Getting started with your Aviatrix Certification Journey

9 min readApr 20, 2023

Have you ever thought about finding some way to connect all these cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP? It seems that there is actually a way: In a nutshell, by using the Aviatrix framework, you can set up an infrastructure that actually lets you communicate between resources that have been set up in multiple clouds, and in a secure way.

I don't want to discuss Aviatrix in depth here, about which you can find plenty of information on https://aviatrix.com/ already, but rather I'd like to share my experience about obtaining two certifications that I earned from Aviatrix.

Learning Aviatrix

The best way to learn about Aviatrix and its possibilities is by going through the certification program that the company offers on its website https://aviatrix.com/ace/

As you can see, there are six certifications that you can earn in total, with two of them offering a self-paced studying option: The Associate and Automation Specialty. The former comes with an exam whereas the latter is more of a hands-on course where you actually have to partake in a lab course and submit the results in order to be granted a certification.

The prices may seem a bit intimidating, but Aviatrix actually offered a voucher on their website during April 2023 that let you take the Associate course for free. The exam for the associate course costs USD 49 per attempt and if you pass then you will be granted a certification that lasts for three years.

For the Automation Specialty course, there was also a voucher offered during April 2023 with which the course would cost only USD 9.95 (to be paid using Paypal only). Here there is no exam, but you will actually have to complete a lab. During the lab you will have to create some resources in your own AWS and Azure account that may incur costs. It may differ per person, but I completed the entire course within a timeframe of 48 hours and paid less than USD 10 for the resources that I created in AWS during this window. On Azure, I didn't have any costs because I used the free credit and also here we looking at less than USD 10. Once you are done, you can terminate the resources and submit your results, after which you will be granted a certification that also lasts three years.

Preparing for the Associate Exam

Let me get straight out of the way that although this is an associate exam, it is definitely not a beginner exam to someone who is new to the Cloud. But you don't have to be an expert either. Although the course doesn't have any formal prerequisites, I would strongly recommend to have at least some experience in all three major cloud providers OR have professional experience with one cloud provider and you will study up on the rest. In my case, I hold four AWS certifications (Cloud Practitioner and all Associates), one Azure certification (Fundamentals) and one Google Cloud certification (Digital Leader), with which I found myself to be sufficiently prepared to start the course.

If you were to ask me for one key prerequisite, I would suggest that you need a thorough understanding of the concept of VPCs in one Cloud provider (Or VNets, in the case of Azure). Despite some notable differences between VPCs at different providers, the concepts are still largely the same and if you understand VPCs at one provider fully, you will be able to understand VPCs at another provider soon as well. So my recommendation is to have at least one of the following certifications before starting with Aviatrix:

Course Outline

The course itself is divided into two parts: First you will get a series of crash courses on networking at different Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI) and then you will be introduced to the concept of Multi-Cloud Network Architecture and the Aviatrix Platform with its most important features.

The Cloud provider courses take between 30 and 90 minutes (with AWS being the longest and OCI the shortest) and will go quite deep on the networking aspects. If you are new to the provider, it will seem like a crash course, whereas if you are experienced it will seem like a refresher. In the case of AWS, you will for example learn about VPCs and various networking resources like Routing Tables, Security Groups, Peering, Transit Gateways and Direct Connect connections. With the other Cloud providers, you will learn the same concepts, albeit with slight differences, with their corresponding own resources.

In the second part, you will learn about the "hub and spoke model" to provide communication between VPCs located in different clouds. Also you will learn about the three pillars of Aviatrix's general architecture:

Security
Cloud Networking
Operations

The Cloud Networking pillar then comes with three layers:

Application Layer
Transit Core Backbone Layer
Access Layer

And you will be introduced to the Aviatrix Controller, which is a GUI and serves as platform for you to manage your Aviatrix infrastructure.

Finally, the course also comes with a quiz after each lecture to help you check if you understand the material. In fact you have to pass each quiz as well before you can move on to the next lecture, but you can attempt a quiz an unlimited number of times.

The Exam

The exam consists of 45 questions and has a passing rate of 70% (that is 32 out of 45). You have one hour to complete the exam. The result can take up to 7 business days to be announced, although in my case it took only 1 day. You will only learn whether you passed or failed and your exact score will not be disclosed.

Due to an NDA, the content of the exam cannot be discussed. However, I managed to pass on my first try by going over the material and studying normally. If you have a similar background as I have and do it the same way, you should be able to pass without problems. If you want to make sure you are well prepared, I would recommend to take the following approach during studying:

Study all of the subject matter since everything is going to be relevant to some extent.
Focus more on breadth rather than depth. But be sure to have a good enough understanding of VPCs in each Cloud with its key features and differences compared to VPCs in other Clouds.
Practice frequently with the quizzes.
Look up concepts and resources you don't fully understand.

The Automation (IaC) Specialty Course

After passing the Associate certification, you can aim to pursue the Automation Specialty certification. As mentioned, this is a hands-on course where you will have to do a lab and actually get some hands-on experience with the Aviatrix platform and creating resources in both AWS and Azure using Terraform.

Strictly speaking, you can already purchase and take the course before achieving the Associate certification, but you can only apply for the Automation certification when you already possess the Associate certification

In a nutshell, you will be setting up an Aviatrix Controller via an image in AWS using the Sandbox Starter. This is going to provide the underlying infrastructure on which you will perform the lab. Rather than using the Controller UI, you will be using Terraform however.

The lab will provide some Terraform resources for you in the form of repositories which you have to fork on your own Github account. So you will not be starting from scratch, but you will have to make some changes and set up a project on the Terraform Cloud to automate the creation of the specified resources in AWS and Azure. Fast-forward, you should eventually be able to log into an AWS EC2 instance and ping a resource in Azure like this:

Now don't worry: The course comes with a series of video lectures to guide you through this lab and show you the solutions. You will not have to do any coding of your own. Also on the Aviatrix Community Platform, there will be written guides available to guide you through each of the lab parts and show you how to clean up your environment. These guides can be found here. Note that this requires you to create a free Aviatrix Community account, which is not the same as your learning account.

Assignment

After completing all the labs, you have to perform a little assignment that you have to submit in order to apply for the certification. I will not mention the explicit assignment here since it is behind the course-paywall for a reason (it is not listed in the lab guides either) but it is nothing too complicated.

Finally, let me point out a few more important caveats to take note of:

The course may state that you need three GitHub accounts to complete the labs. You can and you should however use only one GitHub account since attempting to create multiple accounts from your IP results in the accounts being 'flagged' and you will not be able to complete the labs with them. GitHub's terms of use also state that you can only have one account per person. So simply use your main GitHub account only to perform the labs. In my case, my submission was accepted using only one account.
The clean-up section states that you should terminate the resources and delete the forked repositories from your GitHub account. My advice: DO NOT delete the repositories from your GitHub before obtaining the certification! The repositories are still needed for the Aviatrix team to verify that you actually completed the labs! You can and you should terminate the rest, and double-check the inventory in your AWS and Azure accounts to make sure that everything is deleted. You have to do delete some left-over resources manually.
You may experience technical issues while performing the lab. If you do so, you can visit the technical forum and ask a question there. In my experience, the Aviatrix team are very helpful in case you get stuck. Apart from a few hiccups I found that performing the labs went rather smooth.
It is best to complete everything within a short time frame to avoid additional costs. In my experience, if you allocate one or two days to work on this course full-time, such as a full weekend, that should be enough.

Conclusion

Aviatrix is a very exciting piece of technology to learn about and could be key in setting up a multi-cloud network infrastructure for the use cases where this is desired. I found that doing both of the certifications also gave me a good foundation to understand Aviatrix from both the theoretical and the practical side.

To recap, you should already have some knowledge about Cloud before you should start with Aviatrix, but once you are set up you can learn a lot within a limited time and obtain two certifications for in total less than 100 USD. I think that is therefore a very good place to start to learning. There are of course other courses you can take in addition, such as the Professional course, but these are more expensive and instructor-led. Maybe I will get to do this in the future. In any case I am definitely excited about the technology and I look forward to both learn more about it and also use it in practice at a real-life project.