Taking the next step in your AWS journey
So, you’ve taken the Cloud Practitioner or Technical Essentials course as your appetiser, perhaps had a little Architecting, Developing or Systems Operations on AWS for your main… but what about dessert?
There have been some really good mainstay courses to choose from: Advanced Architecting on AWS to take your architecting of AWS services journey a step further. The Developing on AWS or Systems Operations on AWS courses. Then there's the DevOps Engineering on AWS course to help understand the AWS Tools and recommended practices in creating a CI/CD pipeline within the cloud.
Maybe it's time to focus on creating data lakes, collecting and processing data with Kinesis, EMR, etc, and performing queries and analytics on that data: Big Data on AWS, perhaps. Or for more focus on setting up, managing and querying a datawarehouse: Datawherehousing on AWS. Of course, there is also the Security courses to focus on the tools and services, and the security best practises in the cloud.
And over the last few months, some additional courses have been added to the menu:
- Advanced Developing on AWS
- AWS Cloud Financial Management for Builders
- Architecting on AWS Accelerator
- Planning and Designing Databases on AWS
One topic that is constantly getting hotter is the use of microservices. What are microservices? How can they benefit my operations in the cloud? Can they help me increase velocity in my DevOps CI/CD pipeline? If I have a Monolith, how can we move to a microservice architecture using AWS and build a more cloud-native application? If all this makes your mouth water, then Advanced Developing on AWS is for you – three days taking you on the Monolith to Microservice journey on AWS.
Having flexibility is great. It's one of the great benefits of using the cloud. That flexibility together with scalability and disposability not only give you choice of architecture/services, but also in how we pay for them: variable operational expense. To get a better understanding of AWS Services, their costing model and how to optimise your architecture and your spend, AWS Cloud Financial Management for Builders may be of interest.
For some students, Architecting on AWS is a great course but they need just a little bit more. Perhaps not as far as going on the Advanced Architecting on AWS course, but a little more on networking (like VPN/Direct Connect etc), understanding the migrations options as we move from on-premise to the cloud, more detail on microservices and account design and management – all helping to provide a more rounded understanding of architecting AWS services: Architecting on AWS Accelerator may be the way to go.
AWS has increased its offerings of relational and non-relational database managed services. Whether we are looking at running an SQL RDBMS on an EC2 (IaaS) or choosing to run as a managed service on RDS, using underlying Instances or going Aurora Serverless, the Planning and Designing Databases on AWS can help you understand the decisions to be made.
Of course, a relational model is not always the way to go, sometimes you’ll need to store relationships between different entities of data or perhaps store immutable records. How best to store your JSON or key/value pair data? Investigation of the differences and benefits of Neptune, QLDB, Document DB and DynamoDB will help to understand where the appropriate database services sit in your AWS service architecture
Some exciting new courses are being added to the already excellent catalogue of courses. Definitely something to whet the appetite.