Invariant Properties

It’s amazing how I can have a huge pile of books to read and then another load is dumped on top of them. le sigh. I still have 3-4 technical blog entries in various stages of completion on top of a dozen books for “professional development” at work.

The current top of the stack is cloud computing, specifically AWS. It turns out that there are several certifications available for AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/. The program is still undergoing growth pains, e.g., the nearest testing site to metro Denver appears to be in Winnemucca, Nevada, or maybe some hayseed college in Kansas. The Kryterion testing sites are probably added as people request them as opposed to running down a list of the top N technical markets. (Do you think the startups in Boulder aren’t heavy users of the cloud?)

Anyway I’ve mentioned before how I like to use certification objectives as study guides even if I don’t actually take the exam. I found a few resources on udemy.com that should go a long way. I was already familiar with most (not all) of the information on EC2 and S3 but was pleasantly surprised to learn about the other services.

Udemy Courses

• Amazon Web Services for Entrepreneurs and Bloggers (free) – good introduction. Plan on 6 hours.
• Amazon Web Services Certified Solution Architect – Associate Level (2014) ($59) – I haven’t taken this yet but it’s probably also a good overview. Plan on 10 hours.
• Amazon Web Services – Web Hosting & Cloud Computing with AWS ($49) – highly recommended, much more detailed than first course. Plan on 12+ hours.
• Amazon Web Services Certified Developer – Associate Level ($199) – in-depth discussion of using the AWS API. Plan on 10 hours plus many hours playing around with the SKD in your favorite language(s).

These courses are free under my corporate account so you should check with your employer first. If not Udemy regularly offers specials that can dramatically cut the cost of their courses.