Why AWS Certify?
Over the 7-year history of tech development here at Ibotta, our cloud implementations have grown and matured alongside AWS itself. In that time, I have had the opportunity to experiment with many new and exciting features. But even with all that hands-on experience, I have found value in the structure and goals offered by working towards the official certifications for AWS.
Amazon offers a variety of certifications for AWS in different specialties. I have been working my way through a few, and have completed the Associate level Developer and Solutions Architect exams. Along the way, there have been some questions about the process and why I think these certifications are useful.
Ibotta has been AWS native since the very beginning in early 2012. AWS was still relatively young at the time, only offering what we might think of as basic features at this point. As a group, we were not experts in any way at running in AWS either. So, we learned on the fly by reading blogs and documentation, and by doing simple experimentation. This means we had some false starts and mistakes, some of which we still deal with in production today.
A lot has changed in cloud computing since 2012. The number of features launched since then in AWS alone is amazing, and the maturity of the entire ecosystem has evolved. When we started, VPC networks in AWS were relatively new and optional; RDS only supported MySQL; and AWS had yet to release Redshift, Kinesis, Lambda, or DynamoDB. Docker was in an experimental phase as well, and microservices and continuous deployment were novel concepts.
Ibotta’s needs grew over time too. Spending upfront time setting up a microservice architecture or even serious deploy automation might be considered crazy for a cash strapped startup, so you launch with what you can make work. But over time these things don’t scale along with what the business needs to scale itself. We need updated approaches that can scale efficiently and automatically to meet demand, and new offerings to handle new capabilities or higher scale.
As a Distinguished Engineer on our Architecture Team, I work on providing direction and guidance to the technology organization and assist teams through collaboration. Over my time at Ibotta, I have been able to work directly with many AWS services to learn their abilities and some of their quirks. To this day, I am constantly learning about new features and use-cases in the ecosystem and applying that to help our technology teams build awesome products.
So why would I need certification? It is not a requirement of my job: I am not working for a consultant or AWS partner which might require them, and I have not been required or requested to get certified for any other specific reason. I am not necessarily looking to boast about it on my resume because I think it would land me a new job either.
For me, it is an opportunity to challenge myself by having a specific learning goal. I could read papers and blogs and watch training videos, taking what I get from those and experiment on my own, but keeping with that training can be tough without a clear goal in mind. I also like being able to show that I have certifications in some situations because it quickly shows that I am not just dabbling in AWS but have dedicated a significant part of my career in the ecosystem.
So, should you get AWS Certifications? My opinion is yes, I think engineers working with AWS services can learn a lot from the Developer exam materials, and generalists will gain value from the Solutions Architect exams. There are also new specialty exams on specific topics like big data, machine learning, and security that dive even deeper into specific topics. If you think that having an end-goal and structured curriculum helps you stay focused and get through the material, proving to yourself (and others) that you learned along the way, then these certifications can be a surprisingly low-cost way of doing that.
My next post details some of the specifics and my experience of the process.
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