Amazon is an American tech company founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington. It rose from selling books to video games, software, furniture, toys, and jewelry. Now the company is engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and digital streaming and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, U.S.
In the year 2002, Amazon launched its subsidiary Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) which is specialized in providing APIs and on-demand cloud computing platforms to companies, individuals, and governments on a pay-as-you-go-basis. The computing web services offered by this company represent a variety of tools, computing business blocks, and virtual technical infrastructure. One of the worldly recognized services is EC2 also known as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It gives 24/7 access to users to a group of virtual computers which possess almost the attributes of the real computers, such as CPUs, GPUs, RAM/local memory, networking, SSD storage, to name a few. The only requirement is to have access to Internet. Along with EC2, the most popular Amazon products and services include Amazon Connect, Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda.
Although this company a leader in providing cloud services, its competitors are Microsoft Azure and Google.
AWS developed a certification program so that you can gain skills to get more out of the cloud. The 11 industry recognized certifications included in this program spread across the following 4 levels:
- Foundational: this level is intended for candidates that are going to apply for the cloud practitioner position. Since it’s for beginners, candidates should have the industry knowledge and 6 months of experience in working with AWS Cloud fundamentals. The certification you will gain is known as the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner designation and you need to pass the CLF-C01 exam first.
- Associate: this level is designed for real professionals who have at least 1 year of experience in tackling issues and applying solutions using the AWS Cloud. The certifications offered at this level are intended for architects, operations, and developers. So, there are three certifications available at this level and include the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02), AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate (SOA-C02), and AWS Certified Developer Associate (DVA-C01).
- Professional: candidates with the 2 years of experience in completing tasks related to designing, operating, and troubleshooting solutions utilizing the AWS Cloud are the ideal candidates for this designation. The first one is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, which testifies that you are proficient in using any AWS feature and service and can use them properly. In addition, it proves that you understand all the ecosystem at a deep level and are knowledgeable of all updates and changes. To earn this designation, you need to pass the SAP-C01 evaluation. The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Certification is intended for test-takers of the two tracks operations and developer. This accreditation validates that you possess in-depth skills to automate the testing and deployment of AWS apps and infrastructure. The exam you are to take is DOP-C01.
- Specialty certifications imply that candidates possess special tech skills in the chosen domain. There are five certifications you can opt for: AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty (ANS-C00), AWS Certified Database Specialty (DBS-C01), AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty (MLS-C01), AWS Certified Security Specialty (SCS-C01), AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty (DAS-C01).
