The Benefits of AWS Certification

aws certification
AWS or Amazon Web Services Certification is quickly becoming the rage of the season. As of today, there are 5 certifications available, which include certifications on associate and professional levels alike. Along with the initial certification, there is a re-certification required every two years, which makes the certification sell like hot cakes currently.

Amazon is adding two more certifications to the existing list of certifications, which are yet to be introduced. These certifications are the “Security Operations on AWS” and “Big Data on AWS certification”. So the main question is, “Why go for the AWS Certification at all?”

Since individuals and employers can benefit from AWS Certifications, it all depends on how you tend to look at the certifications. Let’s split the benefits into two categories and take it on from there.

For individuals: No matter the type of certification, any individual would need to demonstrate the skills and prove his/her ability of handling the required tasks. The same is the case with the AWS Certification as well. After achieving the required credentials, the certification can open up various avenues for your growth in AWS related projects or you might even get a chance to present your knowledge before your clients.

This way, there will always be tons of opportunities available to you, post certification, which will declare you as an inherent subject matter expert in the AWS domain. This is not all; post certification, you also get the opportunity to surpass various interviewing preliminaries, and end up straight away into the interviewing round, which helps in cracking the aforesaid position in a more elaborate manner.

For employers: Companies which work regularly in Cloud computing environments often require people with the same skill set. However, since the concept of Cloud Computing is still relatively new, people with AWS Certification are a feather in the cap, especially for companies on the lookout for such skilled workforce. People trained and certified in the AWS skills often posses extensive knowledge with respect to handling and implementing Cloud based projects successfully.

On the other hand, if employers employ AWS certified employees, they too gain a progressive edge in their day to day operations, which makes the hiring all the more successful and worthwhile. At the same time, post hiring, employers are eligible to become a member of AWS Partner Network (APN), which helps employers access a series of benefits, ranging from training subsidies to availing market support to AWS usage support, amongst many others.

As technology is changing at a progressively fast pace, there is a lot to achieve in order to stay up to date with the times. In order to stay competitive, more and more aspirants are seeking certification as a way out to ensure better job opportunities.

Simultaneously, employers are taking a lot of advantage of the sudden developments, since Cloud Computing is becoming a thing of the day. For this very reason, AWS Certification can help individuals go a long way, especially with regards to getting well paying jobs and the much needed exposure in the technology industry.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services or AWS is a cloud computing platform offering by Amazon providing a wide array of cloud services to the customers. Amazon AWS offers several cloud options including Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and Amazon WorkSpaces. This group of remote computing services that make up the cloud-computing platform over the internet are known as Amazon Web Services. Most of these services are not directly exposed to the end users. Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 are two of the most central and well-known offerings.

To enable the use of online services via REST, HTTP or SOAP protocols, Amazon first introduced Amazon Web Services in 2006. AWS launched two Amazon CloudFront edge location in India on 28th July 2013 joining 42 edge locations worldwide. This makes the services global, fast, flexible and cost-effective. Amazon Web Services is now a $6 Billion-a-year cloud-computing monster, and is considered Amazon’s most valuable asset. AWS generated the sales of $1.57bn in the first quarter of 2015, and firm’s total revenue for the quarter rose by 15% to $22.7 bn, which was much stronger increase than expected. AWS provides cloud computing services to several household names including Spotify, Dropbox, Uber, Netflix, CIA and Samsung.

AWS services include:

Cloud– Virtual Servers, Containers, Event-driven Computer Functions, Auto scaling and Load Balancing

Storage and Content Delivery– Object Storage, Block Storage, Archive Storage, File System Storage, and CDN

Databases- Relational, Caching and NoSQL

Networking– Virtual Private Cloud, DNS and Direct Connections

Administration and Security– Identity Management, Access Control, Key Storage and Management, Usage and Resource Auditing, Monitoring and Logs, and Service Catalogue.

Enterprise IT Applications from AWS include Desktop Virtualization, Email and Calendering, and Document Sharing and Feedback. Engineered for the most demanding requirements, AWS offers following advantages:

Secure– AWS cloud security infrastructure is one of the most secure and flexible cloud computing environments providing highly reliable and extremely scalable platform so that the data and applications can be deployed securely and quickly. Data and applications are not only protected by highly secure infrastructure and facilities, they are also protected by extensive security and networking monitoring systems that provide critical security measures such as password brute-force detection and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection on AWS accounts. Additional security measures include built-in firewalls, secure access, private subnets, multi-factor authentication, unique users, dedicated connection options, encrypted data storage, centralized key management, security logs, perfect forward secrecy and so on.

Compliant– AWS’s Cloud Compliance ensures robust control to maintain data protection and security in the cloud. Compliance responsibilities get shared as the systems are built on top of AWS cloud infrastructure.

Private, isolated Resources– Enterprises adopting cloud computing require secure data and applications, increased agility, and reduced costs. However, some organisations also need to take into consideration the unique requirements for regulatory compliance and resource isolation. AWS offers private network, private compute, private storage, enterprise governance, and private encryption resources for completely private cloud experience.

Hybrid– AWS offers solutions and tools to integrate existing resources of the organisation with the AWS cloud to extend and enhance the capabilities and accelerate the adoption of cloud computing. Offering a wide range of options to develop architecture, hybrid architecture involves integration of storage, networking, management and access control. The capabilities include integrated networking, integrated Cloud back-ups, integrated access control, and Integrated resource management and workload migration.

Amazon Web Services have changed the game in several ways. You pay only for what you use, scale up or down easily within few minutes based on the demand. Servers can be added to different parts of the world to provider faster services to the customers. Additionally, Amazon periodically keeps adding features and services to their existing offerings, making it a preferred choice for organisations in different domains. Recent AWS add-on includes Amazon Machine Learning. However, with IBM, Google and Microsoft emerging to grab some of the market share, it needs to be seen how Amazon is able to hold its margins high over the long term.