AWS Training and Certification Blog
New courses and updates from AWS Training and Certification in December 2022
Editor’s note: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Training and Certification courses and offerings in December 2022 include several new AWS Skill Builder subscription features, including a game-based training experience for the financial services industry, a fourth learning path for AWS Jam Journey, a sixth role for AWS Cloud Quest, and 13 AWS Builder Labs. There are seven, free, fundamental-level digital courses; two classroom courses about planning and managing databases on AWS and Amazon SageMaker Studio; two AWS Partner courses about security essentials and AWS GovCloud (US); and an AWS Certification update about the availability of online Mandarin-speaking proctors in Mainland China.
New AWS Skill Builder subscription features
AWS Skill Builder Individual and Team subscriptions offer a new way for individuals, organizations, and AWS Partners to learn with highly-interactive, digital cloud skills training and AWS Certification preparation, allowing you to develop cloud skills wherever and whenever you need. Subscriptions build upon our AWS Skill Builder library of 600+ free, self-paced, digital courses and learning plans. As new subscription features become available, we’ll keep you informed here.
AWS Industry Quest: Financial Services
At AWS re:Invent 2022, we launched AWS Industry Quest, a game-based training experience to help individuals and organizations learn how to build AWS solutions for specific industries. The first version, AWS Industry Quest: Financial Services, features 20 virtual scenarios, such as payment fraud detection and credit risk predictions, during which technical learners earn rewards for completing assignments at a fictitious company. AWS Industry Quest: Financial Services (link for Amazonians) is available with an AWS Skill Builder Individual or Team subscription. Watch the preview video and stay tuned for AWS Industry Quest for other industries in the future.
AWS Jam Journey: Database
AWS Jam Journey provides a gamified, experiential learning path to build AWS skills with real-world challenges, available with both AWS Skill Builder Individual and Team subscriptions. AWS Jam Journey: Database is our newest offering, joining AWS Jam Journeys for security, networking, and machine learning. Learn how to work with AWS database services, such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB, to migrate data from on-premises to the cloud, securing access to data, performing and restoring backups, and even using them as part of serverless workflows. AWS Jam Journey: Database (link for Amazonians) is available via AWS Skill Builder Individual or Team subscription.
AWS Cloud Quest: Data Analytics role and custom learning paths for organizations
Data analytics is the newest role in AWS Cloud Quest, the only role-playing game to help build practical AWS Cloud skills. Learn how to use modern data architecture and AWS Analytics services. Assignments provide hands-on experience working with scalable data lakes, data warehousing, real-time data ingestion, big data analytics, log analytics, streaming analytics, data storage, and business intelligence dashboards. Earn an AWS Cloud Quest: Data Analytics digital badge after completing all assignments. The data analytics role joins existing Cloud Quest roles for cloud practitioner, solutions architect, serverless developer, machine learning, and security. The cloud practitioner role is available for free on AWS Skill Builder. Data analytics and all other roles are available with AWS Skill Builder Individual and Team subscriptions (link for Amazonians).
Exclusive for AWS Skill Builder Team subscribers: Create custom learning paths with existing Cloud Quest assignments, instead of using standard learning paths. These personalized Cloud Quest curricula helps organizations to onboard new employees and host competitions for specific technical domains.
AWS Builder Labs
Dive into 13 new AWS Builder Labs for guided, self-paced, interactive learning in an AWS Management Console practice environment, available on AWS Skill Builder Individual and Team subscriptions.
Fundamental-level
- Evolution of a Website: Going from Single Server to Serverless is a 60-minute, fundamental lab designed for developers who design computer or mobile applications. Launch a website on Amazon EC2; as demand increases, you will evolve the website to include better security, a load balancer, and host it on Amazon S3 to make it serverless. (link for Amazonians)
- Use Amazon SageMaker Canvas to make your first ML Model is a 75-minute, fundamental lab designed for data engineers who want to uncover insights from massive amounts of structured and unstructured data to help shape or meet specific business needs and goals. Learn how to use Amazon SageMaker Canvas, a no-code machine learning solution, to train a machine learning model and get results. (link for Amazonians)
Intermediate-level
- Effortless Relational Scalability with Aurora Serverless v2 is a 90-minute, intermediate lab designed for data engineers who develop, construct, test, and maintain architectures. Learn how to deploy and configure an Aurora Serverless v2 database environment and observe your database as it reacts to changing demand. (link for Amazonians)
- Create a CI/CD pipeline to deploy your app to AWS Fargate is a 60-minute, intermediate lab designed for DevOps engineers and architects who manage software development operations and implement engineering tools and knowledge of the software development process to streamline software updates and creation. Create a CI/CD pipeline to build, test, and deploy a containerized application to AWS Fargate. (link for Amazonians)
- Deploying an Amazon EKS application using CDK8s is a 90-minute, intermediate lab designed for systems operators and DevOps engineers who maintain, configurate, and operate computer systems and manage software development processes. Learn how to create and deploy an Amazon EKS application using CDK8s. (link for Amazonians)
- Secure your account during an active event is a 90-minute, intermediate lab designed for security engineers who operate secure cloud infrastructure, platforms, and software. Gain experience using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon EC2, AWS Cloud9, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge, and Instance Scheduler on AWS. (link for Amazonians)
- My bucket, my rules! is a 60-minute, intermediate lab designed for security engineers who operate secure cloud infrastructure, platforms, and software. Learn about Amazon S3 preventive security best practices and gain the skills to configure and test policies to enforce bucket security. (link for Amazonians)
- A Day in the Life of a Data Engineer is a two-hour, intermediate lab designed for data engineers who manage and organize data. Learn how to ingest data with an AWS Glue crawler and query the AWS Glue Data Catalog using Amazon Athena. (link for Amazonians)
- Event Driven Architecture with Amazon EventBridge is a two-hour, intermediate lab designed for developers who design computer or mobile applications. Learn how to use a HTTP API to drive event-driven architecture and invoke AWS Lambda functions by triggering Amazon EventBridge rules directly from the Amazon API Gateway. (link for Amazonians)
Advanced-level
- How to speed up your AWS Lambda functions is a 60-minute, advanced lab designed for developers who create computer or mobile applications. Dive deep in AWS Lambda and improve AWS Lambda response times for a serverless application. (link for Amazonians)
- Build a multi-language notification system with Amazon Translate and Amazon Pinpoint is a two-hour, advanced lab designed for developers who create computer or mobile applications. Learn how to use Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Translate with AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda. (link for Amazonians)
- Frontend is for Everyone is a 90-minute, advanced lab designed for developers who create computer or mobile applications. Build a serverless, full-stack, single-page app with authentication that allows users to launch and terminate Amazon EC2 instances. (link for Amazonians)
- Resolve VPC Routing Conflicts is a two-hour, advanced lab designed for infrastructure engineers who create the systems and network for computer cloud systems. Learn how to use AWS skills to troubleshoot web application issues that are hosted on Amazon Application Load Balancer. (link for Amazonians)
AWS Digital Training
Free fundamental-level courses
Getting Started with AWS Security Hub
Getting Started with AWS Security Hub is a 60-minute, fundamental course designed for security IT professionals. Get an overview of the powerful capabilities of AWS Security Hub, including automated security best-practice checks, consolidated findings across AWS services, and automated response and remediation. Explore multi-account support, cross-region aggregation of findings, security scores, summary dashboards and filtering groupings, and saved searches for findings.
Right Size Your Amazon EC2 Workload
Right Size your Amazon EC2 Workload is a two-hour, fundamental course, which includes a lab, designed for developers, cloud architects, and cloud operators who develop, deploy, and monitor EC2 workloads in the AWS Cloud. Learn about AWS processor innovations and how to pick the instance type to build a highly-scalable, cost-effective, and optimized solution with the appropriate EC2 instances.
Introduction to Machine Learning on AWS
Introduction to Machine Learning on AWS is designed for technical and non-technical audiences new to the cloud. Get introduced to several AWS ML services for computer vision, data extraction and analysis, language processing, speech recognition, language translation, and virtual agents. Learn how these services help organizations innovate faster to address common business problems while lowering costs. This course is available as both free and paid options at Coursera and edX and requires six to eight hours over two weeks.
Basics of AWS Managed Services (AMS)
Basics of AWS Managed Services (AMS) is a 20-minute fundamental course designed for customers, Partners, and Amazonians who want to learn about AWS Managed Services (AMS). Learn how these services can support organizations that want to operate at scale in the cloud. Understand how AMS can help solve business and technical challenges.
Getting Started with Amazon Timestream
Getting Started with Amazon Timestream is a 60-minute, fundamental course, designed for customers, Partners, and Amazonians who work on databases, including architects, administrators, developers, cloud practitioners, IT professionals and IT leaders. Learn the basic concepts of Amazon Timestream, including use cases and architectures for building. Develop the ability to launch and query the Timestream database.
Getting Started with Amazon ElastiCache
Getting Started with Amazon ElastiCache is a 60-minute, fundamental course designed for customers, Partners and Amazonians who work on data caching strategies, including database architects, system administrators, developers, cloud practitioners, IT professionals and IT leaders. Learn basic concepts about Amazon ElastiCache, including use cases and architectures for building. Discover how to launch and query the ElastiCache for Redis and Memcached engines.
Job Roles in the Cloud
Job Roles in the Cloud is a 30-minute, fundamental course designed for business decision makers responsible for solving problems, contributing to overall strategy, and improving a company’s performance. Learn common job roles in the AWS Cloud environment, their responsibilities and competencies, and how to pair them to your on-premises IT roles. Learn about AWS Cloud training resources for your IT teams and how to differentiate between customer and AWS responsibilities in an AWS Cloud environment. Identify ways to develop AWS Cloud competencies for on-premises IT job roles.
Updated Serverless Learning Plan and new digital badge
Enroll in the updated Serverless Learning Plan on AWS Skill Builder to develop technical knowledge of fundamental AWS Serverless concepts and earn a new digital badge after passing an online assessment. The learning plan focuses on AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway, starts with an introduction to the “Serverless Mindset,” and introduces key concepts to help you design architectures and applications. It discusses how to best take advantage of the event-driven orientation of serverless computing. Next, the course, AWS Lambda Foundations, covers the fundamentals of Lambda. You’ll learn foundational concepts, including how Lambda works, security and permission models, and best practices for writing Lambda functions. The learning plan also includes four courses that span the lifecycle of building Lambda-based applications. You’ll also learn how to use Amazon API Gateway to create and deploy serverless APIs. After scoring 80% or higher on the online assessment, you’ll earn the digital badge. Learn more on the AWS Compute Blog.
AWS Classroom Training
Advanced-level course
Amazon SageMaker Studio for Data Scientists
Amazon SageMaker Studio for Data Scientists is a three-day, advanced classroom course designed to help experienced data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models for a tabular use case with fully-managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows. This course also helps experienced data scientists learn to boost productivity at every step of the ML lifecycle, including reducing training time from hours to minutes with optimized infrastructure. Dive deep into SageMaker Studio setup and navigation, data processing, model development, training, tuning, and deployment using SageMaker Python SDK. Learn to accelerate all the ML lifecycle steps, leveraging the most comprehensive set of tools in a single, web-based visual interface. This course includes presentations, demonstrations, discussions, and 11 labs, including a capstone lab where you will learn to build an end-to-end tabular data ML project using SageMaker Studio and Amazon SageMaker Python SDK. The course covers content in the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty exam. Learn more on the AWS T&C Blog.
Intermediate-level course
Planning and Designing Databases on AWS
Planning and Designing Databases on AWS is a three-day, intermediate classroom course for solutions architects, database architects, and database developers to learn how to identify and design the most suitable AWS database solutions by use case. Modernize your data infrastructure with fully-managed, purpose-built databases to save time and cost, improve performance and scale, and accelerate innovation. Dive deep into how to use the AWS Well-Architected Framework for designing database solutions, determine an appropriate purpose-built database service for a given workload, and analyze data from multiple databases to solve a business problem. An expert AWS instructor will guide you through the features and characteristics of 11 databases (i.e., SQL services, such as Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora, and NoSQL services, such as Amazon Neptune, and Amazon DynamoDB), as well as all associated design considerations. Learn through a mixture of instructor-led presentations, demonstrations, individual and group activities, knowledge checks, and hands-on labs to apply concepts.
AWS Partner Training
AWS Partner: Security Essentials (Technical)
AWS Partner: Security Essentials (Technical) is a one-day, fundamental classroom course for AWS Partners, with a specific focus on security professionals who have minimal knowledge of AWS. Learn AWS Cloud security concepts, including AWS access control, data-encryption methods, and how to secure network access to customers’ AWS infrastructure. Based on the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, learn the customers’ areas of responsibility for implementing security in the AWS Cloud, what security-oriented services are available to customers, and how AWS security services can help customers meet the security needs of their organization.
AWS Partner: AWS GovCloud (US) Essentials (Business)
AWS Partner: AWS GovCloud (US) Essentials (Business) is a two-hour, fundamental digital course designed for individuals at an AWS Partner organization who interface with government customers and organizations in government-regulated industries that need to meet the most stringent government compliance standards. Learn about the purpose and value of the AWS GovCloud (US), how it differs from other AWS Regions, and how to debunk common myths. Learn how to answer customer questions, educate them about AWS GovCloud (US), and provide direction on when and how to use it. Upon completion, all participants receive a digital badge by scoring 80% or higher on an online assessment.
AWS Certification
Online Mandarin-speaking proctors available through Pearson VUE
AWS Certification exam candidates in Mainland China can now benefit from online Mandarin-speaking proctors, Monday-Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. Local Time/CST. Check out the listing of online proctoring languages and availability for AWS Certification exams. Online proctoring is available for all AWS Certifications (exception is AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate, which is available only at test centers through Pearson VUE).
Note: Starting January 1, 2023, all AWS Certification exams will be delivered through Pearson VUE. PSI exam deliveries will continue until December 31, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. UTC.