AWS offers Training and Certification programs to help you develop skills to design, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications on the AWS Cloud. Earning certification helps you gain visibility and credibility for your proven experience working with AWS.

Currenlty, AWS offers the below certification exams which are categorized into two-levels – Associate and Professional.

Associate Level Exams:

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• AWS Certified Developer – Associate
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate

Professional Level Exams:

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional

NOTE: A Master-level exam for AWS Certified Solutions Architect is on the roadmap

AWS continues to be the leader in Public Cloud Computing Services market and AWS certifications are widely recognized in the industry. In order to learn the nitty-gritties of all AWS services, I had decided to take the AWS certification exams.

Being already a Senior Solutions Architect, I wanted to attempt the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate” exam first and gave myself 3-weeks to prepare for it. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for individuals with experience designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform.

I have taken the exam on 06/15/2015 and passed with 85%. I honestly felt 3-weeks was not quite enough time to deep dive into all the topics the way I wanted. I found the exam to be very challenging as the exam had mostly all scenario-based questions which tested one’s comprehensive knowledge to configure various AWS services to be able to solve different usecases.

What I liked the most about this exam is that it was not like read & memorize some documentation and answer straight-forward questions. Hands-on experience and exposure to almost all of the AWS services are required to be able to face this exam. That ’s what makes AWS exams challenging and hence desirable to have on one’s resume.

Below are some key things to know and practice until comfortable before sitting for the exam.

1. Configuring a custom VPC and troubleshooting along with Security in VPC
2. Pay lot of attention to all aspects VPC..very important
3. Private vs Public Subnets, Security Groups vs Network ACLs, NAT instances, Internet Gateway, Storage Gateway, Virtual Private Gateway, Endpoint for S3, Life-cycle policies and Glacier
4. Elastic Load Balancer in combination with Auto-scaling
5. Different storage options, S3 vs EBS vs Ephemeral, Securing S3 buckets/objects for different scenarios, Encryption, Performance/Durability/Availability
6. Read thoroughly on “Route 53”, I had lot of questions on this
7. Different EC2 instance types, EBS Volumes and Snapshots, Some soft limits, Bootstrap scripts, Instance meta data, placement groups, IP Addresses & ENIs, AMIs, Optimizing I/O performance, Security
8. Configuration of Cloud Front
9. RDS/DynamoDB/RedShift
10. Basics of SWF, SQS, SNS, Cloud Watch, CloudFormation
11. IAM Users/Groups/Roles, Groups vs Roles, Policies, Service-based Roles, AD Intagration, Security
12. Security, Security, Security
13. Practice, Practie, Practice

Below are few points that will help towards preparation for the exam.

1. AWS Free Tier

   The AWS Free Tier is designed to enable you to get hands-on experience with AWS at no charge for 12 months after you sign up.

   After creating your AWS account you can use any of the 21 products and services, listed below, for free within certain usage limits.

2. Read all the FAQs at http://aws.amazon.com/faqs/

   • After reading through all FAQs couple of times, practice by answering all the questions under FAQs without looking at answers and then compare

3. Read few AWS whitepapers at http://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/ – at least the below

   • AWS Security Whitepaper
   • AWS Storage Options
   • AWS Amazon VPC Connectivity Options
   • Managing Your AWS Infrastructure at Scale

4. Take one of the online ondemand courses on “AWS Certified Solutions Architect” on udemy.com

5. Watch AWS re-invent deep dive videos on some key topics

6. Read the exam blueprint and also answer the sample questions provided

7. Take the AWS Practice Exam (costs $20) if you feel required

Next, I am planning to take the other AWS exams – Developer, SysOps and CSA Professional. I will share my experience as I complete those exams.

All the best to you if you are preparing for the AWS exam. Feel free to leave a comment if any questions or feedback.

It is only around two weeks since I setup my blog using Octopress/Jekyll framework and I am still in learning mode to get better with using Markdown syntax.

Octopress has very minimal table styling by default. I struggled a bit to build tables in a post. Searched in Octopress documentation, but did not find any info there. My google search for “markdown+table+syntax” led me to John Gruber’s Markdown Page, where I learnt that HTML block-level tags can be used for any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax.

For example, to add an HTML table between two paragraphs in a post:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

This is a regular paragraph.

<table>
    <tr>
        <td>Foo</td>
    </tr>
</table>

This is another regular paragraph.

But, that still did not work. I started searching further to understand it little more and quickly realized that there are many Markdown parsers, of which Maruku, RedCarpet, BlueCloth, RDiscount, Kramdown are some of the popular ones.

Briefly,

• RDiscount is the default engine used in Octopress; It is implemented in C and is fast, but has limited feature set
• Maruku is a Ruby implementation and has extra feature set than RDiscount; But it does not seem to be actively maintained
• Kramdown is also a Ruby implementation and faster than Maruku; Kramdown supports extensions such as tables and footnotes
• RedCarpet and BlueCloth seem to be actively maintained and popular ones too

At this time, I am not in favor of changing my markdown processor from RDiscount just for tables, without further reading and understanding of different markdown parsers. I will try to cover these in a separate post ilater after playing with them a bit further.

To come back to my search on how to use tables in a post, I then landed on this blog post which touched on the exact point I was looking for.

As mentioned, I added data-table.css to source/stylesheets/and inserted the below in source/_includes/head.html.

1

<link href="/stylesheets/data-table.css" media="screen, projection" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

This addresses my need for now.

My site is hosted on Github Pages and it is powered by Octopress/Jekyll.

Earlier I have used Wordpress and Blogger platforms to power my sites/blogs. I am attracted by the prospect of using Octopress/Jekyll/Github due to few factors (which I will explain in a separate post).

Github Pages

Github Pages are public web pages for users, organizations, and repositories, that are freely hosted on GitHub’s github.io domain or on a custom domain name of your choice. GitHub Pages are powered by Jekyll behind the scenes, so in addition to supporting regular HTML content, they’re also a great way to host your Jekyll-powered website for free.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through Markdown (or Textile) and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server.

Octopress

Octopress is a static blogging framework built on top of Jekyll, which makes it much easier to manage Jekyll-powered websites.

I will cover the details of the Octopress setup, Blogging experience and factors for considering Octopress/Github Pages in separate post(s).

Happy Blogging!