My AWS Journey Thus Far
How my love for cloud came about
The Beginning
Last year, I was first introduced to the concept of cloud computing. I was a 1st-year cybersecurity student with a strong interest in cybersecurity and development. However, when I saw an email from my school on training to represent the school in a cloud computing competition, I thought “Why the heck not” and signed up for it even though I hadn’t the faintest idea what cloud computing was like.
I was introduced to an AWS Cloud Architecting course from AWS Academy themselves. It was filled with lecture videos and practical lab sessions that were to be self-studied. After finishing the course, we would go on to take the Certified Cloud Solutions Architect Associate exam from AWS.
At first, I found the content pretty dry as there was a lot of theory, and didn’t really quite understand the concept of virtualization in the cloud, or setting up networks in the cloud. On hindsight, I should have started with the foundational level Cloud Practitioner exam instead. Might have made my understanding easier…
Igniting the Flame
In the beginning, I was really considering dropping the course altogether. It was difficult juggling my usual curriculum with this added one. However, as I progressed through the course and learned more about how the cloud worked, I was very intrigued by it. I can’t exactly explain why or how, but I was really interested in using the cloud for whatever I was doing. When I went for hackathons or did my own projects, I started integrating the cloud into my solutions. This came in the form of EC2 instances, RDS database instances, Lambda functions, APIs from API Gateway, S3 bucket storage and many more. As I slowly exposed myself to more real-life usage of AWS services, my love for them only grew fonder.
Furthermore, the contents in the AWS Academy course was very detailed and gave me a strong foundation in the AWS Cloud. The lecture videos were very engaging and they even had projects, case studies and knowledge checks to help me apply the theory I learned in a real-world scenario.
The Exam
After just 1.5 months since I started learning cloud, I went to take the SAA-C02 exam. Despite the course I had, the exam was extremely difficult for me. It wasn’t a simple “memorise and vomit” kind of exam, it required a lot of thinking and tricky questions. True to its name, “solutions architecting”, it required me to think of the best solution the various real-world scenarios they created. For example, there were multiple ways to store an item on the cloud, but they wanted the most cost-effective and hassle-free method. This required me to be very familiar with the services and the various configuration options I could do, such as encryption, backups and more.
Despite the difficulty, I passed the exam first try, barely. It was a great achievement for me and I was really happy and relieved that I managed to pass. A big contributing factor of that was due to how succinct and detailed the AWS Academy course was. The certification was great, and the feeling of happiness was also amazing, considering how worried I was during the exam. I owe many thanks to my mentor and AWS academy for their help.
From there, I started embarking on using even more cloud services in my daily use, such as AWS Amplify for my AWS Build On 2020 hackathon (I might write a post on that soon too, look out for it!), launching honeypots on Amazon EC2, using Amazon Lightsail for WordPress, Bitnami Ghost and VMs and many more. This really expanded my knowledge of AWS cloud services and made me interested in learning more. However, before I could move on to my next ambitions in the cloud, there was still the competition to think about.
The Competition
To be honest, I didn’t really prepare much for the competition. I read up on some case studies and architectures that have been used and published on AWS Blogs. I did not really know what to expect but I was told it was going to be an architecting competition, hence the requirement of the Solutions Architect Associate certification. However, I was in for a ride.
I am now a year 2 cybersecurity student stacked against poly graduates and university engineering students, who basically do cloud computing as part of their curriculum. That alone made me pretty stressed but I decided to just try my best and see what happens.
It was a 3-day competition with challenges in a CTF style format, which was familiar to me as a cybersecurity student. Each challenge came with their own problems in various categories such as Remediation and more. To keep things brief, I won’t go too much into detail.
When I started the competition on day 1, I was shocked. The challenges had nothing to do with architecting. They were on topics that I was unfamiliar with or had never experienced. I had 0 experience with this and hence was lost from the start. I had to learn on the fly, search for information and apply the knowledge about the services used in the challenges. The nature of the challenges ensued across the 3 days.
Thanks to the various mentors in my life thus far, I managed to build up a foundation of grit, resilience and critical problem-solving. These skills and principles helped me power through the competition and allowed me to do my best. I managed to learn a lot and be resourceful in my efforts to solve the challenges presented to me.
Even though I did not win first prize, I did get a medallion of excellence, and I learned a hell lot throughout that competition. I had many firsts in various services which I had never touched before. It was a very eye-opening and fruitful experience for me. Despite the difficulty, it only served to deepen my passion for cloud computing. I had fallen in love.
Moving On
Right now, with the competition behind me, I am ready to move on and learn even more in the world of Cloud Computing. I am currently studying for the Certified Developer Associate exam and the Certified SysOps Administrator Associate on AWS Academy, through their AWS Cloud Developing and AWS Cloud Operations course. I have also just received the great news that I have been accepted into the most recent intake of the AWS Community Builders program. I am currently working on AWS CLI Scripts, policy templates, CloudFormation templates, mock architecture and many more to give myself more exposure and experience in the cloud.
A goal I have is to complete all 5 main AWS certificates and even expanding my knowledge into other cloud platforms in detail, like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
I am incredibly excited to see what is in store for me to learn in the cloud and I sure as hell see it as a potential career path. I am so grateful to my mentor, who introduced me to the cloud and gave me many great opportunities to explore the ever-evolving world of cloud computing.
I will do a follow-up post in the future with new updates! Stay tuned!
