Taking Advantage of Free AWS Training

With the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders still in place, many of us are working at home and the slower pace has meant that some of us have a little extra time on hands. One great way to take advantage of this time is to up your skills by diving into some of the free training that is available.  Amazon’s AWS provides a rich selection of training options, many of which are available at no cost whatsoever.

Digital Training

First, Amazon offers an extensive collection of digital training courses that you can take advantage of and the best part is that they are completely free. These eLearning courses cover a wide range of topics including getting started courses like AWS Storage Offerings and AWS Database Offerings, business courses like SaaS Business Transformation and business analytics topics like Developing Machine Applications and Understanding Neural Networks. While the lengths of each eLearning course varies most of the AWS eLearning courses typically run between 30 and 120 minutes.

Learning Paths

Amazon also offers a set of role-based learning paths to both help you to find courses that are pertinent to your interests as well as to prepare you for AWS cloud skills exams. The AWS learning paths consist of:

• Cloud Practitioner – Designed to promote an overall understanding of the AWS Cloud. This path is useful for individuals in technical, managerial, sales, purchasing, or financial roles.
• Architect – Designed for solutions architects, solution design engineers, and anyone who wants to learn how to design applications and systems on AWS.
• Developer — Designed for software developers who want to learn how to develop cloud applications on AWS.
• Operations — designed for sysops administrators, systems administrators, and those in a DevOps role who want to learn how to create automatable and repeatable deployments of applications, networks, and systems on the AWS platform.

Certification Training

Another great way to put some extra time to use is with AWS certification training. Many of the digital training courses are oriented toward passing various certification exams. While I think it’s generally true that certifications were seen as being more valuable a few years ago than they are today, it never hurts to be able to add some certifications to your references. You can take all AWS Certification exams online from the comfort of your home. The main AWS certifications include:

• AWS Certified Solution Architect
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
• AWS Certified Developer
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Amazon also provides a collection of AWS specialty certifications in the areas of networking, security, data analytics and more.

Hands-on

Of course, one of the best ways to learn about something is to try it out with your own test projects. The AWS Free Tier provides access to more than 60 products and various limited-time free trials with no additional costs.