Today I Learned Cloud

Is AWS easy to learn?

People that are new to the Amazon Web Services cloud quickly find out that there is an enormous amount of services available. Once seeing this, a question usually comes to mind.

Is AWS easy to learn? Amazon Web Services provides an extensive amount of documentation resources for all of their services. They also offer free digital training, in class training and private training. On top of this there are a large amount of learning paths made available for most end user use cases.

Given all of the resources available to new users, AWS can be easy to learn if the time and effort is put into it. However with all the options available, it might be good to know what each of these options makes available.

AWS Documentation

The documentation available from AWS is vast and contains information about every service that they offer as well as information around each feature of those services. It also includes details related to how certain services might work together to perform certain tasks.

This documentation is available to any potential customer by visiting this link. As you can see there is an incredible amount of information here for each of their services, and written for many different languages. There are also many tutorial and project listings linked from this documentation page to help get you started.

The programming languages and documentation for those languages is also available from links added to that documentation site. Most developers would be hard pressed to be missing documentation for their chosen language for a given service.

AWS Training - Free Digital Training

The free digital training offered by AWS allows you to choose courses and tutorials specific to the area within AWS that you would like to learn more about, but on your own time, from your chosen location, as long as you have an internet connection available to you from that location.

These courses let you choose to learn virtually any of the Amazon services. The courses can be narrowed down by area, including things like role, skill level, language and other popular options. Once selected these courses are then taken at your own pace so that you can make the most out of them.

Currently there are over 369 free digital training options with learning times varying from 20 minutes to many hours in duration. These also span skill levels from fundamental to expert to advanced. It’s really up to you to decide which would be the most impactful for you.

AWS Training - Classroom Training

The classroom based training can be delivered to the cloud customer either virtually or in a real classroom via accredited Amazon Web Service instructors. These types of classes will be a variation of presentations from the instructions, an on hand lab conducted by the students and group discussions around the specific task at hand.

The number of training sessions available in this format is much smaller than the free digital training that is offered by Amazon Web Services, but there is still a good selection to choose from. One big difference with these sessions is that they are usually provided over several days instead of a certain number of hours.

AWS Training - Private Training

The final type of training offered by Amazon Web Services is Private Training. This again can be offered in virtual form or at your physical location. As the instructor may be coming to a specific on site location instead of a common location that multiple companies could attend, this type of training can be more expensive to receive than the other methods.

However, this type of training can be highly customized, as it would be fully tailored for the group requesting the training. This will help the group learn exactly what they need to learn for the given tasks or workloads that they are currently working on. Even though pricier, it may be worth doing in the long term as things will be taught specifically around what is needed to be known at the current time.

Learning Paths

Another way that Amazon Web Services tries to make learning their cloud environment much simpler for users is by providing learning paths which are specifically designed for different types of cloud users that might be using their products. This helps by honing in on what a specific user might need to know most to make their time on the platform most effective.

Learning Paths - Advanced Networking

The Advanced Networking Learning Path is designed to focus on the network specific components of the Amazon cloud. Specifically this helps the cloud user see how the network setup and configuration in their environment might impact performance of the different systems running in the environment, and how to best tune the setup for that customers environment. Once a user has gone through this path they are able to get AWS Certified for this skill to prove that they have learned the advanced networking knowledge provided by this course.

One recommendation for this specific learning path is that the cloud customers have previous experience with advanced networking topics and techniques before taking on this learning path. Otherwise, some of the concepts and tasks that are taught with this training may be difficult to grasp if the foundational network knowledge is missing. However, this is always something that can be taken later and isn’t required to get up and running with the AWS Cloud.

Learning Paths - Alexa Skill Builder

The Alexa Skill Builder learning path is provided to cloud customers that want to learn how to best work with, and integrate with, Amazon Alexa. This is specifically designed for people that have a code programming background so that they can quickly get up to speed with how to best work with the Amazon Alexa APIs and use those skills in order to build new skills for the Amazon Alexa service.

Even though the learning path recommends that the user have some programming knowledge or experience before going down this path, the programming skill of the cloud user does not have to be of advanced nature. Specifically, Amazon recommends that the user have at least basic programming knowledge before attempting to go down this specific learning path.

Learning Paths - Architect

The next learning path I’ll mention is the one specifically designed for Solution Architects or Solution Design engineers. However, it is also geared for anyone that wants to learn best practices with how to design the best applications and systems to run on top of the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.

As there is an incredibly large amount of services available to all of the Amazon cloud users, it can be quite difficult to decide which component of their cloud to use in which situation. It can also be difficult to determine which service should be used with the other Amazon cloud services available for a specific use case. This learning path will help in deciding how to best make those decisions.

Following these steps can be a large time saver as things are done right the first time. This can also help save money as it will help describe how to set things up in the most cost effective manner for the task at hand.

Learning Paths - Cloud Practitioner

This learning path is designed more for cloud customers that want to get a better understanding of how the cloud works. It will help understand what is available within the Amazon Web Services cloud and give an idea of how and when these products should be used. It may not specifically describe the nuts and bolts of how these service work, or how to use them directly, but it will help give a much better picture of how the different technologies can be used to accomplish different tasks required by the business.

Learning Paths - Data Analytics (Big Data)

As the name of this learning path describes, this learning path is most useful for cloud users that need to make sense of large pools of data. This learning path will go over the services and techniques available to process and analyze virtually unlimited amounts of data within the cloud environment.

The learning path will also describe best practices for processing this data in the cloud, where the data should be stored, and what services are best used for analyzing that data in the given situation. With the ever rising amount of data that most companies receive and store these days, this is likely a great learning path to pursue for anyone working with that data.

Learning Paths - Databases

If you are a database administrator and are just getting started with the Amazon Web Service cloud, this is likely the learning path you should follow. This path will help you learn about all of the different databases available to you from the Amazon cloud environment, and there are many. This will also give a lot of detail around what might be the best use case for each of the databases that are available.

This course will also help with planning and designing the best database setup and architecture for the task at hand. Many examples and tutorials will be shown and followed in order to get the best understanding of the cloud way of working with databases.

Learning Paths - Developer

For all of the software developers out there that are just getting started with the cloud, or those that want to polish their programming skills for the cloud, this learning path is designed for them. This will teach the cloud developer the best way to develop code for the different cloud services that are out there.

This will show how to work with the different APIs available to the different services available within Amazon Web Services. There are also software developer kits available for many different programming languages for most of the services, and details will be described and shown on how to best work with those APIs for the different services.

It’s really up to the developer to decide what language they would like to use when working with the Amazon cloud services, as the number of options available is quite amazing.

Learning Paths - DevOps Engineer

On the devops side of the house, there is also a learning path provided. This training will show the best tools available for the devops related tasks that might need to be accomplished within the Amazon cloud. It will also give examples on how to best use the services that are specifically designed for devops related tasks within the Amazon cloud.

You’ll learn the best ways to deploy and maintain applications and pipelines within the cloud environment. You’ll also be taught the best patterns for various use cases that are common to devops related tasks within the cloud environment.

Learning Paths - Game Tech

Cloud technology has also helped move the gaming industry forward by letting games be much more scalable than ever before. This learning path will help those within the gaming industry make the most out of the services provided by the Amazon Cloud.

This path will teach the user how to best collect game data, process that data, and how to best display the data to either game players or the game owners for analytical purposes. Learning about the Amazon GameLift service is also a component of this learning path.

A major focus of this learning path is to help cloud users that are involved with gaming systems to make their products and service as great as possible for the people playing the games. There are many labs designed to help these game specific cloud users improve their skills when designing game based systems for the cloud.

Learning Paths - Machine Learning

In recent years, machine learning has become increasingly more powerful and is helping power more and more things to make the lives of every day consumers easier. This learning path is specifically geared for cloud based users that are working in this machine learning space.

This learning path will help teach the cloud user the current best practices for designing, building and testing machine learning models within the cloud environment. You will also be able to learn how to best take advantage of the models designed and built by Amazon themselves. These can be incredibly powerful models that Amazon is using on a day to day basis, but also providing them to their cloud customers so that they can make use of them as well.

Learning Paths - Media Services

The Media Services learning path provided by Amazon Web Services is delivered to help cloud customers make the most out of the services available for streaming and monetizing live and on demand media streams. This will help learn the best and most efficient ways of working with and providing media content to end customers from the cloud.

Learning Paths - Operations

The Operations learning path is a another focused learning training made available by Amazon, but it focuses specifically on systems operation administrators and devops workers to teach them how to best design repeatable and automated apps and tasks in the cloud environment. This can help with reliability and time to recovery since things are setup in an automated and programmable fashion.

Learning Paths - Security

Cloud based security is something that should be taken very seriously these days. This learning path is specifically designed for those individuals that need to focus most on the security aspects of the cloud. This will teach the best practices and most secure way of designing systems and applications for the Amazon cloud environment. This is definitely a learning path that should be considered by most companies when moving systems and programs to the cloud.

Learning Paths - Storage

Storage can play a large role in most cloud based companies these days. Some companies are now storing petabytes and even exabytes of data in the Amazon cloud environment. This learning path is designed specifically for those people that are going to work with the cloud but that will have a focus on data storage and maintenance.

This learning path will provide detailed knowledge on how data should be stored for a given application or service, and what is the best storage system that should be used for the given task within the cloud environment. It will also be shown when it is best to use the different storage configurations for certain stored items so that cost can be reduced for less frequently accessed items compared to those items that are fetched and used more frequently.

If you or your company is going to be storing large amounts of data within the Amazon cloud, this is likely a learning path that is worth taking.

AWS Can Be Easy To Learn

With all of the options available to learn about the different services provided by the Amazon cloud and how to best use them, I definitely think AWS can be easy to learn if you are willing to put the time and effort into that education.