My cloud certification journey – AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

I've been using cloud services in some capacity for a number of years, primarily Amazon Web Services.

Most of my projects are deployed on AWS, and leverage a varying array of services, including:

• Elastic Beanstalk to deploy web applications and APIs with worker tiers, and to manage auto-scaling groups
• Simple Queue Service to queue background tasks
• Simple Storage Service to store user uploads, and other assets, leveraging pre-signed URLs to manage access to these files.
• Cognito to allow users to upload files directly to S3 with temporary credentials
• Virtual Private Cloud to create secure networks for applications, with security groups, network access control lists and other security considerations, ensuring servers are not publicly accessible
• Elastic Load Balancers to balance load to application servers, and to handle incoming secure traffic
• Amazon Certificate Manager to automate SSL certificate provisioning and renewal
• Route 53 to manage DNS records and DNS routing
• Simple email service to send transactional emails
• Simple notification service to broadcast and listen on events as part of an application necessitate

And this just scratches the surface of the AWS cloud.

Given how much AWS and cloud services is part of my work, I've started my journey to become AWS certified, and successfully passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification (with a score of. This covers a mixture of billing, account and organisation management, architecting cloud services and the AWS global infrastructure.

I'm now working towards the Solutions Architect certification to gain recognition for the work I already do with AWS cloud services.