For the first post of the year, I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience with cloud certifications. In H2 2020 I got certified in:
IBM Cloud Infrastructure selling
AWS cloud practitioner
Azure cloud fundamentals
GCP associate cloud engineer
The exams are the entry-level certifications to their respective clouds services.
My key learnings:
There is a part of all the certifications that is common. You need to have a good understanding of each of them. They will all test you on:
What are the advantages of cloud compared to on-premise
What is a VPC and how do storage, networking, load balancers, auto-scaling work
Basic cloud security, account management, and basic DevOps concepts
They will differ in:
The names of their products (each provider has different names for the same functionality and some that are unique).
Their USPs (even if in these entry levels they are not pushing them too much)
The difficulty level: AWS-Azure-IBM is a much easier exam than GCP which is much more technical and requires more effort to pass it.
My advice:
It always depends on the technology that you will use in your company/product. But as a rule of thumb :
If you are not experienced in cloud technology and would like to learn more about it, I would advise you to start with the AWS certification. It is the easiest one, it really starts from the basics and there are a lot of free tutorials online to learn about it. Then I would continue with MSFT/IBM and then end up with GCP
Any of these certifications are technical (with the exception of GCP). So be careful if you are not too technical and you go for GCP.
These exams will not help you become a master on any specific cloud provider. They are really the first level (very useful for sales professionals or for engineers that are planning to get the next level in a near future)
My learning tools
I used the following programs to get certified. They were all very useful so they are my recommendation.
As a learning material for AWS, I used Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2021 from Stephane Maarek (Udemy)
As a learning material for Azure, I used Microsoft Azure Fundamentals – AZ-900 (Linux Academy)
As a learning material for GCP, I used Google Associate Cloud Engineer: Get Certified 2020 from Dan Sullivan (Udemy)
As a learning material for IBM Cloud, I used IBM Cloud Foundation Skills Series from James Belton (Youtube)
I wish you all the lucks with it and let me know if you need any advice. Happy to help.
Have a great beginning of the year, Gerard
PD: Link to my LinkedIn post HERE