Cross-Cloud Certification: From Non-Cloud to Professional Architect - Introduction

This is the first in a series of articles offering advice for seasoned IT professionals aiming to gain comprehensive cross-cloud expertise and achieve Professional Architect certification with the three largest cloud vendors. I'll provide study tips, share the resources I used, and give my impressions of each exam I've taken.

I've achieved the following certifications along my journey (links are to my certification records):

AWS - Certified Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate, Solutions Architect Professional

Microsoft Azure - Azure Fundamentals, Azure Administrator Associate, Azure Architect Expert (and also Azure Network Engineer Associate, Security Fundamentals, and Azure Data Fundamentals)

Google Cloud Platform - Cloud Digital Leader, Associate Cloud Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect

Whew! That's a lot of exams! I think along the way I've gained some valuable insights, and I'd like to share what I've learned with others. If you find this useful, be sure to Like, Follow, Comment and Connect, to feed my visibility with the All-Knowing Algorithm.

Follow-up articles for the individual vendors are below:

AWS - Part 2

Azure - Part 3

Google Cloud Platform - Part 4

My Background

I am an experienced IT Infrastructure professional, down in-the-trenches of storage, servers, and networks for many years. I started in product support for SAN solutions (back when Fibre Channel was a 'blazing-fast' 100MB/sec, and 1 TB disk array was about the size of 2 industrial refrigerators and took four power cords the size of garden hoses.) My career eventually shifted to spending nearly ten years as a DR Infrastructure Architect (for which storage and storage replication is a fundamental building block.)

A few years ago, I noticed the trend towards cloud computing and decided to dive deep into learning about the three major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (AZ), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While there are other significant cloud platforms like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, I have yet to gain expertise on those.

I'd like to share with all of you how I managed to achieve professional architect certification on all three major cloud vendors, including how I studied, what resources I used, and my thoughts on each of the exams.

(Note: I do not work for any of the cloud vendors, nor am I being compensated for any recommendations or links in this series of articles.)

Why did I want to earn all these certifications?

I've always been an IT Infrastructure generalist; my jobs have required me to be familiar with a wide range of technologies, platforms, and vendors, and as a result, it made a lot of sense for me to get familiar with all three major cloud platforms. Don't expect to follow the steps I've detailed here and become a bona-fide expert in three very-different architectures. (I'm certainly not going to make that claim for myself!) You'll be able to master the basics, but despite the lofty titles of the certifications, you are not going to be qualified as a full-fledged guru after taking these tests.

Becoming a true expert-level professional requires mastering topics that none of these exams cover. (e.g. During your studies, you'll be spending most of your hands-on time in the web consoles of the platforms, but most real-world cloud implementations are done via automation languages, because change control with a web console is just about impossible non-starter.)

Each of the three platforms required me to study about 120-150 hours across all the exams I took. As with any studying process, your experience can, and will, vary. I have many years of broad professional experience as an IT Infrastructure expert; someone earlier in their career, or with a less diverse one, may take longer. And maybe you are just a whiz that has already done professional work on these platforms, and studying for the exams will just be an exercise in filling in the gaps; in that case, you might fly through the material, and be ready to take a test a week.

Study at the pace that is right for you; don't pay too much attention to how long others (including me!) took.

General Studying Advice

To credibly achieve Architect Professional certification across all three cloud vendors, you are going to need to take at least six different exams. (Technically neither AWS nor GCP require you to achieve Associate-level certification prior to Professional-level certification, but it's a really good idea to do so.)

This many tests, none of which are easy, will require hundreds of hours of steady work, and you need a systematic approach to absorbing this much knowledge. You must master note-taking, the ability to focus, and, most-importantly, the capability to retain as much as you can of what you've learned.

There are three fundamental parts of exam preparation, all of which you must master if you hope to achieve certification in a reasonable amount of time.

Lectures and Reading

Whether you take a course from a in-person or virtual trainer in a limited class size, or use an entirely-online curriculum, your efforts will involve trying to absorb, and retain, the crucial facts from a veritable ocean of material.

Fundamental to this process of studying is quality note-taking. Passively listening to videos, or reading written material, has a notoriously-poor retention rate. For the more-difficult exams, if you do not take quality notes, you are unlikely to remember things from the beginning of the course by the time you have completed your studies.

You can easily find notes and flash-cards from other people online, but the real value with notes isn't necessarily reading them, it is the act of writing them. There's a lot of advice out there on note-taking strategies, but speaking for myself, I found that hand-written notes in a simple notebook worked the best for me, using an informal outline format.

I prefer handwriting because for me, it enhances retention over typing, allows for the simple use of arrows, circles, and other forms of emphasis, and makes drawing quick diagrams fast and easy. I've used both paper and electronic notebooks, and my current note-taking platform of choice is an Amazon Kindle Scribe.

It's important to not transcribe information word-for-word. You'll spend a lot of time copying, and the process of doing so quickly becomes mechanical; and as a result, you won't actually remember the information very well. Instead, make a concise summary of facts you think are interesting or might be difficult to remember. And of course highlight anything you believe might be especially important, draw diagrams if you think they might be helpful; anything you can do beyond just plowing through endless material, taking one page of notes after another, will be helpful.

I think in the end, it was about one line of notes per minute of video lecture or paragraph of written material, adding up to a page per hour of studying (hand-written, wide-rule.)

Hands-On Practice

No IT Professional worthy of the name will attempt to claim expertise in a topic just by reading about it or watching videos. Getting your hands dirty is vital to actually understanding the topic well enough to be useful in your career; it's not just about passing tests, you must be able to apply what you've learned on at least a rudimentary level.

An excellent start is the scripted labs that are available for all of the study platforms I'm going to review for you, but you should definitely spend some time exploring the products well above and beyond step-by-step instructions. Actually deploying resources (and, inevitably, figuring out why they often don't work how you expected them to) is a vital part of learning, and you shouldn't skip it.

All three of the major cloud platforms should cost under $20 per exam in cloud resources, as long as you are careful when deploying products, especially outside the bounds of a step-by-step lab. With costs this low (compared with the value of the knowledge you'll gain), this should not be a deterrent to gaining vital practical experience.

Practice Exams

While learning for its own sake is a valuable goal, at the end of the day, you are reading this article because you want to pass your certification exams. To that end, practice tests are a valuable part of this process. In the section on each cloud vendor, I'll go over which practice tests I used, and which I recommend. (Though a short summary is: "If TutorialsDojo offers a practice exam, that's the one you should take." There are others, and they'll be covered specifically in the articles about each provider.)

Practice exams from reputable sources will feature questions of similar difficulty and content to genuine exams, so you can get a picture of how prepared you are, and areas which require further study. Taking a test without going through a practice exam first can be risky, so I'd definitely suggest making that small investment of money and time to make sure you are as prepared as possible. Beyond the lost exam fee, failing an exam attempt can be a strong de-motivator for further study.

Important Note: There is a huge difference between a Practice Exam and an Exam Dump. Exam dumps are stolen exam questions, copied verbatim on to a website. Do not, under any circumstances, resort to the use of exam dumps. You should avoid them not only because they are stolen test materials, and a violation of your agreement with the vendors, but because you are cheating yourself, and any employer that might rely on you genuinely deserving the credential.

It is important to use practice exams correctly. While the score you achieve in the practice exam is valuable, even more valuable is the questions you got wrong, or were unsure of. A quality practice exam will offer detailed explanations of the correct and incorrect answers, and will provide links (usually to product documentation, or longer articles) that can help you understand subjects you are weak on.

Lastly, while you certainly should feel free to repeat practice exams, a particular question bank is only predictive for your exam performance the first time you take it. Subsequent attempts are not without value, but you will inevitably (without even trying) memorize the correct answers to particular questions, even if you still do not understand the underlying concepts adequately. Treat every 1st-attempt for a question bank as a valuable resource, making sure to study between each attempt; don't just take the practice exams one after another.

Make sure to read my follow-on articles that will give you advice on passing the exams for each individual vendor. The first is AWS Professional Architect.