Up in the cloud

I am hardly sure if the movie “Sex Tape” can be considered a classic, but I still remember it was my very first encounter with this thing called the cloud. Almost ten years later, I am finally taking real steps towards understanding and using cloud computing. I did so by passing two foundational cloud certification exams, one for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and one for Microsoft Azure.

There is this scene in the movie where the male character shouts in despair “Nobody understands the cloud! It’s a mystery!”, fearing he will never be able to recover the spicy sex tape lost somewhere up there. No spoiler alert needed because I never watched the movie in full, so I don’t know if the couple eventually did find back their tape. What I do know is that if you are active in the field of data, more and more of the development and production computing is migrated to the cloud. Now was the perfect moment to jump on that bandwagon.

Throughout the second half of August and early September, I took some time to prepare for two foundational cloud exams. I picked Amazon’s AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01, soon updated to CLF-C02) and Microsoft’s Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900). I already had a bit of experience with both cloud providers, but never really studied the cloud as a concept nor examined all these services whose names I regularly see flying by on LinkedIn, hence why I felt it was a good idea.

The basic exams are in and of itself not very difficult. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to prepare for them. There are a lot of things to cover, and I took the studying at heart because I really wanted to learn more in breadth what the cloud has to offer. The exams were a means, not and end. Nevertheless, if you put in the efforts for this level of certifications, you will pass. The required passing grade is around 70%.

A three-step approach is recommended as a preparation strategy. First, take an online course or go through the learning material offered by the cloud provider (for instance as done through Microsoft Learn) to be confronted with all there is to know, which typically takes 10 to 15 hours. Second, reread the course material and your notes. This is when the actual studying and where connecting the topics occurs. Third, take a bunch of practice exams and complement your studying where necessary. You can find high-quality practice exams online, or on a course platform such as Udemy. If your scores are high enough, book an exam.

The Cloud Practitioner exam of AWS allowed me to get very familiar with generic cloud notions besides AWS-specific terminology. This includes the many advantages of shifting workloads to the cloud, deployment models, pricing, considerations about architecture, security, and the infamous provider-client shared responsibility model. It was interesting to see that many of the concepts carry over almost one-to-one to Azure and likely also other cloud service providers. Be prepared to learn a lot of AWS services with cool-sounding names and acronyms (RDS! DynamoDB! CloudWatch! Kinesis! SageMaker! IAM! Fargate!)…

While getting ready for the DP-900 exam, I learned about a variety of different SQL and NoSQL engines and what services Azure offers to implement these (Storage Account! SQL Managed Instance! CosmosDB!). I also learned a lot about the differences between a database, a data warehouse, and a data lake and how they are used within analytics (Data Lake Storage Gen2! Synapse Analytics! Spark! Data Factory!). Furthermore, you touch topics such as data storage models, streaming versus batch processing, and visualization using Power BI. I had encountered most of these topics already previously in my career as a data scientist, but this certification really sets you up for starting to build data pipelines as a data engineer. It helps to understand at a more intimate level the principles behind storing and processing data. A welcomed addition to my knowledge.

Now that the basics are checked off, I will in the near future probably go after the more advanced certifications to further strengthen my theoretical and practical understanding. Studying for these exams proved a good way of getting up to speed with cloud technology. The theory remains only one side of the proverbial same coin. I already got hands-on with some services, but I feel like actually experimenting much more through building a few side projects and deploying them to the cloud. It’s going to be fun and I will share the projects here as they develop.

On a final note, I gathered my learning summaries in a few private GitHub repositories. If you are interested just hit me up, I might add you to the repositories. 😊 Good luck on your cloud journey! May our paths cross.