AWS Learning Resources
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a stack of cloud technologies to facilitate the management of infrastructure and application development without having to worry about the hardware. AWS boasts a never ending list of features and learning them can be challenging. The one saving grace is Amazon itself provides detailed documentation for all the web services they offer with practical examples that can get anyone with basic knowledge started. There are also many online learning resources in form of videos, audio, books, tutorials, courses, etc that cover the different levels. Some of these materials are free while others are paid.
AWS resources
Amazon itself provides vast resources to get users up and running with AWS. They provide both free and paid resources. Users have free access to the documentation of each service provided in the AWS stack.
The “Getting Started Resource Center” (found here: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/) on the AWS website features short tutorials that can be completed in 10 minutes (some can get up to 2 hours depending on the complexity) and mostly free to get started with each service or stack such as database, storage, compute, mobile, serverless, dev tools, machine learning, etc. These tutorials are great when the user is just starting out with the service and want to get started quickly. If a user needs more to understand the service in depth, these tutorials cannot provide the required knowledge. To support these tutorials, Amazon provides detailed free documentation (found here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/) of all the services which can be beneficial to all users. However, documentations are more targeted at users that are already familiar with the service to help them implement a new feature or extend it.
In support of the tutorials and documentation, Amazon also paid provides additional resources for users that want more. These resources prices range from little to very expensive and depend on what the user wants to get familiar with.
● Developer communities — expert users of AWS that are willing to help other users with difficulties. It features forums, discussion groups (https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/usergroups/), and AWS events (https://aws.amazon.com/events/explore-aws-events/).
● Talks and Channels — AWS related programs and talks users participate in to get up-to-date with the latest AWS services (https://aws.amazon.com/events/online-tech-talks/, https://aws.amazon.com/partners/tv/videos/).
● Certifications and Training — Amazon provides digital classroom training (https://aws.amazon.com/training/) and certification exams (https://aws.amazon.com/certification/) for users that want to learn the core of any AWS service and wants to be certificated.
● Reference materials — Frequently asked questions (https://aws.amazon.com/faqs/), whitepapers (https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/), glossary (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/glos-chap.html), and SDKs (https://aws.amazon.com/tools/) are also provided to users to get more familiar with the service.
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Free Online Courses
MOOC platforms such as Udemy, Coursera, Pluralsight provides a number of AWS related courses and certification training. Most of these materials can be accessed for free. The courses comprise of videos, transcripts, useful links, interactive sessions, etc. They are beneficial to beginners of AWS as they can get started with the important concepts of the service. Because these materials are free, users might have to provide some other information in order to interact with the free materials, or, be required to know their way around the platform in other to use free contents.
Also, the courses are targeted towards a particular stack so by taking a course, you only have knowledge related to a particular stack of AWS unless the stack requires knowledge about some other service.
Free resources available online include:
● Udemy — AWS Certified Associate ( CSAA, CSOA, & CDVA), AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
● Pluralsight — AWS Fundamentals for System Administrators, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Certified Solution Architect
● Coursera — AWS Fundamentals: Building Serverless Applications with AWS
● LinkedIn Learning — Free Amazon Web Services Essential Training, Cert Prep: AWS Certified Solutions Architect
While these resources are free to use, they usually only provide a brief introduction to the topic. They are good as starter resources for a beginner. The link to the resources can be found here: https://digitaldefynd.com/best-aws-certification-courses/
Paid Courses and Materials
Paid resources are often more in depth than the free courses. Most paid materials provide a learning path for users that involves learning about a stack from beginner level to expert level over a period of time.
Most of the best-paid resources are offered by Amazon and certification are provided along with the resources. Other MOOC platforms also provide paid resources that also offers certifications and training tracks.
Among top resources available are: Cloud Academy, A Cloud Guru, Amazon Web Services in Plain English, Coursera, Pluralsight, Udemy, Microsoft Virtual Academy.
The link to the resources can be found here: https://serverless.com/blog/aws-resources-to-master-cloud/
Other available resources that offer both paid and free materials include YouTube, blogs, Alfred AWS Docs (https://github.com/SamVerschueren/alfred-aws), and GitHub (https://github.com/donnemartin/awesome-aws).
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