Learning AWS with A Cloud Guru

Read more from Tanya Ruth Selvog on Medium.

In April, A Cloud Guru sponsored a tech talk in partnership with Women Who Code Austin. All attendees of the event received a voucher to A Cloud Guru’s Certified Solutions Architect certification course. Since I’m new to programming, I went to the tech talk for the sole purpose of networking and I was uninterested in learning about cloud computing. (I believed that cloud computing was too advanced for me, so I assumed I wouldn’t understand anything the speakers were saying). As I listened to the talks and I chatted with some of the speakers afterward, I learned about Amazon Web Services, and I wanted to learn more about AWS and cloud computing.

The voucher for A Cloud Guru’s course was for the associate level of Amazon’s Certified Solutions Architect. The course covers over 100 lessons, 13 quizzes, and practice exams. The course starts with a high-level overview of Amazon Web Services and it then goes further into products such as EC2, Cloudfront, Lambda, and Glacier. The course is designed to prepare students for the CSA exam. The breadth of information is perfect, and a lot can be said about each AWS feature. One of my favorite takeaways that I was most excited to learn about is Lambda because I had heard of it prior to taking the class, but I knew very little besides from seeing Amazon Echo commercials.

Lambda is a computer service where one can upload their code & create a Lambda function. It is an event-driven compute service where AWS Lambda runs the code in response to events such as data changes to Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table. Lambda can also run code in response to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway or API calls made using AWS SDKs. The languages supported by Lambda include Node.js, Python, C#, and Java. It is also very cheap, allows for continuous scaling and requires no servers. In short, Lambda is really awesome. Additionally, A Cloud Guru offers a free course in Amazon Alexa/Echo, which is a great way to for beginners, such as myself, to develop their skills.

AWS offers a lot of cloud solutions and products and it can be overwhelming, but A Cloud Guru’s course is very good at explaining everything and the tutorials are straightforward. I also enjoyed that the videos are recent and the instructor mentions if a product will be on the CSA examination. I’m very impressed by the course and I found that it was easy to follow, even though I have no professional experience in cloud solutions. The tech talk in May, as well as A Cloud Guru’s course have made me enthusiastic to learn more about cloud computing and AWS, and in the future, I plan on taking the CSA exam.