[Opinion] I’ve passed an AWS cert… but is this something for me?

(Image source: https://www.irasutoya.com/2020/08/blog-post_42.html)

Passing an exam must feel great, but…

Yes, as the title suggests, I’ve passed AWS SAA(solutions architect associate). It is one of the most well-known certification in the IT world, and many developers try to start their cloud journey with this cert. I’ve spent almost three months preparing for the exam, including taking a famous Udemy course and an exam bundle from another famous website(of course, a completely legitimate one).

Do I feel good? Yes, but at the same time, No. As a matter of fact, I kind of feel incomplete and unsatisfied for having taken this exam. I am not saying that AWS or this SAA-03 cert is bad at all. However, I’d like to share my experience and thoughts on this cert. And you might relate my thoughts to any certifications in general.

Purpose of getting a cert

I had two main purposes for getting this cert:

1. Getting familiar with AWS services: First of all, I listed my experience with AWS on my resume, but somehow I felt I knew nothing about it. So I thought it would be good to review the service and fundamental concepts such as IAM, scalability, or serverless.

2. Improving my resume: Another reason was a 'practical' one - to explicitly tell recruiters that I am certified and therefore qualified. Being in such an extremely saturated and competitive field, I thought getting a cert would be an essential one for landing my next job.

So let me ask myself: has successful getting the cert accomplished my original purposes? I would say WELL....

How SAA cert preparation was actually like

1. The SAA covers not just a few well-known services but a wide range of AWS services

You probably know the 80/20 principle. Basically it means that we use only 20% of something 80% of the time. For instance, we use 20% of all the English words way more often than the other 80%.

I think this applies to AWS services as well. As an ordinary web developer, I have only used EC2, ECS, Lambda, S3, and RDS. If you are more experienced and work at a big organization, your list would be longer. However, the number would be not that different.

However, while preparing the exam, I had to put into my head some very unfamiliar services that I might never use in the future, such as DataSync, Storage Gateway, Polly, and VPC Flow, to name a few. It makes sense that if I were to work as a solutions architect using AWS extensively, then I need to be familiar with the catalog of services that AWS provides, so that I could make reasonable decisions about which to use. Nevertheless, I had to memorize every detail of many services that I had never touched before. I felt like I was reading a food recipe that I have never seen, touched, or tasted before.

2. The exam questions presents real-world scenarios

Most of the questions are like this: "You are a solutions architect at a company and the company uses this and that services, and you have a problem with that. How would you solve it?"

So if you have actual experience in using AWS extensively, you might find those exams interesting. However, as a person who have been spent 90% of time in writing application code, I found it difficult to engage with the practice problems.

For example, imagine you have never worked with Windows before, and you're asked to design a solution where you have to manage employee credentials using Windows AD on your on-premise server and migrate a Windows file systems database from the data center to AWS. Again, if you are a solutions architect, then I think you should know how to deal with such a problem. But as an application developer, would I ever encounter similar cases in the future?

Experience outweighs theory.

Overall, My LACK OF EXPERIENCE IN AWS was the main reason for my painful time in preparing for the cert. Although I managed to get a high score in the exam, I still feel I only become familiar with terminologies like subnet, IAM policy, IOPS, and so on. How could I claim to know more or work better than those who don't have the cert but have actual experience in AWS? Even if I can add a cert to my resume, can I confidently say that I can design a resilient and scalable distributed system in AWS?

What I would do if I go back in time?

As a matter of fact, the official guide of the cert recommends this cert to those who have more than one year of hands-on experience in AWS. You might say that getting a cert first gives you the whole picture of the AWS services at a high level, so that you would be able to touch the AWS services more smoothly. I woudl say NO. It was very painful experience to learn about services that I had never touched before. I would first gain more experience with those services first.

Personal project, actual work experience in enterprises, anything would do. I think it would be great to have an application that simulates AWS services so that one can exercise for free or at little cost. I haven't found any except LocalStack, so please let me know if there are other similar applications.

Conclusion

Well, having a cert is definitely worth it. I won't deny that. I learned a lot while preparing for the exam. However, now I realize that having a certification doesn't prove that you can actually solve real-world problems. I should keep learning and practicing; otherwise the cert itself would become a false representation of my skills.