Having taken a majority of AWS Associate/Speciality/Professional certifications, I rank all AWS exams in increasing order of difficulty levels. This article can also serve as a learning path for upskilling on AWS and is updated according to the latest AWS certification offerings.
- Cloud Practitioner: This one is for AWS newbies and non-engineers. It's not a walk in the park, and I know many who couldn't clear it. Hence, one does need to prepare well.
- AI Practitioner: Newly launched exam for AI beginners.
- Solutions Architect Associate: This exam covers a good breadth of AWS services. It requires a good understanding of what combination of AWS services to use for a given scenario and some hands-on practice.
- Developer Associate: At par with Solution Architect in terms of difficulty. This exam drills deeper into security and CI/CD concepts.
- Sysops Associate: The toughest among associate-level exams. It focuses more on the deployment and configuration aspects of AWS services.
- Data Engineer Associate: This is a recently launched exam. I have not taken it myself, but have heard feedback that it is tough for an associate-level exam.
- Machine Learning Associate: Newly launched exam that covers a good depth of AWS services for AI.
- Security Speciality: A good understanding of security concepts is required to clear the associate-level exams. Hence moving over to the specialty level after clearing Associate level exams, the AWS Security Specialty exam feels like a low-hanging fruit.
- DevOps Professional: Things start to get very difficult from here. 75-question format for Professional exams adds to the overall difficulty of these exams. This exam requires a good level of hands-on practice.
- Solutions Architect Professional: Another 75-question exam, with many lengthy questions and confusing options, makes this one of the toughest exams out there.
- Machine Learning?Speciality: This exam requires sound knowledge of ML concepts. It is very different from other AWS exams as it not only covers AWS services but also many deep questions on machine learning concepts.
- Networking?Speciality: The lack of hands-on practice on some of the expensive services covered in this exam (Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, etc.) makes it hard to grasp all the concepts for this exam making this one the toughest nut to crack.
For anyone considering AWS certifications for the first time, this article might help.
Specialist Infrastructure Engineer (AWS) | Focused on Cloud Security, AI Integration, and Scalable Solutions"
11 个月Thanks for this..recently passed the solutions architect associate without much commercial experience, but lots of hands on practice and personal projects, next will be to take the developer associate then straight on to the security specialisation cert. I intend to focus for now just on aws cloud, Azure, maybe in future.
Software Development Engineer
1 年Why and when was the AWS Developer - Professional certification discontinued? Thanks
AWS Certified | Production Support | Atlassian tools admin | SRE | Ex-NatWest
1 年Hi, thanks for the informative article. What about AWS SAP Specialty certification? Where does it stand in terms of difficulty ranking?
Senior Security Engineer at Coverwallet, an Aon company
1 年Hi, how long did you invest to achieve all 11 certs? thanks