Amazon Web Services (AWS) has quickly become the majority in the cloud infrastructure market. As of Q1 2023, AWS holds 41.5% of the market share, overtaking Microsoft Azure (29.4%) Google Cloud (3.0%) and IBM (2.6%). 

AWS is widely used by many companies across the world, here are a few notable names: Netflix, Twitch, McDonalds, Twitter, Pfizer, Airbnb, The Guardian, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and more. 

And, it’s easy to see why. The many companies and industries that use AWS, benefit not only from its scalable cloud solutions but also from the pay-as-you-go model. This means there is no limit to what their services can provide and no cost barrier. 

What is AWS? 

AWS is a provider of on-demand cloud computing resources, including: 

- Storage

- Analytics

- Database Management

- Networking and Content Delivery

- Security, Identity and Compliance

- Computing

- Machine Learning (ML)

These combined systems provide robust solutions for your tech. Some of the most popular AWS services include the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and AWS Lambda. 

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What are AWS Certifications

Because of the breadth and complexity of the products offered in the AWS ecosystem, AWS has created a dozen different certifications that allow developers, data scientists, cybersecurity networking engineers, and machine learning specialists to have a depth of knowledge of their products.

As a first-time user of the AWS platform, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the wide variety of services. The service offering itself is enormous, and there are many different areas of expertise within it. The certifications are designed to test the users understanding of the tools within AWS.

To receive an AWS Certification, you will need to take an exam. The exams are managed by a third-party regulatory body to ensure the results are fair. In order to pass the examination and receive the certifications, testers will need to answer above 70% of the questions correctly, as the exams begin to stack on top of each other and increase in complexity, you will need a higher percentage to pass. 

Why Moonward is AWS Certified

Here at Moonward, we use AWS for the vast majority of our client and internal infrastructure. We have touched almost every corner of the AWS ecosystem and have a growing number of our team who are certified in different areas as a result. At Moonward, we also have solid working experience of converting our clients from their existing cloud systems to AWS. 

And in general, Moonward likes AWS. Although the product itself is complicated, it offers a performant solution for our clients. 

We facilitate and encourage our team to become AWS Certified so we are all singing from the same hymn sheet.

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What Certifications Moonward holds

CCP Certified Cloud Practitioner

The CCP Certification is a good place to start on their AWS journey, it gives an individual a broad-stroke understanding of the scope of the products they are working with. 

The CCP will deep dive into some of the more popular products available on AWS and provide a robust understanding on how they work.

SAA Solutions Architect Associate

The SAA is based on scenarios and how they can work in association with the AWS software architecture. It focuses on problems that you might face and how you would architect a solution using a number of different services in AWS. 

In order to gain this certification, you will need to have a wider pool of knowledge of how AWS products work together to create a tech ecosystem. 

At Moonward, we are pushing for an even greater number of our developers to be AWS certified so we can continue to offer robust and long-term solutions to our clients. If you want to talk about how AWS can benefit your business, book a free 30-minute strategy call here.