This week's free technical course is an exciting one. Cloud computing with AWS. And you can earn a certification, too.
As with all videos on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel, this is a full course in a single video for your convenience. If you like it, consider supporting our friend Andrew Brown who created it by buying one of his paid courses.
And you can always donate to our nonprofit, too. At our ludicrous level of efficiency, every dollar you give translates to 50 hours worth of free technology education for people around the world.
What is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and how do you earn the certification?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the one of the most widely-used cloud computing services out there.
One big advantage of using the cloud (which is basically just a collection of other people's computers) is that you no longer need to purchase your own servers and plug them into the internet.
Instead you can rent your own servers in the cloud and run your applications on them. And as of 2019, most companies do this.
A Reasonable First Cloud Certification
If you want to start earning some developer certifications, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner may be a good starting point for you.
For starters, it's not super technical. You can earn this certification without knowing how to code. The official certification description recommends you have some basic IT knowledge and "six months of experience with the AWS Cloud in any role, including technical, managerial, sales, purchasing, or financial."
But if you watch this course and follow along on your own computer, you should be OK. The course will break down most of the important concepts in detail for you.
Andrew says the exam will only take most people about 20 to 50 hours of study to prepare for. Even though you can take it online, he recommends taking it at a test center in person. Here's why:
"What value does the CCP hold? It can help superficially increase your certification count. But it's not recognized as an important certification for developers on resumes. If you were a bootcamp grad, it could be a good indicator that you're familiar with AWS."
"But you should go get the CCP. And why is that? It's for a totally different reason. The CCP is going to help you build confidence and it's a very easy win. Because it's the easiest certification. It's the most inexpensive certification. It's the perfect opportunity for you to get comfortable for when you go take a real exams.
"The AWS Solution Architect Associate exams and everything beyond that are very difficult. By taking the CCP and going to the test center, you're going to learn the test center and what the environment's going to be like, and that is the big value of the CCP. This is a very easy way to ease into the associate certifications."
Here's a full list of the topics this course covers. I realize this is a long, long list. So here's a link to the full AWS CCP course on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel in case you want to use use the timestamps in the description to jump to specific parts of the video.
When in doubt, use Google search. This stuff isn't rocket science, and there are plenty of good articles out there.
Cloud Concepts
- What is Cloud Computing?
- Six Advantages and Benefits of Cloud Computing
- Types of Cloud Computing
- Cloud Computing Deployment Models
AWS Global Infrastructure
- Map Overview
- Regions
- Availability Zones
- Edge Locations
- GovCloud Regions
Getting Started
- Creating an AWS Account
- Billing Preferences, Budgets and Alarms
- Change IAM Users Sign-in Link
- Activate MFA on Root Account
- Create individual IAM user
- Set a password policy
Hands On
- Regions
- EC2
- Sessions Manager
- AMI
- Auto Scaling Groups
- Elastic Load Balancer
- S3
- CloudFront
- RDS
- Lambda
️ EC2 Pricing Models
- On-Demand
- Reserved
- Spot
- Dedicated
- EC2 Pricing CheatSheet
️ Billing and Pricing
- Free Services
- AWS Support Plans
- Follow Along - Lets create a support case
- AWS Marketplace
- Follow Along - Marketplace subscription
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- Follow Along Trusted Advisor
- Consolidated Billing
- Consolidated Billing Volume Discounts
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Cost Explorer Follow Along
- AWS Budgets
- AWS Budgets Follow Along
- TCO Calculator
- TCO Calculator Follow Along
- AWS Landing Zone
- Resource Groups and Tagging
- Resource Groups Follow Along
- AWS QuickStart
- AWS Cost and Usage Report
- Cost and Usage Follow Along
Technology Overview
- AWS Organizations and Accounts
- AWS Organizations Follow Along
- AWS Networking
- Database Services
- Provisioning Services
- Computing Services
- Storage Services
- Business Centric Services
- Enterprise Integration
- Logging Services
- Know your Initialisms
AWS Security
- Shared Responsibility Model
- AWS Compliance programs
- AWS Artifact
- AWS Artifact Follow Along
- Amazon Inspector
- AWS WAF
- AWS Shield
- Penetration Testing
- Guard Duty
- Key Management Service
- Amazon Macie
- Security Groups vs NACLs
- AWS VPN
Variation Study
- Cloud* Service
- *Connect Service
- Elastic Transcoder vs Media Convert
- SNS vs SQS
- Inspector vs Trusted Advisor
- ALB vs NLB vs CLB
- SNS vs SES
- Artifact vs Inspector
How much does the exam itself cost?
Note that this video course is totally free, but Amazon's CCP exam itself costs $100 (practice exams are $20 each time). You can schedule an exam here.
And no, Amazon is not paying us to give this information to you. We just think it's a worthwhile certification to explore.
AWS has lots of other certifications, too. As does Google, Microsoft, and other cloud service providers.
As always, do your research before you spend any money on exams.
OK - here's the full course. I embedded it below for your convenience. Get your notepad ready, and plug your computer into a second monitor if you have one. And remember to have fun. ?