LPIC certification: "Vendor neutral," meaning you need to memorize (note I said memorize, not learn) how both Debian and RHEL do things. For example, you'll be tested both on YUM and APT.
LPIC certifications are multiple choice, and really come down to rote memorization of flags. You're also tested on stuff of questionable relevance, like X11, desktop environments, and CUPS. If you're supporting Linux desktops, that stuff is probably important. But Linux deployed mostly on servers.
RHSA: RHEL/CentOS-only, and performance based. You can use man pages during the exam, so you can concentrate what commands do what and how to configure things. This is opposed to LPIC, where you're more focused on obscure flags.
Ubuntu has no vendor-specific exam. If you really want to stick with Debian/Ubuntu, go with the Linux Foundation certs. They're performance-based and you can choose to do it on Debian.
Wikipedia does a decent service, but its community is a toxic cesspool.
And I think one of the underlying issues with Wikipedia is its is community incredibly hostile to new editors. So any attempts by Wikipedia to correct for the bias toward white male editors is often undercut by its own community.
I find certifications good for really three things:
1.) Having a structured curriculum to learn something new. All my tech skills are self-taught, and it's useful to have a structured learning path.
2.) Validating your skills, especially when you're changing careers. I went from working in call centers to AWS Systems Architect/Linux SysAdmin by virtue of a couple of certs.
3.) Sometimes employers require certain certifications as a condition of employment (or continued employment). This one can be a bit sticky, though. Make sure those certifications make sense for the role. I can't tell you how many job listings I see wanting CompTIA A+. Unless you're applying to work for Geek Squad, you probably don't need an A+ cert (which asks things like 'What is RAM'? 'What is Bluray?').
If you want to get into Linux, getting a couple of certs won't hurt. Red Hat's certs are probably the most well-respected, but of course are centered around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and by extension CentOS).
If you want a good cert path for Debian, go with the Linux Foundation certs. Linux Foundation's certs are less well-known, but also practical exams.
I would avoid LPIC and CompTIA Linux+ certs (NOTE: I am Linux+ and LPIC-1 certified). They are multiple choice exams and really emphasize based on rote memorization of command flags, which really isn't useful to be an actual Linux SysAdmin. Then's the last time you ran into a bzip2 archive? I can't remember the last time I did, but I still remember that tar xjf will unzip one. But, of course, if I did run into a bzip2 in the wild, I can just as easily read the tar man page. Thanks LPIC!
I would not call AWS certs “good”, especially not the associate certs. I have the the three associates and two professional ones. The company paid for all except the first.
AWS is so massive, it’s hard to know where to start to get a general overview of it. Studying for and at least doing proof of concepts help with giving you an organized learning path with an end goal in mind.
But, I still don’t think that the certifications necessarily show any level of competence.
I was the dev lead at a mid size company with a small development shop. I was specifically hired to modernize the department and to architect a green field project. Right after I designed the system, they decided to “move to the cloud”. I knew nothing about AWS at the time and neither did they. So they hired a bunch of “certified consultants”.
At the end of the day with the consultants “help”, I ended up setting up an environment just like I would on prem (first mistake) with seven (1 in DEV/QA/UAT and a cluster in production) small VMs for Consul, Nomad, Mongo. I’m already at 21 servers. This doesn’t count two VMs for build servers and 10 or 11 app servers in all.
While this design would have been perfectly acceptable for an on prem setup and looking back I wouldn’t have done anything differently if we were on prem, this was a horrible system for AWS. We could have used managed services for everything above and not had a single VM running except the app servers (today we could have used Fargate to avoid even the app servers but it wasn’t around at the time). We could have even used managed ElasticSearch instead of Mongo since the data stored in Mongo wasn’t the source of truth.
But the “certified consultants” were a bunch of old school infrastructure guys who only knew how to click around on the web console (2nd mistake) and do a “lift and shift”.
I started studying for the AWS Architect Associate just so I could talk intelligently to the consultants and see what type of improvements I could do during phase 2. I had already designed the system to abstract our dependency on Consul, Nomad, and Mongo. I was horrified after discovering all that AWS could have managed for us. I was more horrified that the certified consultants didn’t have a clue. I was most horrified that I passed the certification without ever touching the console and just by watching the videos.
For various reasons, I ended up changing jobs shortly there after, to work for a company that was a pure AWS shop with a new (to the company) manager that wanted to be more “AWS native”.
I became the “AWS guy” even though I’m a developer. Eventually we started interviewing “AWS Architects”. None of the people we were looking for (mid level) had any practical experience. They had just memorized enough from ACloudGuru to pass a multiple choice test.
The last set of certs I did was around 2010. They were the six certs required to be a Microsoft Certified Architect (?). I was transistioning from a decade of C bit twiddling with some VB6 on the side to becoming an “Enterprise Developer” and had just gotten a job where they were transitioning to from a VB/C++ backend to .Net.
My thought process for the certifications were the same - a method to get on an organized learning path. But, by the time the company folded two years later, the certs had already expired and I never bothered getting them renewed. I knew it wouldn’t matter when looking for my next job. So they have never appeared on my resume.
Looking back, I don’t think that the AWS Associate certs were any better or worse than the Microsoft certs. But I will keep these up to date.
The second part of the story is that after seeing how much these “certified consultants” were making - I was the dev lead after all - I realized where the money was. Especially since I already had a long development background and some Devops experience I could be much better at AWS consulting than some infrastructure guys.
When I changed companies, I negotiated not to be a team lead. I wanted to be an IC to fill in some technical gaps and get hands on experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant moving companies up on the cloud maturity model”.
Study for the developer cert and do some hands on work. Again, it’s not because I believe in the importance of “getting the certification”, it’s about the guided learning path.
I was able to get experience through my job, but if that isn’t an option for you, just build something. There are some really good, cheap, thorough Udemy course (no affiliation, not affilliate links):
This course goes over API Gateway, lambda, DynamoDB and a quick overview of how to create a NodeJS Serverless app:
That is the “right way” to create a Serverless API, but if you want to take a regular old Node/Express API and run through lambda you can use the lambda proxy integration:
Now let's just make sure they don't replace employees with lower-paid contractors. I'm always suspicious when these minimum wage hikes don't talk about contractors.
Nah bruh. He's where he deserves to be. Just like the Sackler family, he aided and abetted the destruction of many families and actual death of many drug users.
Saying that he deserves a harsh penalty is one thing - but double life sentence and 40 years means he'll effectively never be able to have a life.
It's almost like a death penalty (some would think even worse). Ross did facilitate bad things unintentionally and/or turned a blind eye, but he was also young and reckless.
It's time to pardon this young man so he can actually contribute positively to society and make up in other ways.
I guess the first question is: What do you want to do with AWS?
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.
It only works regionally, but it's better than nothing.