How I passed AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner in 2021
If you are reading this article, then you must have heard of “Cloud Computing”. It is much more than just Google Drive and iCloud. From an IT engineer’s perspective you might know a little bit more about it. If you wish to learn cloud for your knowledge or career growth, this certificate, and more importantly, the contents of this course are a very good place to start. It covers most of the important topics without going into the depth of any specific one.
There is one thing I would like to mention : this is the most basic and fundamental course. Without experience, neither would you learn how a real large scale cloud works, nor would you get a job solely on the basis of this certificate.
If you are from a non IT background without any Hands-on experience on cloud like me, it might take more time for you than what is find mentioned in many other blogs. It took me 6 weeks with an average of 10 hours per week to complete the course.
Why AWS
From the given image it might be one of the obvious answer to why. Apart from the big market share, which also opens more job opportunities, the types of services offered by AWS are far more than its competitors. AWS has the largest market share, has more services to offer and is the oldest player in the market due to which the number of resources to learn AWS, compared to other cloud services, are much more. AWS has a better ecosystem integration with third party and open source applications. If you prefer to work in startups, then most of them use AWS more than any other cloud provider.
Other providers
Even though AWS is the biggest player, others like Azure, GCP, IBM, Oracle, Digital Ocean, etc. are catching up fast in terms of number of services provided, infrastructure in different locations and market share. The basic concepts of cloud computing are the same in all the cases, every provider has all the basic services with different names, hence, you can learn any cloud services, depending on your interest or your organization’s requirement. There are other SaaS providers like Salesforce which are also huge players and provide a broad variety of certificates.
Other AWS CCP equivalent certificates are —
- Microsoft — Azure Fundamentals (AZ — 900)
- Google — Associate Cloud Engineer
There are certificates from others too but these are the 3 most commonly used IaaS cloud provider and hence I would recommend one of these.
Study Resources
You can purchase a course but I would suggest you not to spend money as there are many free courses out there.
The ones that I used are —
- Intro to AWS Services — This is a must watch if you are an absolute beginner or from non IT background.
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials — Amazon’s own training center.
- Free Code Camp — This cover many of the topics left in Amazon’s course.
- Udemy sample test paper — I am sure you can find an alternative to a paid sample paper but if you don’t mind spending 500 INR than this is really worth it. The 6 sample test paper covers questions from a broad selection of services. Almost every question in the main exam was from these question banks. (Strongly Recommended)
Few other points
You can now give AWS CCP through a test center or online if you have a stable internet connection and match all the other requirements by AWS
- The cost of the exam is $100 (+ $18 taxes in India).
- You can pay $20 for sample exam, but the Udemy papers are more than sufficient.
