Getting AWS Certified

During my tenure at Xero, I never really had the opportunity to properly work with Amazon Web Services.

As a product engineer, these responsibilities usually tended to lie with internal Platform Engineering teams. As a hypergrowth company, my main focus was more on delivering new features and value to our customers than managing the underlying infrastructure.

To complicate matters, Xero’s environment was a lift-and-shift migration from Rackspace to AWS. By the time I joined, the transition to the cloud was well underway, and the organisation had its own way of structuring the underlying architecture.

So while I had some exposure to a few of the basic underlying services, I never really got to use the platform to its fullest.

In late 2018 I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend re:Invent in Las Vegas, but I always felt my understanding was behind that of my peers.

While I was able to advocate for the use of certain services by studying official documentation, new services are released constantly and so it can be incredibly hard to keep up with.

Given AWS’s position as Gartner’s cloud leader for over 15 years, bridging this gap felt increasingly important.

So I have decided to fill in those gaps in my knowledge by taking the excellent courses on A Cloud Guru before taking on the exams.

I’ve heard that the Professional exams are more challenging than the Associate exams, so I’m going to start with getting the Associate certifications completed first using the paths on Pluralsight before moving on to the Professional certifications – targeting completion within a few months.

I’ll be documenting the process, key learnings, and study resources in case this helps others on a similar path.

Wish me luck!