Passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam is one of the first steps to a career in cloud development. And freeCodeCamp just published my free 12-hour course that will help you prepare for the exam.

This exam mostly deals with cloud computing concepts. Even if you are new to coding, you should be able to prepare for this exam and earn the AWS certification.

This entire free course is now live on YouTube, and linked below. Before you dive into it, read this guide to help you decide whether the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification is for you.

What is the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner?

The Certified Cloud Practitioner is the entry-level AWS certification that goes through:

• The cloud fundamentals, for example Cloud Concepts, Cloud Architecture, and Cloud Deployment Models
• A close look at the AWS Core Services
• A quick look at the vast amount of AWS services
• Identity, Security, and Governance of the Cloud
• Billing, Pricing, and Support of AWS Services

The course code is CLF-C01 but its commonly referred to as the CCP.

Amazon Web Services is the leading Cloud Service Provider (CSP) in the world and the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is the most common starting point for people breaking into the cloud industry.

Consider the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner if:

• You are new to cloud and need to learn the fundamentals
• You are in the executive, management, or sales level and need to acquire strategic information about cloud for adoption or migration
• You are a Senior Cloud Engineer or Solutions Architect who needs to reset or refresh your AWS knowledge after working for multiple years

No matter your path towards a cloud role, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner provides fundamental knowledge that you shouldn't skip.

How this course is different from the 2019 AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course

This is the second edition of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course released on freeCodeCamp. This edition has three times more content, and all previous content has been revised, expanded, and re-filmed.

I made these major updates because of some important changes that have been made to the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. In general AWS has increased the difficulty of this exam.

Overview of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is divided into 3 domains, each with their own weighting. The weighting determine the number of questions about that domain that will appear on the exam.

• Domain 1: Cloud Concepts at 26%
• Domain 2: Security and Compliance at 25%
• Domain 3: Technology at 33%
• Domain 4 Billing and Pricing at 16%

The official exam guide lists a very long list of possible services, technologies, and concepts that could appear on the exam. In actuality, only one third of the content that could appear will appear on the exam.

How do you get Certified?

Google uses Pearson Vue and PSI test centers to deliver the exam. You can take the exam in-person or online.

If you want to schedule the exam with either testing method, you do that via AWS Trainings Account.

There are 65 multiple-choice and multiple-select questions and you have to score 70% to pass.

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner costs $100 USD.

Can I simply watch the videos and pass the exam?

AWS has increased the difficulty of this exam. And while watching lecture videos is critical to passing, having hands-on experience and utilizing practice exams are essential if you want to pass the exam.

How much you need to study will vary, but on average it will require about 24 hours over 2 weeks to be prepared to successfully pass this AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

This course comes with a full free practice exam which you can redeem for free with no credit card by signing up on ExamPro.

ExamPro has multiple paid practice exams along with other study materials to increase your chances of passing.

Head on over to freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel to start working through the full 6-hour course.

As promised, here is the 4th free ExamPro AWS Certification course. This course prepares you to earn the coveted AWS SysOps Admin Associate Certification.

We now have free courses for 4 out of the 12 AWS Certifications:

1. ? AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
2. ? AWS Solutions Architect Associate
3. ? AWS Developer Associate
4. AWS SysOps Administrator Associate (the full course link is at the bottom of this article – but I hope you'll read this article first ?)
5. AWS Solutions Architect Professional (coming soon)
6. AWS DevOps Engineer Professional (coming soon)
7. AWS Machine Learning Speciality (coming soon)
8. AWS Security Speciality (coming soon)
9. AWS Advanced Networking Speciality (coming soon)
10. AWS Alexa Skill Builder Specialty (coming soon)
11. AWS Data Analytics Specialty (coming soon)
12. AWS Databases Specialty (coming soon)

What Is The AWS SysOps Administrator Associate Certification?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 3 Associate Certifications:

1. Solutions Architect (most popular)
2. SysOps Administrator (most technical)
3. Developer (most practical)

An overview of AWS certifications.

The AWS SysOps Associate is the most popular entry-level certification into a DevOps cloud role.

Along the way, you'll gain practical DevOps knowledge for the three most essential skills:

• Cloud Networking
• Monitoring
• Automation and Management

Who Is The AWS SysOps Admin Associate For?

This certification is for people who enjoy highly technical work like building and maintaining systems more than they enjoy programming. (If you particularly enjoy programming, DevOps roles may be a better fit for you.)

SysOps is the kind of work where you configure Windows or Linux servers:

• You deal with networking (think routers, switches, and IP Addresses).
• You installing software packages for developers.
• You investigate and solve problems.

The amount of programming knowledge you need to enter the DevOps field, by comparison, is much more than a SysOps, but much less than a Developer. You would need to know:

• How to work with JSON, YAML and configuration files
• Bash or PowerShell scripting
• How to work with some programming languages but only to configure SDKs in a straightforward copy-and-paste way

There are many DevOps specialization roles, so there are many opportunities for growth or future career transition.

The AWS Certification Roadmap: Start with the Certified Cloud Practitioner, advance to the SysOps Administrator Associate, then DevOps Engineer Professional, then one of many elective certifications.

What is a Systems Operations Administrator (SysOps Admin)?

Also known as a Junior DevOps Engineer or Cloud Support Engineer, this role is responsible for reacting to incidents, monitoring and maintaining the existing infrastructure that was architected by a DevOps Engineer.

A SysOps Admin will receive tickets of work (also known as operational items) they need to complete. Such tasks could include:

• patching a server with the latest updates
• debugging production errors relating to the infrastructure
• improving the performance and optimizing the cost of infrastructure
• writing automation scripts to perform tasks on remote servers
• creating servers and various resources for Cloud Engineers or Web Developers to use.

A SysOps Admin is also the first line of defense when something goes wrong with cloud infrastructure. It's common for SysOps Admin to respond during off-hours if an unexpected incident arises.

What is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps Engineer is a proactive role and focuses on the automation and grand architecting of complex infrastructure systems.

DevOps Engineers build the foundational infrastructure that will be maintained by SysOps Admins.

Such tasks a DevOps Engineers might do include:

• Create runbooks or operational playbooks that will be used by SysOps Admins in the case of an incident
• Looking for ways to automate the work that a SysOps performs to free them up for other more demanding tasks
• Creating Infrastructure as Code (IaC) so that entire complex systems can be created and destroyed quickly.

Here's a quick, simplified way to understand the two roles:

• SysOps manage operations and manage systems
• DevOps manage operations and develop those systems

Many people start in an entry-level SysOps role and then move on to DevOps roles as their career progresses.

Which AWS Services You Should Give Special Attention To as a SysOps Admin?

CloudWatch

CloudWatch is a collection of services that relate to monitoring. This may be the most critical service to learn for SysOps Admin since "Monitoring and Reporting" are worth 22% of the final exam score.

There are nine CloudWatch services, but the ones that require special attention are Logs, Metrics, Events and Alarms.

Events are so important that AWS has turned CloudWatch Events into its robust service now called EventBridge.

Cloud Networking

Cloud Networking is the concept of how servers and services talk to each other using various internet protocols such as IP addresses.

The SysOps Admin has a reputation for being hard, but I believe it is because most courses do not include Cloud Networking Fundamentals. (They expect you to take another course or have the knowledge.) So I made sure not to skip Cloud Network in my course, and I include a large section that will comprehensively teach it to you.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks is a service for deploying and managing multi-tiered applications. The purpose of this service is to be something in-between Elastic Beanstalk (EB) and having to set up everything yourself using CloudFormation. The idea was to give you more flexibility but still, reduce complexity.

OpsWorks did not become a popular service, and so many courses will gloss over OpsWorks. I made sure to make OpsWorks as practical and hands-on as possible.

In the future version of this exam, we might see less of OpsWorks, but for now, you need to learn this service.

Systems Manager

Systems Manager is the cornerstone to the SysOps Admin role. Systems Manager, just like CloudWatch, is composed of multiple AWS Services. Systems Manager has everything to do with managing, patching, maintaining servers.

I gave extra care to thoroughly cover AWS Systems Manager since I predict we'll see more exam questions in the future with multiple new AWS Systems Manager services.

CloudFormation

CloudFormation is a service that allows you to write scripts that will set up multiple AWS Services. This is known as Infrastructure as Code.

I covered CloudFormation thoroughly in the Developer Associate course. This said, I added a few additional questions since the SysOps Administrator requires significant CloudFormation knowledge.

Overlap With The Solutions Architect Associate and the Developer Associate

When you study for more than one AWS Associate certification, you will notice some overlap among the subjects covered on exams.

As a result, about half of this new SysOps course overlaps with other courses I've published for other AWS certifications. If a section of the course seems familiar, you can use it for review, or you can go ahead and skip to the next section.

All right – you can watch the full course here.

Note that YouTube wouldn't let us upload all 14 hours as a single video, so the first video is 12 hours. The final 2 hours of the course are in a second video, linked from the video description.

Some Parting Words

I did my part by designing this course for you and making it freely available. But ultimately it's up to you to complete your journey by investing the time and effort into studying these materials. Best of luck preparing for the exam.

One way to signal to the cloud and labor markets that you have a broad understanding of cloud computing is to pass the Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner Exam.

Studying for this test can range from easy to moderately challenging depending on your technical and professional background.

I recently allocated five business days to studying for and taking the Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner Exam.

During this week I increased my understanding of cloud computing, AWS specific products, and the cloud market.

And I want to pass these lessons on. If you want to take this exam – or are considering it – my experience may be of help to you.

Lesson #1: Know What is Tested and Why

Understanding what an exam tests and what it does not test is important.

Firstly, know the mechanics of the test. How is the exam given? When is the exam offered?

Secondly, know the composition of the test. How is it scored? What types of questions are asked?

COVID-19 has changed how the test is administered, and my test was proctored remotely. I used my personal computer at home to complete it.

In order to pass the exam, you need a score of 70% or higher. The questions were largely multiple choice but there were multi-select prompts as well.

At its core, the exam tests if you have a sufficiently strong understanding of cloud computing to be a practitioner in the field.

This means that your baseline knowledge of core concepts will enable you to engage with AWS customers, partners, or other relevant stakeholders.

It also validates an examinee’s ability to explain the value of the AWS Cloud, understand the AWS shared responsibility model, and comprehend AWS Cloud security best practices.

Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

This definition (and how Cloud technologies are deployed and managed) comes up repeatedly.

The exam also tests your working knowledge of design standards (i.e. reliability, scalability, and the durability of cloud technology) and specific technologies (Virtual Private Clouds, Subnets, Networking Access Control Lists, and so on).

Lesson #2: Don’t Fear the Exam

Many professionals taking the exam have – to put it mildly – mild anxiety heading into test day. That is because the exam does ask some technical questions.

But fear not!

President Franklin Roosevelt declared in his First Inaugural Address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Those words certainly hold true for the Cloud Practitioner Exam.

The exam doesn’t ask you to write software or deploy or use Python to architect cloud configurations. So relax :)

By taking time to prepare and learn the suite of AWS products, how they work, and why companies benefit from these tools, you will be well served on exam day.

Lesson #3: Prepare

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos noted that “a brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”

If you have not taken an exam in a long time (let alone a professional certification), you might be unsure of how to start preparing.

Use the Cloud Practitioner Exam as a platform by which to work hard and lean in to learning new things.

Going into the exam, I was familiar with a number of AWS’s core products: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, and Relational Database Service to name a few. And having built my financial technology startup Pennybox on AWS services certainly helped.

But there were many products I had yet to discover. I needed to learn these.

Some had Greek names (Athena, Kinesis) and others were composed of unfamiliar acronyms (QLDB, SQS, SNS to name a few). I kept a running document in an effort to best remember each product.

Learning new concepts and ideas can be challenging.

But in the process of doing hard things you can develop a reputation as a resourceful learner and someone who brings strong thought leadership to the table.

When you pass the exam you will be proud to have earned that reputation.

Lesson #4: The Devil is in the Details

When taking the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam you need to understand Amazon’s core cloud products, how they operate, and the ways in which they work together.

One area that I needed to invest more time in was cloud security.

I learned that AWS is certified as a PCI DSS 3.2 Level 1 Service Provider, the highest level of assessment available for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

This knowledge led me down a curiosity rabbit hole.

I started visiting websites, like the accounting SaaS company Freshbooks, to see how they accept payments and how those payments are securely transacted.

Needless to say, the details matter.

I also needed to brush up on Virtual Private Network technology and, more broadly, how connectivity works between private and public networks.

For example, I learned that a VPN is created by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated circuits or with tunneling protocols.

Lesson #5: Let Core Concepts Guide You

The exam tests computational concepts. These concepts are tied to general paradigms in security, pricing, networking, and infrastructure.

I found it very useful to diagram AWS architectures.

I picked from among the best whiteboards online to write out solutions by hand.

My whiteboard helped me enter exam day with greater confidence and the ability to visualize how AWS products work.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. Learn how to draw a virtual networking environment, including subnets and route tables.

Without knowing the names of all the products that AWS builds, you can still easily get a sense that Amazon wants users and companies to have a flexible, secure, reliable, and scalable experience with cloud technology.

For example, take a look at this sample question:

A company needs to migrate their website from on-premises to AWS. Security is a major concern for them, so they need to host their website on hardware that is NOT shared with other AWS customers. Which of the following EC2 instance options meets this requirement?

Without seeing potential choices, what sounds like a reasonable answer?

To paraphrase this question, this company is looking for a server that they alone have access to.

In AWS terminology such a server is called a “Dedicated Instance”.

And just like that, you have earned a point.

See, it’s not that hard, right?

Lesson #6: Practice

There are three ways to practice for the exam: read whitepapers that Amazon publishes, take practice tests, or use actual AWS products to gain firsthand experience with the services.

Deploying a combination of all three approaches will likely yield the best results.

There are affordable courses offered by aCloud Guru and Udemy to help you take and review practice questions. And Andrew Brown offers free prep courses on the freeCodeCamp YouTube channel.

Another approach, and one that I find preferable for deeper learning, is to set-up and run a test environment in AWS itself. Why? Because this will give you firsthand exposure to how products operate and interact.

By creating an AWS account you will have root access and can provision users and products easily. This experience will likely lead to more indelible mastery of the core concepts.

Lesson #7: Enjoy Exam Day and Remember Why You are Taking the Exam in the First Place

The exam is 90 minutes long and you are notified at its conclusion if you passed. You must wait a few days to get your actual numerical results.

If you are just starting this journey, try to enjoy it.

Unlike the GMAT, which I had to take for business school and which teaches concepts that infrequently appear in my everyday life (although I do remember that 2 is the smallest prime number), the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is both practical and relevant.

If you work in cloud technology, this exam will help you earn customer trust by demonstrating foundational knowledge.

The cloud computing market is growing rapidly. Cloud technology will continue to shape our digital economy for years to come.

According to research conducted by Lolly Co, tapping into this technological age isn’t just about producing new goods and services. By using digital solutions that streamline business processes, companies can elevate efficiency, lower costs, and remain competitive via customer experiences.

Understanding the technological underpinnings of these changes is worthwhile and exciting.

I used the exam as a platform to deepen my understanding of how this world works. You can do the same.

AWS is constantly evolving and adding new products and services. So my own learning path continues.

Studying AWS and the core pillars of cloud technology will serve you well on exam day and, most importantly, beyond.

This article will teach you everything you need to know in order to get any AWS certification from home. You will learn how to schedule an exam, how to set up your workspace for the big day, and tips you need to have in mind.

What are AWS certifications?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) Certifications help validate your knowledge and ability to solve different problems using AWS. They're a great tool for helping you and others confirm how much you know about this cloud provider.

These certifications come directly from AWS, as they are the ones who produce the content for the certification and maintain them. When you earn an AWS certification you start belonging to a global community of AWS Certified people and you get some benefits for being part of this group.

Currently there are 12 different AWS certifications covering different levels of knowledge and different expertise.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/

There are 2 different types of certifications: the specialty certifications and the more generalist ones.

In the generalist certifications we have 3 levels of expertise - foundational, associate, and professional. These certifications generally cover most of the services that are available in AWS, depending on the level of depth you need to have.

In the foundational level we have the Cloud Practitioner. This certification covers a lot of AWS services, but you really don’t need much depth.

This certification is perfect for people beginning their cloud journey, as you will learn a lot of different services and concepts that are very important in the cloud.

In the associate level there are 3 different certifications:

• Solutions Architect Associate
• SysOps Administrator Associate
• Developer Associate.

These certifications are also very broad in the amount of services they cover but they go deeper than in the foundational level.

Associate-level certifications are great to get a view of architecting, deploying and maintaining or developing applications in the cloud. These are a good way for technical people to get started in their journey with the cloud.

And at the top of the generalist certifications we have the professional level certifications: Solutions Architect Professional and Developer Associate.

These are very broad and very deep certifications, and you need basically to know everything in AWS. These are meant for people working in AWS for a long time with broad experience.

In the specialist category we have 6 certifications:

• Advanced Networking
• Security
• Machine learning
• Alexa Skill Builder
• Data Analytics and Databases.

These certifications are very specific in one topic and go very deep into that topic. They are great for professionals that are focused on those topics and want to learn as much as there is about it in AWS.

How to study for an AWS certification

Studying for a certification really depends on your background. There is no one path to rule them all. If you are not in tech and you want to get started, or you are a developer or architect new to the cloud, it's not the same as if you have been working with AWS for many years and just want to get your skills validated.

AWS and its partners offer a lot of courses where you can go and sit for 3 days and learn everything you need to pass the certification. These instructor led courses tend to be quite expensive.

There are many platforms that offer paid online courses. These courses tend to be self learning and you have to follow the instructors. Usually the main advantage of these sites is that they have great forums and lots of tests exams.

In freeCodeCamp you can find some free courses to study for some of the certifications. These are valuable resources as you can basically prepare for your exam for free following these videos:

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Training 2020

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 2020

AWS Certified Developer - Associate 2020

Also, if you need some extra motivation there is the #AWSCertified Challenge going on, so you can become part of a bigger group of people trying to achieve the same goals.

How to take an AWS certification from home

Until 30th of March, 2020 you could only sit for an AWS certification from a testing center. Basically you had to visit a specific place in a specific time to take the exam.

After that date everything changed. The option of getting the certification from a testing center still exists, but now ALL AWS certifications can be taken in an online proctoring method - this means from home. This new choice adds a lot of flexibility for testing for an AWS certification, making it more accessible for everybody.

Taking the exam in a testing center has its benefits, as there is staff to assist you with the exam check-in process, the testing computers are setup perfectly for the exam, and the whole place is designed to be quiet and exam ready.

When you take the exam with online proctoring, you will take the same exam, with the same time that you would have in a testing center. But you will take that exam from your computer and at a place that you have to prepare for that situation. There will be a proctor remotely that will monitor your exam.

Should you take your certification at home?

There are some conditions you need to have in place if you want to use the online proctoring for the exam.

First, you need to be able to talk with an English-speaking proctor that will be the one monitoring your exam. AWS Certifications are available in English, Japanese, Korean or Simplified Chinese, but the communication with the remote proctor will be in English - no matter what language your certification will be on.

Online proctoring is available across the world - except for candidates in mainland China, Japan, Slovenia or South Korea. This is a great thing as finding testing centers in remote parts of the world can be challenging.

Also, these exams are available 24/7. That is very convenient for busy people so you can always find a spot that works for you.

In addition, you will need to use your own computer for the online proctoring and there are specific system requirements and policies that you should be aware of before deciding on this option.

It is always good to run the systems tests before registering for the exam, with the same computer and in the same location where you are going to take the exam. The main requirements are a stable internet connection, a microphone, and a webcam.

You need to have a private place that is silent where you won’t be interrupted. This is one of the most important requirements. If the proctor thinks that there is some voice or weird noises, they can fail your exam automatically.

Also, during the proctored exam you won’t be able to get up from your computer at all, as no breaks are allowed. You always need to be in the view of your webcam.

If you are ok with all the previous restrictions then taking the certification from home will be possible for you.

How to schedule an AWS Certification

Even though online proctoring exams can be taken all around the clock every day, it is a good practice to register for the certification some time in advance. This way you can get everything ready and set up in your environment.

Registering for the certification is quite straight forward. You need to follow the instructions in the AWS Certification page. Keep in mind that you might need to create many accounts and log into at least 3 different services.

This might sound scary, but the process is guided and well documented. One very important thing is that when you are creating these accounts make sure that the name you use is EXACTLY the same as the one that appears in your ID. This is crucial in the validation process.

When you get to the page to pick your AWS Certification you need to pick the testing vendor “Pearson VUE”. That is the online proctoring vendor.

After you pick the time and the date you need to pay for the certification. All certifications have different prices and you can find the price list in the AWS Certification page. When you've completed your payment then you are ready.

How to get prepared for your exam at home

There are many things you should do in the days before your exam to ensure that everything runs smooth on the day of the certification.

Try to do as many mock exams as you can, making sure that you have the right timing on your practice exams. When you get to the hardest exams, time becomes an issue, so it's very important to practice answering questions quickly.

Also, if you have some notes from studying it is a great time to read them again. Most online courses have summaries or some shortened version where you can review the most important concepts before the exam. It's always good to review at least the hardest topics again.

If you are taking the exam at home or at an office there are some things that you need to do some time in advance. First find where you want to do the exam, the exact location. And then run the system tests. Make sure that everything is working fine.

After you have done that, make sure that neither your family or coworkers will interrupt you during that time. If you have ANY interruptions you will fail automatically.

If you have pets make sure that they can be put in a different room. It is very important that nothing interrupts you and that there is not other movement or noise in the room when you are taking the exam.

This was the place where I took the exam - the proctor made me remove the plant and the frame

When you pick the place and sort out the external factors of distraction, now it is time to set up the environment. My recommendation is that you find a not very cluttered space with a clean and empty table. A table where you can remove everything that is on top.

There should be no whiteboards with text or screens that cannot be turned off in the room. Make it as decluttered as possible, so then there are no reasons for the proctor to be nervous of your chosen place.

Keep in mind that the proctor doesn't know your space – they can only see and hear what comes from your microphone and webcam, and if there is any doubt they will fail you.

It's also good to pick clothing that shows your hands. The proctor will ask to see your sleeves and it helps if you don't have any. Also they will ask you to remove your watch if you have one.

If you want to know the time during the exam, the clock of your computer will be blocked and you won’t have a wrist watch, so make sure that you have a wall clock before going into the exam. During the exam you will have a timer on the screen that tells you how many minutes you have left.

What to expect during your exam at home

You are asked to check-in to the certification system 30 minutes before the exam time. That is very important to remember, and when the check-in process starts it is a good practice to have the whole space prepared for the certification.

Thirty minutes before the exam, you should go to the email that you received during enrolment and click the link to start the check-in process. For that you need to have in hand your mobile phone and a valid id with photo.

During the check-in process you will be sent an SMS to your mobile phone with a link. That link will open a web app that will be used to validate your identity and space.

The first thing you will need to do is to take a selfie. Then you need to take a picture of both sides of your identity card. And finally you need to take four pictures from your testing space. You need to take pictures from all the directions showing all the walls around you.

After you complete this process, you need to put your phone away, in a place that is out of reach. Then you can move to the next step. You might need to wait for some minutes for a remote proctor to welcome you. This depends on how busy they are.

The first thing the proctor will do is to make sure that you are the one in the selfie that you took with your phone. They will also ask you to see your sleeves and hands to make sure that you don't have a watch. Also if you have glasses they will ask you to see the insides of your glasses.

Then the proctor will also validate your workspace. They will ask you to move your computer around, and show with the webcam the surroundings of your workplace. If there are things on top of the table they will ask you to remove them. The only thing you can keep on the table is a glass of water - and the glass needs to be transparent.

After the proctor validates everything, they will say some basic rules and ask if you have any questions. Basically they will say that you need to keep your computer microphone and webcam open during the whole exam and that you need to have all your applications closed in your computer.

When everything is validated, the proctor will start the exam for you.

During the exam, you cannot talk. Even if you are reading the questions out loud or thinking out loud, you cannot speak at all. Also you always need to be in the view of the webcam, you cannot take breaks or go to the toilet.

My personal experience taking the online certification was very pleasant, even with all the restrictions. As I knew the restrictions beforehand I prepared the whole workspace for this day. I was quite relaxed as I was in my house, a place I feel safe and where I studied for this exam. At some point I forgot that someone was watching me and it felt like I was just rehearsing for the exam.

I made a video about this experience with some of the tips and tricks I mentioned in this blog post. In this video you can see more personal comments and clips of my feelings right away after I took the exam.

Thanks for reading.

I’m Marcia Villalba, Developer Advocate for AWS and the host of a youtube channel called FooBar where I have over 250 video tutorials on Serverless, AWS and software engineer practices.

And I am also trying to get certified in as many certifications as I can, so you can follow me there and we can do it together.

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mavi888uy
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/foobar_codes

freeCodeCamp started the #AWSCertified challenge at the beginning of this year. You can get AWS certified with totally free courses.

Yes, you read that right. Free courses.

AWS offers 12 certifications. Today, 3 courses are available on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel:

1. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
2. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
3. AWS Certified Developer Associate

In this post, I'll show you how to pass your AWS Certified Developer Associate exam successfully.

Let’s begin.

Establish a learning routine

We're all busy in our daily lives. Always something to do and never enough time. Preparing for the AWS Certified Developer Associate takes time and commitment.

According to Andrew Brown, it can take up to 2 months of study to pass this exam. You need to get your hands dirty to understand all the concepts discussed in the course, contrary to the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner or AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certs.

It took me 20 days to complete my exam preparation, but that's not the point. What matters is your commitment to learning every day.

I progressed by baby steps. From Monday to Saturday. Each day, I dedicated myself 4 or 5 hours to the task. For sure, you can spend less time. The most important thing is to find what is best for you and work regularly.

My preparation was divided into 4 steps:

1. Watch 2 or 3 sections of the course while taking notes
2. Deep dive into things I didn't understand
3. Read AWS whitepapers
4. Take practice exams

I used the free ExamPro AWS Certification course developed by Andrew Brown. It's a 16-hour course posted on YouTube which helps you to understand AWS and practice with Follow Along sections. Andrew Brown did tremendous work. His explanations are very clear and go straight to the point.

Sometimes you'll be frustrated to not understand something. I remember being stuck all afternoon with the first Follow Along. I even thought about skipping it because it was so demotivating.

The next day, after a good night of sleep, I spent all day debugging the code. I even submitted a pull request to help others. Solving this issue helped me deep dive into things I didn't understand and motivated me to write other AWS stories to consolidate my knowledge.

https://github.com/ExamProCo/TheFreeAWSDeveloperAssociate/tree/master/EB-Follow-Along-Docker

After completing the course, you might feel the need to supplement what you learned. You can read the AWS whitepapers recommended by Andrew Brown.

Recommended AWS whitepapers

In my case, I read the following ones:

• Practicing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery on AWS: Accelerating Software Delivery with DevOps
• Microservices on AWS
• Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices

It was my first-time reading AWS whitepapers. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised! It helped me a lot to understand the things I was missing and gave me the confidence to book my exam.

If you're curious about how to schedule your online exam, you can watch Marcia Villalba's YouTube video. She explains everything you need to know to avoid stressing yourself out too much.

Something worth mentioning: AWS gives you a 50% discount for booking your next exam when you pass one!

A few days before your exam, I strongly recommend you train with practice exams. You can find them easily on the Internet. Andrew Brown gave me access to ExamPro to take the Developer Associate Practice Exam.

ExamPro Developer Associate Practice Exam

The practice exam was challenging. It's close to the real exam. You have 2 hours to answer 65 questions and the clock is ticking. After submitting your practice exam, your score is displayed. Most importantly, you can review your wrong answers and read the explanations to understand why you made these mistakes.

If you failed your practice exam, be sure to review your questions/answers first before taking the same practice exam. It will improve your confidence for the real exam.

I was able to pass the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam. Before that, I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate with the same preparation.

All this requires time, patience, and dedication. I'm not special, you can do it too. It won't be easy at first but it's worth doing.

The course is not enough

You're wrong if you think the 16-hour course is enough to let you pass. If you plan to schedule your exam after studying only this course, you'll miss for sure many questions.

Don't worry, Andrew Brown covered most of these topics in the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course.

Here is a non-exhaustive list to help you with your exam:

• Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
• Elastic File System (EFS)
• Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Aurora
• Redshift
• CloudWatch
• Kinesis
• VPC Follow Along
• OpsWorks

Beginners can pass the exam

Say you're a complete beginner and you're wondering if you should take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner first.

AWS designed a Developer Learning Path with the recommended certifications.

AWS Developer Learning Path

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is not mandatory. You're good to go if you have some basics in programming.

Of course, exam preparation will require more work. Establish your learning routine to prepare enough. Don't be afraid to deep dive on your own. You have to understand the course and not memorize it. Be sure to understand containers and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).

Keep working, you can do it!

My online exam experience

I had a technical problem with my online proctored exam. The proctor started my exam after the check-in process. But my screen turned black and it was impossible to see the questions!

The proctor contacted me by audio conference. We spent 20 minutes together trying to fix the problem, but it was impossible to start my exam.

If something similar happens to you, you have to contact the customer service as soon as possible. It's impossible to connect again to your online exam. Send directly your email form to: https://home.pearsonvue.com/aws/contact

Pearson VUE customer service

Your issue will be solved in 3-5 business days. It takes about a week to schedule your exam again. Be patient!

To avoid unpleasant surprises, I recommend you:

• Run the System Test before your exam
• Reboot your laptop on the exam day
• Be sure to log into your account 30 minutes early to start the check-in process
• Close all your applications except your exam app after the check-in

Last be not least, scheduling your exam for the first time can be difficult. With the current situation, it can be challenging to find a schedule suitable for you.

Did you know that you can reschedule your exam appointment up to two times if you're not happy with it? It's exactly what I did for my second try. My first exam appointment was at 09:15 PM which wasn't good for me. I managed to change the appointment at 3:00 PM and pass!

It's now your turn

During almost 42 days I committed myself to the #AWSCertified challenge.

It was exhausting and not easy every day, but I don't have any regrets. Although I still don't know all AWS services (is that even possible?), I learned a lot about AWS and cloud computing. I know for sure it will help me in the future!

I also met some pretty amazing people along the way. In the beginning, I was a bit reluctant to tweet about my progress or encourage people. Now, I'm convinced that's the best way to do this challenge.

Don't be shy! Feel free to join the Discord channel to ask your questions or contact people directly on Twitter. You'll be amazed at the result.

It was a long journey. I would like to thank Andrew Brown and Quincy Larson for making it possible.

I did my part and now it's your turn.

Are you ready to commit to the challenge?

Any questions? Feel free to contact me on Twitter or directly on the freeCodeCamp Discord channel. I will try my best to answer you.

As promised, here is the 3rd free ExamPro AWS Certification course. This course prepares you to earn the coveted AWS Developer Associate Certification.

And yes – you read all that correctly. This is a full 16-hour video course – available for free on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel.

We now have free courses for 3 out of the 12 AWS Certifications:

1. ? AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
2. ? AWS Solutions Architect Associate
3. ? AWS Developer Associate (the full course link is at the bottom of this article – but I hope you'll read this article first ?)
4. AWS SysOps Administrator Associate (coming soon)
5. AWS Solutions Architect Professional (coming soon)
6. AWS DevOps Engineer Professional (coming soon)
7. AWS Machine Learning Speciality (coming soon)
8. AWS Security Speciality (coming soon)
9. AWS Advanced Networking Speciality (coming soon)
10. AWS Alexa Skill Builder Specialty (coming soon)
11. AWS Data Analytics Specialty (coming soon)
12. AWS Databases Specialty (coming soon)

What Is The AWS Developer Associate Certification?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 3 Associate Certifications:

1. Solutions Architect (most popular)
2. SysOps Administrator (most technical)
3. Developer (most practical)

A chart of 11 of the AWS certifications, showing which ones we're currently working on courses for.

The AWS Developer Associate is widely considered the most difficult associate certification. This is because the exam questions are based on practical knowledge of implementing, deploying, and securing web applications.

Along the way, you’ll gain practical developer knowledge for the 3 most common cloud architectures:

• Traditional (Virtual Machines)
• Containers / Microservices (Docker)
• Serverless (AWS Lambda)

I always say: if you don’t know which AWS Certification to take, you should go for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate. It's so broad in scope that it offers the largest amount of cloud roles available to you.

But if you want the highest chance of getting a job, the AWS Developer Associate is the objectively best certification. It proves you have hands-on knowledge, which helps reassure employers you're ready to work on the cloud.

Who Is The AWS Developer Associate For?

The AWS Developer Associate is for you if:

• you want to prove that you have practical knowledge of AWS.
• you’re already a Web Developer and want to show you have Cloud Computing knowledge.
• you enjoy writing code and building applications.
• you want to master how to deploy web applications to production.
• you want the highest chance of getting a job as a junior developer.

What is a Cloud Engineer?

A Cloud Engineer is a Full Stack Web Developer who knows how to use the cloud. Cloud Engineers are Web Developers, but not all Web Developers are Cloud Engineers.

Let's contrast these two roles to see how responsibilities change when using the Cloud:

Web Developer

• Setting up a production environment requires deep knowledge of Linux and configuring OS packages. (Some developers avoid needing deployment knowledge altogether by using Platforms as a Service like Heroku.)
• It's not easy for Web Developers to leverage Machine Learning, Cloud Storage, Analytics, or Virtual Reality, because their tools are often directly integrated into the application on a single server.
• As the complexity of a single web application grows, it becomes harder to add more Web Developers because the app becomes more difficult to learn, configure, and maintain.

Cloud Engineer

• A Cloud Engineer has many deployment options available based on the architecture they use. Many cloud services manage the complexity for you. Then – once you've learned the cloud tools – you can directly manage deployment yourself.
• Cloud Engineers have multiple architectures to choose from such as Microservices, Serverless, or traditional.
• Cloud Engineers are better equipped to make their applications highly available, durable, and scalable.
• Cloud Engineers can leverage cloud services to bolt-on Machine Learning, Cloud Storage, Analytics, VR, Realtime, and more.
• It is easier to grow a team of Cloud Engineers, since using Cloud services encourage isolation of applications and keep apps small and easy to maintain.

Which AWS Services You Should Give Special Attention To

Most AWS Certifications emphasize specific AWS services. It's important for you to give these AWS services special attention in your studies. I wanted to highlight the top 8 AWS services for the AWS Developer Associate and explain why they are important.

1. DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that allows you to scale to any size. All you need to do is tell it how many reads and writes per second, and you have a guarantee of performance. DynamoDB is serverless, meaning it just scales, and you can choose to pay on demand.

The most immediate use-case I find in my day-to-day is when I need to create a small application backed by a database.

If you have to use a relational database such as MySQL or Postgres, you could use RDS. However, the starting cost would be $15 per month for a t2.db.micro. You could set up your own Postgres server on a t2.nano which would be around ~5 per month, but you’d have to configure, backup, and manage that server.

Maybe you think you could use Aurora Serverless, but in my experience, it was not as cost-effective as DynamoDB, where it was the difference between paying dollars vs paying pennies.

As a Cloud Engineer, you want to create isolated applications instead of big apps that do everything on a single server. The latter is what is known as building a monolith.

The future of application architecture is moving to micro-services. To fully decouple your services, they need to have ownership of their own database. With DynamoDB you can do that.

So in the free AWS Developer Associate course, we have put considerable effort to ensure you understand DynamoDB inside and out. The Cheatsheet is 7 pages long! In fact, we published it for free on freeCodeCamp so you can print it out on the day of the exam.

2. Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk (EB) is the fastest way to deploy traditional architecture to AWS. Traditional architecture is when you use Virtual Machines configured for a web framework. If you are using traditional web-frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Laravel, ExpressJS, Django, or Spring, then you are using traditional architecture.

When you use micro-services or serverless architecture your code is broken up into smaller chunks. Much of the responsibilities of your traditional web-framework are pushed to application integration AWS services.

However, the majority of tech companies use traditional architecture because it's what they know, and it is taking time for companies to adopt microservices and serverless.

When you want to deploy a traditional web-application you have to:

• Configure a virtual machine image by installing the correct libraries and applications
• You need to set up a load balancer and auto-scaling groups
• You need to set up a relational database and configure a secure connection
• You need to configure your Cloud Networking such as Security groups
• You’ll need to set up a deployment pipeline.

Elastic Beanstalk will set up all the above for you. All you need to do is choose what environment you want and upload your code.

Elastic Beanstalk manages the infrastructure but does not abstract it away, so you can explore all the services it setups for you. Eventually, when you get familiar with all underlying infrastructure, you can directly manage these resources.

I like to think of Elastic Beanstalk as training wheels for deployment. It’s the best way to get started on AWS if you’re a developer, and we show you how to deploy a variety of different ways with EB.

3. AWS CLI and SDK, 4. CloudFormation

Nearly all AWS Services can be accessed programmatically via the AWS API. This allows you to write code to automate the creation, deletion, and configuration of any AWS services and resources within your account.

AWS CloudFormation (CFN) is also used to automate the creation and configuration of infrastructure. While it's important for developers to know CFN, the AWS CLI and SDK is more important for the Developer Associate as it allows greater fine-tune control over services programmatically. When you run into a situation where something cannot be done with CFN, you can be sure you can do that with the CLI or SDK.

To access the AWS API you either use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK).

The AWS CLI saves developers time from logging into the AWS console and navigating around the Graphical User Interface.

The AWS SDK is the primary way you integrate AWS Services into your web-applications. The SDK is also available in most common programming languages.

In this free AWS Developer Associate course, we take every opportunity to use the CLI and SDK, and added additional slides showing the CLI commands for various services. You'll need to know CLI commands for the exam, and they're all important to know as a Cloud Engineer.

5 / 6. ECS and Fargate

Elastic Container Service (ECS) and ECS Fargate make it easy to run single or multi-container applications. Running your web-applications is becoming more popular because it allows you to package your server configuration with your code, giving you greater portability of applications.

7. X-Ray

With microservice architecture, you have many isolated services working together. It can be difficult to monitor the performance or pinpoint failure, so X-Ray is a service that allows you to trace the path of HTTPS requests through various services.

8. Step Functions

Lambdas allow you to pay per 100ms for compute time – you just upload your code and AWS is responsible for the rest. The challenge is how to organize all these Lambda functions into actual serverless applications.

Step Functions is a state machine that allows you to define something that looks like a flow chart so you can build serverless applications.

9. CodeCommit 10. CodeBuild 11. CodeDeploy and 12. CodePipeline

Elastic Beanstalk (EB) comes with a simple deployment pipeline. When you graduate from EB you'll have to build your own deployment pipeline. So we need to know how to use all the CI/CD AWS services.

Overlapping Content From The Solutions Architect Associate

When you are studying for more than one AWS Associate certification, you will notice overlapping content.

40% of the AWS Solutions Architect content is necessary to pass the Developer Associate. So what we have done is carried over that 40% into this free Developer Associate exam.

So there are 6 hours of content from the free AWS Solutions Architect Associate with some minor corrections, and there are 10 hours of new content specific to the Developer Associate.

We have marked in the table of content with ? to indicate this is repeated content. So if you’ve already watched our free AWS Solutions Architect Associate course you can skip these videos.

The #AWSCertified Challenge

To maximize your study experience, I recommend you join the #AWSCertified Challenge so you don’t have to study alone.

Thanks to Jose Talancha for moderating the #AWSCertifiedChallenge Discord and volunteering their time to support other people studying.

Recommended Additional Free Resources

There are additional free learning resources I want to recommend to you because:

• we didn’t have time to include them in this free course
• they are core to being a Cloud Engineer but are not part of the exam right now
• they explain certain difficult concepts in an alternative way.

What The Cloud?

• Alejandra Quetzalli ??? — AWS Developer Advocate @ AWS
• Jonathan Dion ??? — AWS Developer Advocate @ AWS

What The Cloud? is the personal project of Ale and Jon to make cloud knowledge accessible to anyone. They achieve accessibility by multiple means such as:

• Translating their videos into French and Spanish
• All their videos have Closed Captioning
• They take the time to thoroughly explain cloud concepts with illustrations

Their content is for everyone. For example, in my free AWS courses I cover AWS Global Infrastructure, but I never covered Points of Presence (PoPs) because I honestly didn’t know what they were. They're mentioned, but never explained in the AWS documentation. So when I watched What the Cloud? I was surprised to learn I missed such fundamental knowledge.

Ale and Jon leave no stone and unturned, and I recommend their videos to fill any gaps in knowledge you may have been too embarrassed to ask about.

AWS Identity & Access Management

• Bart Castle ??— Cloud Technical Trainer @ CBT Nuggets

AWS IAM is required knowledge for all AWS Certifications. What appears to be a simple service gets very complicated quickly. Everything that IAM does is not in the AWS console, and its important for you to understand the underlying functionality.

I strongly recommend watching Bart’s IAM playlist so you have alternative explanations to ensure thorough knowledge of this tricky AWS service.

AWS Amplify

Nader Dabit ?️?— Senior Developer Advocate @ AWS

I really wanted to include AWS Amplify in this free AWS Developer Certification course, but we ran out of time. AWS Amplify does not currently appear in the exam, but you will see it in future exams.

The reason I want to get you hands-on exposure to AWS Amplify is because its the most powerful service for Cloud Engineers to learn.

AWS Amplify is a modern serverless framework for building web or mobile applications. It has plugins to various AWS services so you can quickly bolt on Analytics, Machine Learning, AR, VR, Decentralized Authentication, Notifications, Chatbots, and more!

By learning AWS Amplify you are gaining a competitive advantage because, if you master this framework, you can rapidly develop applications which will absolutely impress employers.

So I recommend you check out Nader’s Youtube channel which is packed with AWS Amplify tutorials.

Amazon EventBridge

• James Beswick ☕? — Senior Developer Advocate @ AWS

We only briefly cover EventBridge in the free AWS Developer Associate course because currently it does not appear much on the exam. EventBridge is a service I want you to know because it fundamentally changes the way to architect serverless applications.

EventBridge was previously called CloudWatch Events, but AWS added some additional functionality to create multiple event busses and the ability to connect third-party services and multi-account services.

It’s hard to describe, so I generally say to people it’s like Zapier. But its really more like IFTTT.

To get a good handle on EventBridge and stay current with modern serverless architecture, I recommend looking at James Beswick’s content:

• ?Introduction to EventBridge
• ?Amazon EventBridge: Integrating with Zendesk
• ?Setting Up A Custom Event Bus
• ?How Amazon EventBridge transforms serverless development

Some Parting Words

The world ? needs Cloud Engineers (Web Developers + Cloud Skills) right now more than ever.

The pandemic of 2020 has forced everyone to be open to remote opportunities and created a demand for cloud talent. So this is your best opportunity to enter the cloud and web development industry.

I did my part by making this course free for you – it's up to you to complete the journey.

? You can watch the course here.

Note that YouTube wouldn't let us upload all 16 hours as a single video, so the first video is 12 hours. The final 4 hours of the course are in a second video, linked from the video description.

Best of luck preparing for the exam.

The emergence of cloud services has changed the way we build web-applications. This in turn has changed the responsibilities of a Web Developer.

We used to build everything into a single web-application on a single server. This encompassed multiple responsibilities such as storage, databases, authentication, background jobs, caching, and more.

Cloud services allows us to reduce the complexity of our web-app and web-servers by pushing the responsibilities to these highly available, scalable, and durable cloud services.

A Web Developer who knows how to deploy and integrate cloud services with a web-application is what we call a Cloud Engineer.

If you want to fast-track your career as a Web Developer in 2020 then the AWS Developer Associate Certification can help you achieve that end goal.

The most important AWS service you need to study to pass that AWS Developer Associate exam is DynamoDB. So I have released what I call The Ultimate DynamoDB Cheatsheet for free. You can print this out on the day of your exam to increase your chances of passing.

It was Nader the AWS Developer Advocate for AWS Amplify who suggested I release my entire cheatsheet for free. You would not have this resource if it wasn't for him.

It was Kirk the AWS Senior Technologist specializing in DynamoDB who volunteered his time to ensure the accuracy of this cheatsheet. This turned it from 5 pages to 8 pages long! ????????

If you have Twitter, please do me the favor of thanking them by tweeting at @dabit3 and @NoSQLKnowHow with the #AWSCertified hashtag.

So lets move on to the cheatsheet:

The Basics of DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL key/value and document database.

DynamoDB is suited for workloads with any amount of data that require predictable read and write performance and automatic scaling from large to small and everywhere in between.

DynamoDB scales up and down to support whatever read and write capacity you specify per second in provisioned capacity mode. Or you can set it to On-Demand mode and there is little to no capacity planning.

• DynamoDB stores 3 copies of data on SSD drives across 3 AZs in a region.
• DynamoDB's most common datatypes are B (Binary), N (Number), and S (String)
• Tables consist of Items (rows) and Items consist of Attributes (columns)

Reads and Writes Consistency

DynamoDB can be set to support Eventually Consistent Reads (default) and Strongly Consistent Reads on a per-call basis.

Eventually consistent reads data is returned immediately but data can be inconsistent. Copies of data will be generally consistent in 1 second.

Strongly Consistent Reads will always read from the leader partition since it always has an up-to-date copy. Data will never be inconsistent but latency may be higher. Copies of data will be consistent with a guarantee of 1 second.

Partitions

A Partition is when DynamoDB slices your table up into smaller chunks of data. This speeds up reads for very large tables.

DynamoDB automatically creates Partitions for:

• Every 10 GB of Data or
• When you exceed RCUs (3000) or WCUs (1000) limits for a single partition
• When DynamoDB sees a pattern of a hot partition, it will split that partition in an attempt to fix the issue.

DynamoDB will try to evenly split the RCUs and WCUs across Partitions

Primary Key Design

Primary keys define where and how your data will be stored in partitions

The Key schema can be made up of two keys:

• Partition Key (PK) is also known as HASH
• The Sort Key (SK) is also known as RANGE

When using the AWS DynamoDB API eg. CLI, SDK they refer to the PK and SK by their alternative names due to legacy reasons.

Primary key comes in two types:

• Simple Primary Key (Using only a Partition Key)
• Composite Primary Key (Using both a Partition and Sort Key)

Key Uniqueness is as follows:

• When creating a Simple Primary Key the PK value may be unique
• When creating a Composite Primary Key the combined PK and SK must be unique

When using a Sort key, records on the partition are logically grouped together in Ascending order.

Secondary Indexes

DynamoDB has two types of Indexes:

• LSI - Local Secondary index
• GSI - Global Secondary Index

LSI - Local Secondary index

• Supports strongly or eventual consistency reads
• Can only be created with initial table (cannot be modified or and cannot deleted unless also deleting the table)
• Only Composite
• 10GB or less per partition
• Share capacity units with base table
• Must share Partition Key (PK) with base table.

GSI - Global Secondary Index

• Only eventual consistency reads (cannot provide strong consistency)
• Can create, modify, or delete at anytime
• Simple and Composite
• Can have whatever attributes as Primary Key (PK) or Secondary Key (SK)
• No size restriction per partition
• Has its own capacity settings (does not share with base table)

Scan

Your table(s) should be designed in such a way that your workload primary access patterns do not use Scans. Overall, scans should be needed sparingly, for example for an infrequent report.

• Scans through all items in a table and then returns one or more items through filters
• By default returns all attributes for every item (use ProjectExpression to limit)
• Scans are sequential, and you can speed up a scan through parallel scans using Segments and Total Segments
• Scans can be slow, especially with very large tables and can easily consume your provisioned throughput.
• Scans are one of the most expensive ways to access data in DynamoDB.

Query

• Find items based on primary key values
• Table must have a composite key in order to be able to query
• By default queries are Eventually Consistent (use ConsistentRead True to change Strongly Consistent)
• By default returns all attributes for each item found by a query (use ProjectExpression to limit)
• By default is sorted ascending (use ScanIndexForward to False to reverse order to descending)

Capacity Modes

DynamoDB has two capacity modes, Provisioned and On-Demand. You can switch between these modes once every 24 hours.

Provisioned

Provisioned Throughput Capacity is the maximum amount of capacity your application is allowed to read or write per second from a table or index

• Provisioned is suited for predictable or steady state workloads
• RCUs is Read Capacity Unit
• WCUs is Write Capacity Unit

You should enable Auto Scaling with Provisioned capacity mode. In this mode, you set a floor and ceiling for the capacity you wish the table to support. DynamoDB will automatically add and remove capacity to between these values on your behalf and throttle calls that go above the ceiling for too long.

If you go beyond your provisioned capacity, you’ll get an Exception: ProvisionedThroughputExceededException (throttling)

Throttling is when requests are blocked due to read or write frequency higher than set thresholds. E.g. exceeding set provisioned capacity, partitions splitting, table/index capacity mismatch.

On-Demand

On-Demand Capacity is pay per request. So you pay only for what you use.

• On-Demand is suited for new or unpredictable workloads
• The throughput is only limited by the default upper limits for a table (40K RCUs and 40K WCUs)
• Throttling can occur if you exceed double your previous peak capacity (high water mark) within 30 minutes. For example, if you previously peaked to a maximum of 30,000 ops/sec, you could not peak immediately to 90,000 ops/sec, but you could to 60,000 ops/sec.
• Since there is no hard limit, On-Demand could become very expensive based on emerging scenarios

Calculating Reads and Writes

Calculating Reads (RCU)

A read capacity unit represents:

• one strongly consistent read per second,
• or two eventually consistent reads per second,
• for an item up to 4 KB in size.

How to calculate RCUs for strong

1. Round data up to nearest 4.
2. Divide data by 4
3. Times by number of reads

Here's an example:

• 50 reads at 40KB per item. (40/4) x 50 = 500 RCUs
• 10 reads at 6KB per item. (8/4) x 10 = 20 RCUs
• 33 reads at 17KB per item. (20/4) x 33 = 132 RCUs

How to calculate RCUs for eventual

1. Round data up to nearest 4.
2. Divide data by 4
3. Times by number of reads
4. Divide final number by 2
5. Round up to the nearest whole number

Here's an example:

• 50 reads at 40KB per item. (40/4) x 50 / 2 = 250 RCUs
• 11 reads at 9KB per item. (12/4) x 11 / 2 = 17 RCUs
• 14 reads at 24KB per item. (24/4) x 14 / 2 = 35 RCUs

Calculating Writes (Writes)

A write capacity unit represents:

• one write per second,
• for an item up to 1 KB

How to calculate Writes

1. Round data up to nearest 1.
2. Times by number of writes

Here's an example:

• 50 writes at 40KB per item. 40 x 50 = 2000 WCUs
• 11 writes at 1KB per item. 1 x 11 = 11 WCUs
• 18 writes at 500 BYTES per item. 1 x 18 = 18 WCUs

DynamoDB Accelerator

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed in-memory write through cache for DynamoDB that runs in a cluster

• Reads are eventually consistent
• Incoming requests are evenly distributed across all of the nodes in the cluster.
• DAX can reduce read response times to microseconds

DAX is ideal for:

• fastest response times possible
• apps that read a small number of items more frequently
• apps that are read intensive

DAX is not ideal for:

• Apps that require strongly consistent reads
• Apps that do not require microsecond read response times
• Apps that are write intensive, or that do not perform much read activity
• If you don’t need DAX consider using ElastiCache

DynamoDB Transactions

DynamoDB supports transactions via the TransactWriteItems and TransactGetItems API calls.

Transactions let you query multiple tables at once and are an all-or-nothing approach (all API calls must succeed).

Global tables

DynamoDB Global tables provide a fully managed solution for deploying multi-region, multi-master databases.

Streams

DynamoDB Streams allows you to set up a Lambda function triggered every time data is modified in a table to react to changes. Streams do not consume RCUs.

DynamoDB API

DynamoDB API's most notable commands via CLI: aws dynamodb

aws dynamodb get-item returns a set of attributes for the item with the given primary key. If no matching item, then it does not return any data and there will be no Item element in the response.

aws dynamodb put-item Creates a new item, or replaces an old item with a new item. If an item that has the same primary key as the new item already exists in the specified table, the new item completely replaces the existing item.

aws dynamodb update-item Edits an existing item's attributes, or adds a new item to the table if it does not already exist.

aws dynamodb batch-get-item returns the attributes of one or more items from one or more tables. You identify requested items by primary key. A single operation can retrieve up to 16 MB of data, which can contain as many as 100 items.

aws dynamodb batch-write-item puts or deletes multiple items in one or more tables. Can write up to 16 MB of data, which can comprise as many as 25 put or delete requests. Individual items to be written can be as large as 400 KB.

aws dynamodb create-table adds a new table to your account. Table names must be unique within each Region.

aws dynamodb update-table Modifies the provisioned throughput settings, global secondary indexes, or DynamoDB Streams settings for a given table.

aws dynamodb delete-table operation deletes a table and all of its items.

aws dynamodb transact-get-items is a synchronous operation that atomically retrieves multiple items from one or more tables (but not from indexes) in a single account and Region. Call can contain up to 25 objects. The aggregate size of the items in the transaction cannot exceed 4 MB.

aws dynamodb transact-write-items a synchronous write operation that groups up to 25 action requests. These actions can target items in different tables, but not in different AWS accounts or Regions, and no two actions can target the same item.

aws dynamodb query finds items based on primary key values. You can query table or secondary index that has a composite primary key.

aws dynamodb scan returns one or more items and item attributes by accessing every item in a table or a secondary index.

? #rocketsToMars

I want to help you enter the web and cloud industry. That is why I am releasing my free AWS Developer Associate Certification 2020 course on the freeCodeCamp YouTube channel with 10+ hours of additional content I have never released previously.

This free course will be released in a few days as I apply the final touches.

I believe in making tech education accessible to the world because in-turn the more we upskill, the sooner we can lift people out of poverty, the sooner we can engineer sustainable solutions to keep our planet green and healthy, and the sooner we can launch rockets to Mars.

But first, let me tell you about #100DaysOfCode.

Alex Kallaway created the #100DaysOfCode challenge back in 2016.

I had the honor of hanging out with Alex in Toronto, and I even wrote an in-depth history of the challenge.

The #100DaysOfCode challenge is massive. How massive? To give you an idea: challenge participants tweet the #100DaysOfCode hashtag once ever 20 seconds.

The #100DaysOfCode Twitter bot – which does nothing but randomly retweet people who tweet with hashtag – has more Twitter followers than a lot of Fortune 500 companies do.

The #100DaysOfCode challenge works like this:

1. You code at least a little bit each day for 100 days in a row. Each day you tweet about what you did.
2. Each day you reply to other people's tweets to support them.

That's it. Super simple. It's a public commitment device with a built-in support network to help keep you motivated.

This is a powerful model for any kind of endurance-based challenge.

This year I wanted to channel the brilliant simplicity of the #100DaysOfCode challenge into more advanced developer challenges.

These 2 new challenges are a good fit for more advanced developers who may not have the time to commit to the #100DaysOfCode challenge.

These challenges are also well-suited to people who have already finished one or two rotations of #100DaysOfCode, and want to try something more advanced.

And so the #ProjectEuler100 challenge and the #AWSCertified were born.

In this article, I'll explain these challenges briefly and also showcase some of their participants' achievements so far.

An Update On The #ProjectEuler100 Challenge

Project Euler is a website created back in 2001. It hosts a collection of around 600 different algorithm problems that get progressively harder, to the point where even people with math PhD's still struggle with them.

This said, the first 100 problems are totally do-able by a new developer. Thousands of people have completed the first 100 Project Euler problems over the years.

It's just brutally hard. Like... Dark Souls hard.

Dark Souls is a video game famous for being ridiculously hard. But it becomes much easier with consistent practice - just like these algorithm problems.

I love the Project Euler problems. I used them extensively when I was first learning to code. I love these so much that we've added these Project Euler problems to freeCodeCamp's Interview Preparation section.

I've boiled everything down to these 6 simple rules all participants must follow.

1. Tweet out a photo of yourself giving a thumbs-up and announcing that you are committing to the #ProjectEuler100 challenge.
2. Create a GitHub repository.
3. Each time you complete a problem, add your solution to your GitHub repository and tweet a link to it using the #ProjectEuler100 hashtag.
4. Then scroll through the #ProjectEuler100 hashtag and give supportive feedback on at least 2 tweets from other developers.
5. Move on to the next Project Euler problem. You can't skip ahead. You have to complete all 100 problems in order. But you can use any programming language you want to solve these.
6. Once you've finished all 100 of them, tweet out a celebration photo of yourself with your laptop open to your GitHub repo.

So far more than 700 people have joined the #ProjectEuler100 Discord chatroom.

The #ProjectEuler100 Twitter bot is already up to 300 followers.

And since this challenge is completely self-paced, several super-motivated developers are already reaching the last half of the challenge.

Here are some things people are tweeting about the challenge:

And some people have already made it pretty far into the challenge:

You can read more about the #ProjectEuler100 challenge here.

An Update On The #AWSCertified Challenge

And last week, we launched the #AWSCertified challenge. Here are the rules:

1. Tweet out a photo of yourself giving a thumbs-up and announcing that you are committing to the #AWSCertified challenge.
2. Each day tweet at least one time about your progress and what you've learned or done, using the #AWSCertified hashtag.
3. Each day, reply with encouragement to at least 2 other people who are also using the #AWSCertified hashtag.
4. Each time you earn a certification, print it out, pose with it, and tweet a triumphant photo.

In total, AWS offers 12 certifications. Here's a breakdown of the tests, how much they cost, and how long the certifications are valid for.

A chart showing all 12 AWS certifications. (Since the time that AWS made this chart, the've broken down the "Big Data" certification into 2 specialty certifications - Database and Analytics). We explain each of these in much more detail later in this article.

So far more than 500 people have joined the #AWSCertified Discord chatroom.

And here are some tweets from the community:

We've had a lot of people publicly commit to the challenge just in the past 24 hours:

We even had one of the challenge participants already earn their first certification. That was fast.

Andrew from ExamPro is creating full-length preparation courses for each of these certifications, and he's making these completely free (and ad-free) on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel.

You can read more about the #AWSCertified Challenge here.

Both the #ProjectEuler100 and the #AWSCertified challenges are off to a strong start.

If you are looking for a more advanced developer challenge for 2020, either of these could be a good option for you.

I just want to give a big shout-out to all the people tackling these challenges. Your ambition and persistence are so inspiring.

Keep up the progress toward your goals. We're all looking forward to watching you complete these challenges and become stronger developers as a result.

Happy coding.