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Finally, after three attempts at sitting the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam I got to actually do it this week. That’s not that I failed two times before, which I could have dealt with better, but the previous two attempts were remote exams via PearsonVUE where the online proctor didn’t show up!
It frustrated me enough the first time but the second time really did grind on me and I vowed not to try anymore online exams with PearsonVUE and wait for test centres to reopen, which some have now.
My mum always told me that if you don’t have anything positive to say then don’t say anything, but I’m making an exception here! There’s a reason why PearsonVUE have one star on TrustPilot. A quick look through the comments and it turns out I’m not the only one. I could rant about this for a whole post but I’ll leave it at that and switch to a more positive tone:-)
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I’ve been doing more and more work in AWS recently, mostly working with networking, EC2, S3, Route 53 – the most common services. I wanted to gain some knowledge of other services and after trawling the internet to figure out the best possible route to take I realised that the syllabus for the SAA-CO2 certification actually fitted the bill perfectly.
So I found some study guides and buried my head in them as well as getting hands on and found it really enjoyable. As a long time infrastructure guy I find working in AWS pleasurable. Getting stuff done with almost infinite resources at hand in super quick time is something you can only do in the cloud. It’s such a paradigm shift from my early days as an OpenVMS systems manager and Oracle DBA where resources were super tight, and since then where “paperwork” puts weeks/months on a simple infrastructure request. I love it!
Anyhoo, I thought to myself if I’m going to learn the syllabus for an official certification then I might as well get on and take the exam. Et voila! I’m now an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.
By the way, I’ll be running a live demo soon where I showcase how we can use AWS with Delphix to quickly spin up masked dev and test environments in the cloud. It’s a real game changer in how we work with CI/CD pipelines from a data perspective, with all the AWS and Delphix goodness baked into Infrastructure as Code. I’ll post it on LinkedIn once I’ve set the date.
Matt is a technology consultant with over 20 years experience helping organisations around the world achieve data success using proven and emerging technologies. He is the Principal Consultant and Head Trainer at Kuzo Data.
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.