred date and location.
Give your study plan enough runway to prepare thoroughly for the big day!
4. Take and Pass the Certification Exam
Follow all rules and regulations around identification and approved items when entering your chosen test facility. For online proctored exams taken remotely, ensure your workspace and testing computer meet requirements.
The exam administrator will guide you through the onboarding and testing process. Stay calm, take your time and apply the AWS knowledge you’ve gained through diligent study and practice.
5. Add AWS Certification to Your LinkedIn Profile
Upon passing, you will receive an email notification typically within 5 business days with instructions for accessing and downloading your official AWS certificate.
Add your new AWS certification credential to LinkedIn and résumé. This provides immediate validation of your cloud expertise to employers and partners.
Most certifications expire after 2-3 years, requiring approved continuing education credits and re-testing to renew and maintain high-demand designations.
So continue expanding AWS skills through new projects, independent research and training.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Earning industry-recognized AWS certifications provides the clearest path toward thriving cloud computing careers.
Options range from foundational Cloud Practitioner to specialty credentials in security, networking and machine learning. And many steps in between like associate and professional certifications.
Align exam preparation to your hands-on experience levels and target job roles. With disciplined study habits leveraging suggested courses and practice tests, you can confidently earn certifications matching personal career goals.
The over 500,000 people holding AWS certifications by end of 2021 proves the value in validating cloud skills. In many companies, over half of cloud staff now boast AWS credentials.
AWS research shows role-based certified professionals can earn over 25% higher salaries in equivalent positions. So showcase your cloud abilities and watch opportunities abound!
Did this comprehensive guide help you identify next steps for advancing AWS expertise this year? Share your thoughts and exam experiences via email. And good luck acing your cloud certifications!
