AWS Certification: Cloud Solutions Architect Associate - Is it worth your time?
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Time to get certified...
Want to get cloud certified? I saw that the AWS entry level Cloud Practitioner certification is getting retired this year in 2023. I obtained the Cloud Practitioner certification a few years back in 2021, and it was well worth it as it gave me a lot of insight into 100 different types of AWS tools in the cloud. What will be the new entry level cloud certification when AWS discontinues the Cloud Practitioner certification?
Is it worth it to study and get the Cloud Solutions Architect Associate certification?
Obtaining the AWS Solutions Architect Associate would prove you have some knowledge with the AWS cloud tools. The AWS Cloud Solution Architect Associate also shares a lot of the same material, tools, and basics as the Cloud Practitioner certification. So is it worth it to obtain the certification? I definitely think it would be worth the study time as well as adding this cloud certification to your resume... if your career path is headed toward cloud technologies.
All you need then... is to get some on the job experience to further develop your cloud skills. However, if you get a free AWS account you can play all you want in the cloud for free by spinning up EC2's, creating S3 storage buckets, building a new static page for your new website, creating security groups with identity access management (IAM), etc.
Challenging, yet rewarding and good career outlook
The last few years have been fun doing this, however it does get complicated and challenging because AWS has hundreds of tools to learn. As it can get overwhelming even learning the basics I found by sticking to 3-4 tools at a time that work together and master those help in breaking down the complexity between the AWS tools. For example using some AWS tools for static website building like S3, Certificate Manager, Route 53, and CloudFront to name a few that would be a smaller area to focus on and master.
With other cloud vendors like Google Cloud an Microsoft Azure, having AWS skills will be great, as cloud concepts are the same but just using different vendors. For those who want to work in the cloud technology field, a career outlook still looks good as there has been a lot of shortage of workers before Covid started, and employers right now are still showing they are hiring for these skills and having a hard time finding folks.
