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If you're already working with AWS cloud or are enrolled in college, it may be challenging to find the time to figure out the right AWS training course to help you prepare for your certification exam. Looking for the correct AWS training course takes much effort, especially if you are looking for a free one. In our preceding blog, we explored what AWS certifications are, what they can do for you, how much they cost, and a brief overview of what each entails.
In this article, we save you the heavy lifting involved in finding the right AWS course such that you spend more time preparing for the certification exam instead. Essentially, we outline the best AWS training courses to study and prepare for even the most complex, speciality level AWS certifications.
Table of Contents
1. AWS Foundational Certificate
AWS Solutions Architect - Associate
AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate
3. AWS Professional Certificates
AWS Solutions Architect - Professional
AWS DevOps Engineer - Professional
AWS Advanced Networking - Specialty
AWS Data Analytics - Specialty
AWS Machine Learning - Specialty
Best AWS Courses
Amazon offers 11 certifications currently, divided into Foundational, Associate, Professional, and Specialty levels. This list contains the best AWS courses for each of them, their cost, and highlights what makes each one attractive. It is important to note that most of these courses have sale discounts from time to time. For this reason, the price we list may not be the final cost of signing up for one.
AWS Foundational Certificate
AWS Cloud Practitioner
Price: $84.99
Instructor: Stephane Maarek
Link: Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - 2021
Stephane Maarek's Udemy course does a beautiful job explaining all the fundamentals of the Cloud Practitioner exam, such as EC2, ASG, S3, ELB. This AWS course is straight to the point in all the topics covered and is explained in a way that requires no previous IT or AWS knowledge. These aspects make it ideal for individuals looking to jump into cloud computing and start working with AWS. If you are looking to cement the knowledge, we also recommend Jon Bonso's practice exams on Udemy. They're detailed, challenging, and offer section-based practice exams to help you fixate on what you need.
AWS Associate Certificates
AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
Price: $40
Instructor: Adrian Cantrill
Link: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
Adrian Cantrill is known for making detailed content that's easy to digest. This AWS course offers easy-to-understand visual aids, a GitHub full of learning aids, and a clean presentation. But what sets this AWS course apart from the rest is the in-depth explanations, diagrams, and hands-on demos that make all the explanations make a lot more sense. Once again, we recommend Jon Bonso's practice exams to cement your knowledge. They're complex, have a remarkable similarity to the actual exam, and help build confidence for the real exam.
AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate
Price: $40
Instructor: Adrian Cantrill
Link: Designed for SOA-C02 (new version) also valid for C01 (current version)
AWS courses to help you prepare for the SysOps test are very scarce and lackluster, whether you search for them on Coursera or Udemy. Thankfully Adrian Cantrill recently released an in-depth course that will prepare you for the current and new version of the test. This AWS course includes a GitHub repo containing DEMO assets, and an introduction to acclimatizing newcomers without previous IT experience. Additionally, we recommend Jon Bonso's practice exams that are up-to-date, detailed, and honestly harder than the actual certification exam to give you what you need to be ready for it.
AWS Developer - Associate
Price: $124.99
Instructor: Stephane Maarek
Link: Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2022
Filled with content, this AWS course created by Stephane Maarek offers comprehensive explanations with plenty of visual aid, graphs, and examples to help you understand the fundamentals of technologies such as EC2, CloudFormation, and CI/CD. Stephane Maarek also does a great job at keeping the guide accessible. You can jump right into it even without much AWS experience. If you're new to the area, we recommend going through the labs a few times to get good hands-on experience with the more complex technologies. This is truly amazing when it comes to AWS services. Furthermore, Stephane Maarek goes through almost every service and explains them directly and comprehensively, offering tips on how to best work with each of them. For practice exams, we recommend both TutorialDojo's and Jon Bonso's.
AWS Professional Certificates
AWS Solutions Architect - Professional
Price: $80
Instructor: Adrian Cantrill
Link: AWS SA PRO Certification
Updated in May 2021, this AWS course received over 20 additional hours of content from one of the best content creators for AWS training courses. It provides catchup lessons, detailed demos, excellent production value, presentation, and a lot more. A wonderful thing about purchasing an Adrian Cantrill AWS course is that you get it for life, which means that if in the future you need to retake the exam or go through the process of recertification, your investment will still be relevant. Moreover, you will have the material ready to use.
Pair up Adrian Cantrill's quality course and Jon Bonso's detailed, up-to-date practice exams, and you will have everything you need to score well. This is an incredibly difficult test, and studying alone will not be enough. Real-world experience is a crucial factor in passing this exam.
AWS DevOps Engineer - Professional
Price: $124.99
Instructor: Stephane Maarek
Link: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional 2022
Stephane Maarek once again makes a vital, straight-to-the-point, objective guide. The guide is detail-rich, well explained, and full of visual aids to help you follow it. This AWS certification is particularly challenging, but this course takes the time to explain every aspect of what's asked in the DevOps Engineer exam.
Stephane Maarek also made sure to build a comprehensive set of practice exams to aid in cementing his course knowledge. Abhishek Singh was invited to help structure and write the exercises here. He's a heavyweight in DevOps with over 14 years of experience in related areas.
AWS Specialty Certificates
AWS Advanced Networking - Specialty
Price: $29.99
Instructor: Rick Crisci
Link: Clear and Simple AWS Advanced Networking Specialty 2022
Considered one of the most challenging exams to date, you'll need reliable resources to be confident in your ability to pass the exam. Rick Crisci does an excellent job at giving concise explanations about the topics discussed. The course provides you with demos, presents you with concepts, and uses cases to be applied. Rick Crisci's guide alone won't be enough to prepare you, as it lacks sample tests and material to solidify what you learn.
To help you apply this knowledge, we recommend TutorialDojo's Advanced Networking Specialty Practice Exams. They fill the gap on important information, provide a concise review mode, and are constantly updated.
AWS Data Analytics - Specialty
Price: $124.99
Instructor: Stephane Maarek & Frank Kane
Link: Data Analytics Specialty 2022
For this AWS course, Stephane Maarek brings the Big Data and Machine Learning specialist Frank Kane to weigh on the course. It delivers simple to understand, concise examples of all the subjects touched in the exam. Stephane Maarek and Frank Kane work exceptionally well together in this course, leaning on each other's strengths to make a comprehensive guide teaching the core concepts expected by the certification exam.
The course itself won't be enough, as all AWS Specialty level courses are very tough to pass. We recommend that you check AWS Whitepapers such as [1], [2], and [3], and last but not least, try your hand and practice with Jon Bonso's extensive practice exams.
AWS Security - Specialty
Price: $99.99
Instructor: Chandra Lingam
Link: AWS Certified Security – Specialty SCS-C01
Chandra Lingam has a very dynamic and engaging teaching style. This course provides up-to-date, detailed, and clear information to help you do well in your exam. The instructor makes sure to include refresher sessions that approach all the subjects touched upon. If you have any questions, this author is very attentive and answers as many questions about the course as possible.
As with all speciality level AWS courses, we recommend that you dive into additional material to help prepare. TutorialDojo's practice exams are essential when preparing. We also recommend TutorialDojo's Study Path.
AWS Machine Learning – Specialty
Price: $109.99
Instructor: Stephane Maarek & Frank Kane
Link: Machine Learning Specialty 2022
In this AWS course, Stephane Maarek and Frank Kane go in-depth on the concepts of machine learning, data engineering, deep learning, automatic model tuning, and much more. The course is well organized, as both instructors work well together, and they provide plenty of demos along the course.
This test may not be as difficult as some others in the Specialty level, but as Frank Kane touches on several times throughout the course, having experience and exposure to the subjects handled by the course will significantly help with exam questions. He also made an up-to-date and very detailed practice exam that we recommend before taking the certification test.
AWS Database - Specialty
Price: $124.99
Instructor: Stephane Maarek & Riyaz Sayyad
Link: Ultimate AWS Certified Database Specialty 2022
Stephane Maarek hasn't taken this AWS certification course himself, so he brought the expert consultant and database specialist Riyaz Sayyad on board. This course is interesting because it focuses on a few specific databases to prepare you for the test. The instructors went the extra mile and talked about every single database that AWS uses, giving you a complete experience, with plenty of demos, comprehensive exam breakdowns, and a simple and straight-to-the-point language that makes the course easier to grasp.
We also recommend you to check ACloudGuru's Big Data certification section on Redshift and DynamoDB sections, as it provides valuable information to pass on the exam. When it comes to practice exams, Jon Bonso offers a detailed one, with updated questions to the most recent version of the exam. The instructor is also very responsive and will quickly respond to questions about it.
Conclusion
Certifications make you incredibly desirable to most companies working with cloud computing. If you want to prove your skills, enjoy higher salaries, and build a solid career path, certifications are a sure way to solidify your position in the market.
We have chosen these AWS courses because they offer high quality, constantly updated, well-organized course material made by senior professionals, with plenty of experience in both the areas they approach. We also considered how they deliver their message with an emphasis on those that are presented in the most comprehensible way possible.
Most instructors here are also active in the Udemy forums of their course and are more than willing to help if you send them a message on Reddit. They're also often posting in /r/AWSCertifications answering questions both about their course and AWS in general.
Now that you know who the best instructors are, what makes these the top AWS certification courses, the content of the courses, and their prices, we hope you have the necessary tools to pass your certification exam and take your career to new heights.
If you want to dive deeper into the AWS world and learn what AWS Salaries currently look like and which certifications are trending, check out our guide on AWS Salaries.
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