- what to learn? - how to learn? - should I get aws certified? AWS Certified Developer vs AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate ?
Do you want to have a good understanding of the breadth of services, or do you want to learn how to leverage AWS to help in your development?
CSA will give you a good overview of the main services AWS offers: You'll learn about EC2, S3, VPC networking, security and access management, etc. You'll also learn about costing holistically, and how to make well-architected systems.
Certified Developer will give you a deeper dive into the development-centric aspects of AWS. You'll learn stuff like specific details about RDS and Dynamo DB (manage SQL and NoSQL databases, respectively), how to build CI/CD pipelines, ECS (Elastic Container Store), etc. It covers fewer products (but at a deeper level) than the CSA.
With the CSA you'll learn which use cases you'll want a relational DB or when you want to go NoSQL. You'll also learn what DB engines are available in RDS and Dynamo DB. With the Developer, you'll be asked more detailed stuff like read/write units, eventually vs. strongly consistent reads, how DB throughput is calculated, etc.
How to learn? AWS Whitepapers and ReInvent videos on Youtube are both free. Linux Academy has great courses on AWS. acloud.guru fills in some gaps Linux Academy may leave out, but overall I find acloud.guru to be less feature-rich and somewhat underwhelming.
A lot of people use Whizlabs for practice tests, but I've never used them.
I encourage getting AWS certified. The certifications are really hot right now, and it'll validate that you have at least the base knowledge. There's a lot of fakers out there, and AWS certification helps you overcome that hurdle somewhat.
--3x AWS certified, including CSA Pro.