AWS Certification Begins

So I’ve been working on projects running in AWS for about 4 years now, and it seems about time for me to start looking at getting certified on this stuff. I prefer working in this space anyway, and if I ever change jobs, I believe I would be wanting to continue work in this space.

The days of managing hardware in a company are gone. Not to sound like an infomercial, but putting your IT in the cloud just makes sense. This removes so many startup costs, and you can start as small as you are, vs buying bigger.

I know a lot of people worry about security, and cross account breaching, but in reality, the large players (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) put WAAAAAY more time, money and effort into protecting your data than your company would put into securing your own data center (especially as a startup). So why bother worrying about it? Don’t get me wrong, I am very security conscious after working with Information Security in the U.S. Army and then for companies dealing with lots of PII and PCI data. You still need to ensure you encrypt your data at rest and limit access to that data to the systems/personnel who need access to it. But encrypting in the cloud space is a checkbox or button, not purchasing hardware/software and managing a bunch of keys in a safe.

Okay enough soapboxing on Cloud vs. on-premise, I have gotten off topic. Back to getting certified. I plan to take all of the AWS certification courses I can this year, as my company has been kind enough to give me access to A Cloud Guru for a year. It will be interesting to see what I already know, and what I don’t. Based on the sheer volume of AWS products out there today, I expect most of this will be things I don’t know(yet 🙂 ).

As I go through these courses my intent it to keep updating this blog about my journey to both ingrain what I have learned in my studies, as well as evaluate the course.

This should be interesting!