I COMPLETED the “AWS Essential Training for Developers” LinkedIn Learning Course | My Thoughts

Introduction:

This week’s blog post essentially summarises my experiences of the following course: AWS Essential Training for Developers.

It’s a fairly big course which covers many different areas therefore I thought that a blog post would be a good way to consolidate my knowledge. It does also help to raise awareness for this course and some of you may even choose to undertake it after reading this blog post.

*Disclaimer — All views are strictly my own opinion*

As always, make sure to applaud and share this post!

Happy Reading!

Thoughts Before Starting the Course:

As some of you might know, I’m not exactly a big fan of online courses.

There have been occasions in the past where I’ve left them incomplete. I also don’t really value the certificates.

So that poses the question: Why am I doing this course?

Firstly, I want to learn more about AWS.

I also believe that it’s pointless setting up tiny cloud projects. If I want to use the cloud then it should be for something big. Perhaps this is a wrong way of thinking but currently, that’s my opinion.

This course was appealing because it seemed friendly for my level of experience and it covered a wide range of topics (AWS, DevOps, Security … which are all topics that I’m interested in and it would be good to handle them in 1 course).

Section By Section Overview:

Introduction:

Fairly standard stuff but this section was easy to follow.

AWS Essential Setup:

This might turn into a common theme as we go through each module but I genuinely found the majority of the course really easy to follow!

The key thing to take away here is the principle of least privilege !!

On-Premise to AWS:

This could be described as the first “real” section of the course as “On-Premise to AWS” is a real world requirement.

The course did a good job of starting off with the theory (what exactly does this mean/entail?) before bringing in services (EC2 and S3 in the case) before then going further and walking through how to setup these resources!

IaaS Compute:

Just as I eluded to earlier, this is where we actually got to see how to setup an EC2 instance and manage costs.

IaaS Networking:

I’d definitely say the course got a bit more challenging at this point. Services such as S3 and EC2 are somewhat familiar to me as a dev however networking is a bit less familiar to me (I’ve only really touched on this at a theoretical level).

This section definitely helped me to become more familiar with Availability Zones, VPN’s and even Architecture Diagrams too!

IaaS Storage:

I’ve already eluded to this earlier but storage wasn’t too challenging to me so this section was fine.

Database as a Service (DBaaS):

I’ve briefly touched DynamoDB in the past so again, I was somewhat familiar with AWS for databases.

The course does a good job at exploring options for both relational and non-relational databases (even sharing how AWS can be used to migrate a database to the cloud!).

Platform as a Service (PaaS):

I didn’t make too many notes on this section. It’s impossible to cover this (or any of the topics) in a single section therefore this section seemed to refer to the docs a lot more than others.

It could be argued that this should just be its own course however it was still good to introduce me to the idea of PaaS.

Software as a Service (SaaS):

The idea of this section is amazing however it definitely tries to cover far too many services.

It got to the point where I stopped attempting to make notes because it flew through so many services!!

DevOps with AWS:

This section was far better than the previous one.

It even brought in CloudFlare.

DevOps is sought after and this section was a great introduction.

Security on AWS:

Again, lots of services get thrown up.

Security is one area I am quite interested in but this course can’t specialise in it.

Conclusion:

Overall, the course was really good!

AWS is huge and this course does a good job to start you off with AWS and familiarise yourself with the course components.

If I had to be critical, I would say that it definitely does run through many many different services and this makes it a bit too fast paced at times (for my liking!). Maybe that time could’ve been spent going deeper into other aspects however I’m not complaining, the course was definitely worth it!

Throughout the course, it refers to more specialised courses (security, devops …) which is great!

Next Steps:

It’s all well and good doing this course but I need to get hands on.

I need to incorporate the AWS SDK into my future projects (stop letting the thought of “potential costs” hold me back!).

Keep researching, reading docs and attempting to understand architecture diagrams.

Final Things:

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. I don’t always do courses so this is definitely something different!

All my links are here!

Hashtags:

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