One week from today, on Friday, September 3rd, I sit for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam. …. And I couldn’t be more excited and stoked! …. okay and now maybe a little nervous that I am sharing with the world that I will be sitting for the exam. :).
A Newbie Again
I am a beginner again. A complete and total newbie.
Cloud, I admit, has really been pushing me way outside of my comfort zone in a major way! It was, I admit, scary at first… and then it somehow shifted from “scary, overwhelming, uncomfortable” and thinking I’ll never get this to “scary, overwhelming, and INCREDIBLY exciting”.
Being a beginner … a total newbie/novice can really come with a lot of fear. Well, if we let it. Which, admittedly, has been hard for me to not let that happen. Especially in the beginning when it seemed like EVERY single solitary acronym or concept was new and I didn’t even have the teeniest tiniest bit of a foothold on any of the concepts. This is when it felt “overwhelming”. But once I got even the smallest of footholds…. the excitement started.
I admit, to make matters worse, I can have issues with GUIs. Ever seen my sticker “I’m just a CLI Girl living in a GUI World?” ‘Steinzi’ (@0x535431) made this sticker for me a few years ago. 🙂
Ever seen the AWS Dashboard? lol… yup… I admit that was definitely overwhelming for me also at first. So many options… so many services… so many things to click. I still don’t seem to get around easily there yet. But that will come with time and it isn’t super scary now. Just exciting.
Embracing The Cloud
If you have not yet really gone “diving” into the cloud. Do it! 🙂 Seriously! I am so stoked I did! Yes… very much a newbie. I can only spin a couple things up still. And I can’t do ANYTHING yet without following detailed directions. 🙂
Embrace the Cloud! Seriously! It is so wicked awesome and cool what we, as network engineers, can do there. Wow!
Why I Chose AWS
So why did I decide to dive into AWS? Why not any of the others?
To be honest I still do not know what the future is going to hold. I do assume that I will eventually need to also learn the others. But I chose AWS as my starting point for very specific reasons which come down to a summary of 3 main items –
- Documentation
- Training
- Certifications
As a newbie I wanted to go into a cloud that had great documentation – both offered by them and also others. I wanted great training – both offered by them and also others. I also wanted a Certification path that would work for how I like to study and learn. AWS pretty much headed the list for all 3 of those things I was looking for.
I would guess/assume that this is likely the case due to the fact AWS is so widely used and has a great deal of the market share. Don’t know. I do know that my experience very early on was that when I was reading high level docs about the other clouds, I found a lot of the externally created training/documentation seemed to frequently include the term of the AWS “equivalent” when trying to explain things. So I just decided…. well… guess I’ll just dive into AWS.
Studying
So how have I been studying? I’ll be honest and just say that someone i know who went before me on this journey told me they did ACloudGuru. Being lazy I just signed up for that. :). Admittedly I also like hard copy books. Love highlighting and making notes. So just bought some generic AWS books. They have been “okay” … nothing so “awesome” that I would pass them on. :). So I won’t. I will say I have loved the ACloudGuru AWS Cloud Practitioner course.
What’s Next?
Well, next is the exam in less than a week. If I do not pass… then “what’s next” is just to keep trying and sign up for another date.
What if I pass? Honestly I don’t know. I looked at the Solution Architect Associate one… but a lot of the AWS terms that are on the blueprint I don’t know. “Associate” on the AWS track has “one year” of experience of solving problems and implementing solutions… which definitely doesn’t describe me. So I looked at the Specialities, but I don’t know enough about the specialities and what is needed there to know.
So I think after passing AWS Cloud Practitioner (whenever that ends up happening)… I honestly do not have a “What’s Next”. Really it depends on what other cool stuff I’m playing with and needed to do at work… and whether or not that is in the cloud. 🙂
… Back to Studying
:). Have fun! Keep learning!
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Good luck on the exams!
You can’t go wrong studying AWS:
– They were the first who offered the public cloud, so still have a lead
– They still hold > 50% of the market
– Their documentation, including white papers, best practices, and case studies are rivaled by NONE (to the point that if you were to try Azure/GCP exams, the advice would be to use cert books NOT vendor docs)
– It is the most popular cloud certification, hands down. As the consequence it has enormous prep materials pool by various authors.
Some people swear by Jon Bonso exam prep tests (I didn’t try them). ACloud Guru – I tried myself, but as am not new to AWS found it too wordy and time wasting (for me). But people on the Internet (talking about Associate exam, not Practitioner) said that CloudGuru is not enough to pass the exam, worth being aware of I guess.
Their GUI Console is OK, but with time using their aws cli command tool is so much faster…
” …cool what we, as network engineers, can do there.” – will have to disagree here, as network folks we have almost nothing to do there, after all cloud is someone else’s DC and we have no “enable” on it . You can have dev folks creating farms in AWS and not being able to calculate subnet mask … Even ARP there is fake 🙂
Literally just got the below from someone who read my blog and works at AWS. 🙂
“https://aws.amazon.com/cli/”
I’m still doing network designs and trying to figure out how to utilize it. So I guess since I am not a production engineer at a Company – but a Solution Architect at Cisco… lol… how I’ll be using the cloud may not be the typical ‘network engineering’ I guess. Valid point there.
I’ve just completed my journey from complete cloud newbie (and SP/DC network engineer) to AWS Cloud Practitioner > Solutions Architect Associate > Advanced Networking Speciality > Solutions Architect Professional in just 6 weeks. Pretty tough, but really interesting experience.
CP and SA-A exams are pretty easy – you just need to have some general understanding about 30-50 foundational AWS services. ACloudGuru cources (plus maybe some basic AWS whitepapers) are more then enough to pass these two.
Networking Speciality and SA-P – two of the most hardest exams in AWS. SA-P was slightly harder for me, but only because I have much more experience in networking than in other areas. These two definitely require more hardcore studying. Official study guide for Networking Speciality is really good (despite being slightly outdated). ACloudGuru cources are great – they have AWS Architect training path with all necessary stuff. As for SA-P – nothing better than reading A LOT of AWS whitepapers, FAQs and documentation. Exam readiness training from AWS is also really usefull.
I think you’ll have a lot of fun diving deep into AWS networking, it’s pretty exiting journey for a network enginner.
Good luck!
thanks tons!
lol. forgot to update here that I passed.