Taking certifications is one beast, taking hours upon hours studying new concepts and AWS services and taking practice exams to test your knowledge. The feeling after passing a certification is like no other, validation that your hard-work has paid off for something that can aid you in the future. But nothing in this world beats out real world, hands on experience. This is something that I was searching for while trying to studying for different certifications. After scrolling around on LinkedIn for a hours, I found a post and a few people in the cloud community talking about their new “badges” they got from completing these courses. These badges are verified from AWS and prove that you have real hands on experience completing AWS tasks. So as someone who is yearning for the chance to get real world experience, this “game” or “quest” allows me to get experience and also allows me to prove with a badge to everyone on LinkedIn and in the professional world that I have experience in what I am learning, not just testing knowledge.
I am still in the process of finishing all of the labs for the different sections and I will update my blog when I am complete but as of this date I have finished the Cloud Practitioner and the Solution Architect labs. This has taught me valuable hands on experience with Kinesis Data Streams, VPC’s, API Gateways, etc. I am looking forward heavily to finishing to the Security labs next as I find security vitally important and vastly interesting. More to come on this soon.