I recently took and passed the AWS Certified Cloud Professional exam, based on the training material from <a href="https://acloud.guru/" rel="nofollow">https://acloud.guru/</a> and my personal experience (30+ years as a SysAdmin/DevOps Engineer, overlapping with 7+ years as a cloud consultant, including working extensively with AWS). I’m now going through the acloud.guru training material for the AWS Certifies Solutions Architect. And I’ve got several more AWS certifications planned.<p>The acloud.guru site is not the only training facility out there — I think there may be better material from certain teachers on Udemy.com, but acloud.guru is free for us thanks to an arrangement with my employer, so that’s the primary service I’m using.<p>In the years since I graduated from university and went into the professional field in 1989, I haven’t seen very many certificates that I felt had a lot of value. Netware certificates actually meant something. As did Cisco certs. But I’ve found very few other certificates that do. So far, I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of stuff I’ve learned in pursuit of my AWS certificates. Sure, there’s lots of stuff I already knew, but then there were also a surprising amount of gaps in my knowledge that I would have never known about, had I not gone through this training.<p>That said, just going for the certificates is not useful. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to actually build stuff with the material you’re learning. You can use a free account, or the “sandbox” type systems that are provided through acloud.guru, or other training facilities.<p>If you want to learn AWS, I recommend you actually do stuff with AWS. You’ll learn it as you build and break various things. And doing the certifications as you go may help you learn more than you could have learned on your own.