Developing on AWS

Michael Blythe | MBA

Director at Yellow Mango | AWS Certified Solutions Architect | Experienced Business Solutions Architect | Agile

This week I attended the Developing on AWS course which was delivered by QA who are a AWS training partner (the trainer was Daniel Ivesa, who i'd recommend). I decided to use QA again for this course based on previous experience I had from attending the Architecting on AWS back in December.

 Why I decided to attend this course

AWS provide certifications and learning materials to support a number of learning paths, these include:

  • Cloud Practitioner path
  • Architect path
  • Developer path
  • Operations path

For the complete list of paths click here.

In my case I typically sit within the Architecture path however I personally believe that to be an Awesome Architect (see our values) you need to know not only conceptually how the building blocks work but have an appreciation for how the components work. For example; if I'm working with a client and we are discussing a particular design pattern or solution it can aid the process and in some cases reduce the risk if I can quickly spin up a prototype to validate understanding.

The AWS certifications are structured in a way to target specific groups (or roles) and therefore the learning material is tailored to cover specific services/applications which will help. If you want to learn more click here.

What we covered

When I received the course content and agenda from QA I almost fell off my chair, it looked like a very busy 3 days with theory work backed up by practicals.

Initially I was concerned that we maybe going ground I had already covered during the Architecting on AWS course however that did not appear to be the case thankfully. I'd estimate that perhaps there is a  15% overlap.

Course outline

We covered the below modules throughout the 3 days:

  • Introduction to IAM
  • Developing Storage Solutions with Amazon S3
  • Developing Flexible NoSQL Solutions with Amazon DynamoDB
  • Developing Solutions with AWS Lambda
  • Developing Solutions with Amazon API Gateway
  • Developing Solutions with Amazon SQS & SNS
  • Developing Solutions with AWS Step Functions
  • Caching Information with Amazon ElastiCache
  • Getting started with Docker and Amazon Elastic Container Service
  • Developing Secure Solutions
  • Deploying Applications

Key takeaways

With so many modules covered as noted above its difficult to highlight one particular key take away. I did however like the idea of a practical exercise after each module to reinforce the theoretical learning. The final practical exercise then brings everything together with the build of a web based (S3 hosted) text to voice translation (Polly) application.

Who should attend the course

The course is ideally suited to developers who are looking to get good hands-on experience of developing on AWS. Assuming you have a basic understanding of Python, Java or C# you should be fine. If like me you tend to operate in an architecture capacity I would still recommend attending this course, that is assuming you enjoy and want to go down to the next level of detail.

I would recommend if you can reading or at least 'skimming' through the course content before attending as I felt at times we were racing against the clock to cram in as much as possible.

If you would like to ask any questions regarding the course or anything covered please get in touch.