Passing the AWS CCP//
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - the first AWS exam on my journey (naturally) and the first goal to be reached. The CCP took me around 1 month of study for around 2 hours a day. Before taking the exam i had minimal experience, dipping in to the Azure cloud every now and then from my time at Specsavers - mostly looking at NACLs. This was my first real look at what a cloud is and how the cloud works.
The exam covered the basics - how AWS split out its network geographically and how it manages to remain fully redundant with the implementation of its 'Global', 'Regional' and 'AZ' based services. It also touched on its many services including VPC, Database, Analytics, Compute and Storage. As well as its responsibility model - a model which describes who is responsible for what when using the cloud. In the exam there wasnt much emphasis on how you use the services, but, understanding what they are and where you may come across them.
There are a wide variety of topics that were covered and of those, i found the Database services (DDB, Aurora/Serverless, RDS) the hardest to grasp. This is probably because i havent done much work with SQL, PostgreSQL or noSQL before. Databases are more or less new to me and i cant see where i would ever use one in my personal life or my professional life as a network engineer.
I found the physical layout of the cloud from its many Availability Zones (Data Centres) which make up a Region and how those Regions are interconnected via a super fast private network the most interesting and easiest to understand. I feel it gave clarity on the mysteriousness of the cloud and exposed it for what it really is. A bunch of DCs scattered around the globe which are all interconnected and have many different routes out to the internet. I felt once I understood that concept, understanding the difference between global and regional services and how those services remain redundant is simple.
Passing the exam and receiving my CCP badge was a feeling i was eager to have again. As soon as i received it in my Credly App, and looking at it for all of 5 minutes, I wanted more. I looked at the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam and thought it was naturally the next step up. It was worth a shot.
