Hacker News Reader

Comment by 616c | Hacker News Reader

Let's say I want to get into devops, and combine that with, gee, I don't my continued interest in infosec.

Does anyone take these certs seriously? I was listening to SE Daily and the host in an ad mentioned the SysOps certs. I even search Reddit, and the obviously more programming-oriented end of tech has always been adverse to cert culture than the grunt ClickOps (TM, but who I am kidding I stole it from a blog I forget mark) end I am familiar with.

I have debated studying for these certs. I do want try and study for them to get a feel, but I somehow doubt I can really get a job with them.

Is this like for consulting gigs where partner firms with consultants need minimum X certified people to meet a threshold for their Gold/Platinum/Whatever-flavor partner status?

View on HN

As a devops engineer and systems architect, I pay a little attention to AWS's certs. The basic-level certs are not a guarantee of competence, and they're fairly trivial (I remember taking the AWS Certified Developer cert and finishing with like 96% in twenty minutes), but they're in-depth enough and the questions just interesting enough that I consider it to be a minor positive. The professional-level certs, however, are a bigger deal to me--they're not easy.

As a business owner, my clients like seeing certs a lot. It helps with bigger clients (with longer and ongoing business arrangements!) a lot.

If you are interested in getting into this side of things, feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) for an offline chat, I'm happy to help out any way I can. (This is a public offer; I like hearing from people and helping them get in. It's fun.)

I found the Associate level good for directed learning. I learned about some facets of services I hadn't been aware of and gained exposure to services I hadn't used for projects to date. It was my first cert in ~20 years of IT (sysadmin and dev), FWIW.

I've heard, as another poster pointed out, that the Professional level certs are well regarded. Associate, eh.

No one ever comes out and says "You were hired on the basis of a cert". It's just another factor. If you've got the experience they're probably not worth as much. If you don't, they'll help.

I have also been thinking of getting these certifications, but I'm not sure how much I'm going to get out of them in the long term, business-wise.

I want to study for them and get to know the AWS ecosystem better, actually learn something new for once. I do hope that there's some kind of ROI for getting them. I work freelance as a developer and I know some clients really do like certifications. Then again, AWS - as far as I know - isn't all that popular in Belgium.

The base-level certs are like $99 and, if you're more than passingly familiar with AWS, you should be able to blast through them. There are a couple questions about sillier services like SWF but it's mostly EC2, IAM, S3, and DynamoDB.

I can't speak for the certs, but I can tell you that the DevOps course was actually pretty good. It had many real-world examples, wasn't copy-paste-click-next heavy and had great intros to the newer tech such as Lambda.

The certs have good commercial value. There is a shortage of people with the Pro certs and they are needed for businesses to advance through partner tiers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com