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Ask HN: Google Cloud Certification vs. AWS Certification

11 points by lsiunsuex ↗ HN
I'm curious if anyone has taken both the AWS certifications and the Google Cloud certifications.

Long story short - 20 years a sys admin / developer and I've never pursued a certification in anything. I've done just fine, career wise, but I think it's time to get something on paper.

I'm almost done with some AWS systems architect associates certification online training - planning on scheduling the exam this coming week or next week if I do well on the practice exams. I intend to take the first 3 at least (systems architect, developer and Sys Ops)

Can anyone compare the difficulty of the Google Cloud certs compared to AWS? I get that their different proprietary systems and in my opinion with different purposes - I personally feel Google Cloud is more for big data type situations where AWS is more for scaling and serverless architecture (please, correct me if that's wrong) - BUT - systems are systems and a basic knowledge in 1 should be helpful in the other, no?

(I'm a Linux guy - No Azure here...)

I don't intend to take the Google Cloud certs until after AWS certified and have produced some production sites to get real world experience with it. So this is really just a "I think I'm gonna do x" right now, then a "I'm doing it next week" type question.

8 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 30.5 ms ] thread
dkarapetyan
Pretty sure certification is a racket. Why would you play into it?
lsiunsuex
Something to do, lol... I "need" to move 2 sites from a host to AWS and while I have a general idea of how AWS works and how to use it, I figured what better way to learn it quickly then to get certified for it.
fspear
AWS certs seem to be valued by enterprise clients in my experience.
hemansan
Enterprise clients always want to minimize their risk by choosing the closest match to qualifications. It helps a lot when you have a AWS certificate when the client wants to use AWS for complex workloads. You can cook up any stories about your past exploits and it would be very difficult for prospects to verify them. However, the certificate gives something tangible to trust upon.
inka
I can't say on Google certs, but I passed the AWS ones - I wouldn't go for developer and sys ops both - they are the same level certs in the same certification path, so it seems like a waste of money to get them both really :)

Quick note, it's "solutions architect" not "system architect".

AWS certs are very focused on AWS products, so may not be helpful for Google Cloud. The developer/sysops -> devops path may be a bit better of the two, as it focuses on how to get stuff done, while solutions architect is a bit more higher level knowledge of putting AWS products together.

lsiunsuex
I was skimming the sys ops course and it seams to have some stuff missing from what I've learned so far that I could really use - log files, alerts, analytics, monitoring, etc... While I appreciate the whole serverless idea and let Lamda and such do the heavy lifting, the programmer side of me says meh... I'll just do it myself.

If both aren't needed, I'll probably do sys ops next then.

Thanks for the info!

mindingdata
Just jumping on in terms of the "architecture" certifications. I'm currently doing the Azure architecture certification (And have the course materials for the AWS ones too). They are REALLY light on implementation. It's literally like reading a feature list of every single thing the cloud provider offers.

It's for when a question comes up like "Hmm. How can we we send a message that allows a yet to be decided amount of subscribers to act on that message? I know! Azure Service Bus!".

It's not that expensive to get the certifications so I usually say go for it. But it can be really dry and not as "real worldy" as you might expect.

lsiunsuex
I'd agree with that so far

So far it's very high level and "let's build a wordpress site in multiple AZs with an RDS instance and an ELB"

not "Ok - we have a site that gets millions of hits a day; currently uses 1 LB, 1 NFS shared file server and 3 web servers, and 1 dedicated DB server. Let's rip everything apart and move it to AWS with as close to 0 downtime as possible"

I just didn't want to go into this almost completely blind. The price of the exam is "negligible" (not to call $150 / exam insignificant - to some, I'm sure it's a lot) so... why not. I'll have a good base to start with when I finish and at least can speak to it where before, maybe I was speculating.