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Cracking the AWS certification exams: How to prepare
10 min read
Dec 18, 2024
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Before diving into preparation, ask yourself: Why pursue the AWS Certification? Is it worth your time and effort?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a variety of certifications that will help you build your skills so you can get more out of the cloud. Since AWS is the most popular cloud provider on the market today, getting AWS-certified will help you grow as a developer, build your portfolio, and advance your career.
In this blog, we’ll explore the different types of AWS certifications to help you make an informed decision about which path to pursue. We’ll also discuss the benefits of certifications, exam preparation, and more. By the end, you'll have a clear roadmap to cracking the AWS certification exams and advancing your cloud expertise.
What is an AWS certification?#
AWS is the leading cloud provider on the market today, and it provides valuable, industry-recognized certifications to help you further your career. Its training and certifications are tailored to specific roles and specialties, providing flexibility for those working in cloud computing.
An AWS certification demonstrates that you have experience with the AWS platform, its services, and its technologies. It shows hiring managers that you can maintain and implement AWS services, products, and technologies into a company’s workflow.
Data-backed benefits of AWS cloud certifications#
A cloud certification shows potential employers that you have strong technical skills, and knowledge of the cloud. It demonstrates you have what it takes to support and optimize an organization’s cloud needs. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of becoming cloud certified:
Demand: As of 2024, over 98% of organizations are utilizing the cloud in some form, and 90% of large enterprises and 76% of organizations worldwide have a multi-cloud infrastructure. Since so many companies are taking advantage of the cloud, there is a huge market for developers with cloud expertise and experience.
Growth: Cloud certifications can boost demand and significantly increase pay. In 2024, the average salary for developers with cloud computing certifications at the entry-level is $100,000; with experience, it is over $150,000.
Flexibility: AWS certifications’ applications extend into several industries (e.g., healthcare, finance, retail), where cloud skills are increasingly in demand. AWS offers certifications for various roles, from foundational knowledge to specialized areas like machine learning or data analytics, enabling professionals to ease into other roles (e.g., moving from development to operations or analytics) within the cloud domain by obtaining certifications.
Impress potential employers: Cloud certifications give employers a way to benchmark your skills against industry standards. Over 80% of hiring managers say cloud certifications make applicants more desirable. Not only will a certification make you more desirable to potential employers, but it will also broaden your career opportunities.
“Fully certified teams are 35% more likely than partially certified teams to finish projects ahead of schedule, typically reaching their targets more than two weeks early,” according to research in an IDC InfoBrief.
What types of AWS certifications are available?#
AWS currently offers 12 certificates in four categories: foundational, associate, professional, and specialty. Each category and certification is geared towards a different type of person and requires different background knowledge and experience. The certification exams cost between $75 and $300. Let’s dive deeper into the four categories and their certifications.
Types of AWS certifications
Foundational AWS certifications#
A foundational-level certification is ideal for individuals with around six months of fundamental AWS cloud and industry knowledge. It is recommended to have a solid understanding of cloud concepts, cloud migration strategies, and the fundamental workings of AWS. While six months of hands-on experience is recommended, this certification has no prerequisites. AWS currently offers two foundational-level certifications.
1. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner#
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is intended for anyone with basic knowledge of the AWS platform. This certification is a good choice for you if you have minimal experience with AWS cloud but want to gain more experience and a deeper understanding of it.
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification exam validates the following knowledge areas:
The importance of AWS Cloud
AWS shared responsibility model
AWS security practices
AWS costs, economics, and billing
Core AWS services
AWS services identification for common use cases
If you’re preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification, this course provides comprehensive coverage of all domains in the CLF-C02 exam.
Master AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 Exam
AWS is one of the leading cloud service providers, offering various services to design secure, compliant, and cost-effective cloud solutions. This course will empower you to deeply understand AWS’s core services and practical applications. You’ll start by learning about the fundamentals of cloud computing. Next, you’ll learn about core AWS services like networking, storage, compute, and databases. You’ll also learn about AWS’s different analytics tools and machine learning services. From there, you’ll explore various AWS services for your organization’s pricing, budgeting, and billing optimization. You’ll learn about different tools for monitoring and auditing the cloud infrastructure to ensure security, optimize performance, and maintain compliance. Finally, you’ll get hands-on experience in various cloud services using Cloud Labs. After completing this course, you will be confident in becoming an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and pursuing entry-level roles in the industry.
2. AWS Certified AI Practitioner#
The AWS Certified AI Practitioner certification is intended for technical and non-technical professionals who want to demonstrate their skills in AWS AI services. The certification is good choice for you if you have foundational experience in AI but haven’t yet worked on AI solutions in AWS.
The AWS Certified AI Practitioner certification exam validates the following knowledge skills:
AWS shared responsibility model
AWS security practices
AI, ML, and generative AI concepts
AWS AI services
AI services identification for specific use cases
AWS service pricing model
Associate AWS certifications#
The associate-level certification is ideal for you if you have about one year of experience using AWS cloud to solve problems and implement solutions. Certifications at this level cover skills such as the ability to deploy hybrid AWS systems, hands-on AWS application design, building secure AWS applications, and more. AWS currently offers five associate certifications.
1. AWS Certified Solutions Architect#
The associate-level AWS Solutions Architect certification is intended for individuals in a solutions architect role. This certification benefits you if you have hands-on experience designing secure, high-performing, scalable, cost-effective, and resilient AWS systems. The exam validates your ability to do the following:
Design solutions by following architectural principles and using AWS services
Provide performance guidance based on AWS best practices
If you’re preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification, this course provides comprehensive coverage of all four domains in the SAA-C03 exam.
Master AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Exam
AWS is a popular cloud service provider that offers various services. The course prepares you to design secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized architectures. You’ll learn about services to secure your AWS resources and accounts against external threats. You’ll also cover various load balancing and replication techniques to make AWS applications highly available and resilient against failover. Next, you’ll cover several storage options and analytics tools that help design high-performing architectures. You’ll also cover various cost optimization techniques by choosing appropriate purchasing opinions for compute and storage solutions. Finally, you’ll gauge your understanding with the help of some practice exams. You’ll also get hands-on experience deploying AWS resources using Cloud Labs. This course covers all four domains for the SAA-C03 exam and increases your chances of becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate.
2. AWS Certified SysOps Administrator#
The AWS SysOps Administrator certification is intended for system administrators in cloud operations roles. This certification is a good choice for you if you have hands-on experience with AWS deployment, management, networking, and security. The exam validates your ability to do the following:
Manage workloads and systems on AWS
Manage incidents
Support and maintain workloads within the AWS architecture
Implement architectural requirements
Perform disaster recovery
Perform operations using the AWS Management Console and AWS CLI
The SysOps Administrator certification is considered to be the most difficult associate certification exam. With a structured approach and the right resources, you can confidently prepare to meet this challenge.
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate Exam Prep
Cloud computing is necessary for organizations of all sizes, from large enterprises to small startups. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud provider with the largest customer share. An AWS SysOps Administrator operates and maintains the AWS infrastructure while handling cybersecurity, which is a high-demand skill. This course provides in-depth coverage of core AWS Services, including EC2, Auto Scaling, ELB, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, and more. You’ll learn AWS best practices for security, compliance, automation, monitoring, and troubleshooting through practical hands-on labs for key topics. You’ll test your knowledge by attempting quizzes and two full-length sample AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate practice exams at the end. By the end of the course, you’ll have gained practical experience through real-world examples and hands-on labs in administering systems and applications running on AWS to ace the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam.
3. AWS Certified Developer#
The AWS Developer certification is intended for individuals in a developer role. The target audience and the skills that the exam for this certification validates are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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4. AWS Certified Data Engineer#
The AWS Certified Data Engineer certification is intended for individuals in data engineering roles. The target audience and the skills that the exam for this certification validates are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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5. AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer#
The AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer certification is for individuals with experience in machine learning roles. The target audience and the skills that the exam for this certification validates are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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Professional AWS certifications#
If you have about two years of experience using the AWS cloud to design, operate, and troubleshoot solutions, a professional-level certification is ideal. Certifications at this level cover skills such as cost optimization, monitoring, and logging AWS systems, implementing scalable systems on AWS, and more. AWS currently offers two professional certifications.
1. AWS Certified Solutions Architect#
The professional-level AWS Solutions Architect certification is intended for individuals who are in a solutions architect role with two or more years of experience working with systems on AWS. The target audience and the skills that the exams of AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification validate are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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2. AWS Certified DevOps Engineer#
The AWS DevOps Engineer certification is intended for individuals who are in a DevOps engineer role with two or more years of experience working in AWS environments. The target audience and the skills that the exams for AWS Certified DevOps Engineer certification validate are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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AWS Specialty Certifications#
A specialty certification is ideal for you if you have about two to five years of experience and advanced knowledge of AWS in a particular specialty area. Specialty certifications cover skills such as designing and maintaining Big Data, using AWS to automate data analysis, designing secure machine learning solutions, and more. They dive deep into their individual domains and are designed for someone with many years of hands-on, professional experience. AWS currently offers three specialty certifications.
1. AWS Certified Advanced Networking#
The AWS Advanced Networking specialty certification is intended for individuals who have five or more years of experience performing complex networking tasks. If you’re looking into this certification, it’s recommended that you already have the Cloud Practitioner certification or one of the associate-level certifications. The target audience and the skills that the exam for this certification validates are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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Consider exploring the following Cloud Lab by Educative to polish your networking skills:
2. AWS Certified Machine Learning#
The AWS Machine Learning specialty certification is intended for individuals who are in a development or data science role. The good to-haves and the skills that the exam for this certification validates are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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3. AWS Certified Security#
The AWS Security specialty certification is intended for individuals who are in a security role with at least two years of hands-on experience securing AWS workloads. The good to-haves and the skills that the exam for this certification validates are given in the table below:
Target audience | Skills tested |
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How to prepare for AWS certifications#
The AWS certification exams are known to be difficult, so it’s very important that you engage in some kind of certification training prior to your exam. Let’s take a look at some ways that you can prepare for your exam:
Familiarize yourself with exam structure and content#
Use Amazon’s provided certification exam guides to familiarize yourself with the exam structure. There are different exam question types, such as multiple-choice, multiple-response, and exam labs. Each exam guide outlines what types of questions you’ll see on the exam, along with detailed information about its content. It also explains the scoring process for the exam.
AWS provides the relevant documentation for each individual exam. These resources can also help you better understand the key concepts covered in different exams.
Get hands-on experience with the AWS Cloud#
Using tools like Educative’s Cloud Labs is a great way to gain hands-on experience in AWS. This will help you get a detailed view of how different services work on AWS, what challenges one can face, and how to resolve them, which will in turn free you from memorizing minute details.
Practice the sample questions#
AWS also provides sample questions to help understand what questions will appear on your exam. These practice documents also come with answers.
Moreover, there are many practice exams available on third-party websites. Take advantage of these resources. The questions you’ll practice will depend on the certification you plan to get. We looked at some of the certification sample question guides and pulled some questions from them. Sample questions of some certifications include:
AWS Certification | Sample Question |
Foundational: Cloud Practitioner exam | Which AWS service allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers? |
Foundational: AI Practitioner exam | Which AWS service is best suited for building, training, and deploying machine learning models quickly and easily? |
A company has a legacy application that stores user-uploaded media files on a single Amazon EC2 instance. As the application grows, it experiences scalability, availability, and cost issues. The company wants a cost-effective automatic scaling and redundancy solution without extensively modifying the application code. What is the best solution to address these requirements? | |
Associate: SysOps Administrator exam | A company runs a critical application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Auto Scaling group. The company wants to monitor the health of the instances and automatically replace unhealthy instances without manual intervention. Which approach will meet this requirement? |
Associate: Developer exam | A developer is building a serverless application using AWS Lambda. The Lambda function needs to process images uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket. The function will run asynchronously, and it is important that failed executions are retried automatically. Which combination of AWS services should be used to meet this requirement? |
Associate: Data Engineer exam | A data engineer is tasked with designing a data pipeline to ingest, process, and store user activity data from a web application. The data needs to be transformed in real-time and stored efficiently to allow for querying. The engineer must also ensure the data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Which combination of AWS services should the data engineer use to build this solution? |
Associate: Machine Learning Engineer Exam | A company is building an ML model using Amazon SageMaker. The pipeline needs to handle both real-time data and batch data ingestion. The model will be trained on a large dataset that arrives daily in Amazon S3 and should adapt to real-time changes in the data. Which AWS services and approaches should be used to build this pipeline efficiently, ensuring scalability and automation? |
Professional: Solutions Architect exam | A company is designing a multi-region, highly available architecture for its e-commerce application. The application must be resilient to regional failures, minimize downtime, and ensure that user data is always available. The backend database needs to store transactional data with strong consistency guarantees, and all regions should be able to write to the database without conflict. Which AWS architecture should be implemented to meet these requirements? |
Professional: DevOps Engineer exam | A company is using AWS CodeBuild to build its application. Company policy requires that all build artifacts be encrypted at rest. Access to the artifacts must be limited to IAM users with permission to assume the operations role. How can these requirements be met? |
Specialty: Machine Learning exam | A company is using Amazon SageMaker to build a housing price prediction model. After an initial training run, the model exhibits overfitting with high accuracy on the training set but poor performance on the validation set. Which two actions can be taken in Amazon SageMaker to reduce overfitting? |
Specialty: Advanced Networking exam | An organization has a hybrid network architecture where its on-premises data center is connected to AWS using AWS Direct Connect. The organization wants to ensure high availability and fault tolerance for the connection. The goal is to have a resilient architecture that can handle failover automatically in case of Direct Connect link failure. Which solution should the organization implement to achieve this? |
Specialty: Security Exam | A company is migrating its application to AWS and wants to ensure that sensitive customer data stored in Amazon S3 is protected. The data must be encrypted both at rest and in transit. The security team requires that encryption keys be managed securely and that access to the keys is limited to only authorized personnel. Which combination of services and configurations should the company implement to meet these requirements? |
Check out the AWS sample question guides for additional questions and answers for your exam.
Wrapping up and next steps#
The AWS certification exams are designed to be difficult, so it’s important to allocate sufficient time for a thorough preparation. Once certified, be sure to update your resume and LinkedIn to stand out from the competition.
To continue learning about AWS services, explore these additional resources available on Educative:
Frequently Asked Questions
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Written By:
Erin Schaffer
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