Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) exists in a marketplace filled with competitors such as Google, Microsoft, IBM and many others. AWS was also cited by the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for 2015 as being much larger than its 14 leading competitors combined—about 10 times bigger. This means that AWS has a gigantic reach and popularity and with that developers from across the world want to know how to use AWS.

To maintain this lead, AWS needs to on board startups as well as the enterprise—segments of which still run in legacy software and paradigms. Startups to an extent are easy because they tend to employ fresh and new developers, but enterprise can be a slow moving beast that sticks with what works.

Amazon’s strategy for training the next crop of cloud developers

About Amazon’s approach to training, Lynn Langit, Big Data and Cloud architect at Lynn Langit Consulting, says: “When enterprise is moving to the cloud they like familiarity,” for example everyone is talking relational in data because, Langit adds, it’s easier to go big relational with something like NoSQL.

Lynn Langit, Big Data and Cloud architect at Lynn Langit Consulting, is an AWS Community Hero.

By distinguishing Community Heroes, Amazon, Inc. has been working to bring in educators as big data and cloud advocates and diplomats. Langit also holds the distinction of one of the only people to also be a Microsoft MVP and Google Developer Expert—meaning she’s on the frontier of training and education when it comes to multiple big cloud platforms.

Langit feels that Amazon is winning the day by providing big relational and training for its cloud that bridges the gap between familiar relational databases and cloud databases.

Where to get AWS cloud training for Business, IT, Dev, DevOps

For prospective developers and administrators, Amazon provides a great deal of training and classes to bring anyone up to speed on AWS. These classes, training sessions, and workshops are available at the AWS Training & Certification website.

For people who just want to get their bearings, AWS Training provides a number of videos that outline platform features such as Compute (EC2) and Storage (S3) Source: Amazon website screenshot

Free videos for learning AWS basics

For beginners, AWS Training offers a broad variety of free videos on every aspect of the service. Amid these are training videos on compute, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) where cloud-based instances can be spun up to run data analysis or other applications; storage and content delivery, via introduction to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) where blocks of data can be read and written to cloud instances and other hybrid-uses including databases, enterprise application building and so on. There are also videos covering basic security and networking with different AWS platform services.

Learning in a virtual laboratory environment

For intermediate users, Amazon offers self-paced labs that allow journeymen programmers, sysadmins and others to hone their skills in a virtual environment similar to an actual AWS instance.

This gives developers a chance at hands-on experience in a practical environment that allows the developer to experiment and practice with the product as it would work in the field.

Virtual labs are not just useful for training purposes, but are often also used by already skilled developers and administrators who want to see how a particular system operates without needing to set it up. While most developers have test environments inside their own company infrastructure, sometimes it takes a while to get assets in place on test just to experiment–having a hands-on lab available on AWS with all the toys already present can save time and energy.

Taking training to the (virtual) classroom

As for advanced and enterprise users, Amazon offers an academic experience with actual classes held in virtual classrooms or actual classrooms via AWS Training.

New classes appear daily and while many take place in virtual classrooms (meaning that students can reach them anywhere in the world) some of them take place in real world environments. The classes also come in a number of different languages, of course English, but also German, Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish and Finnish (to name a few.)

One example of a class provided for by one of Amazon’s partners is AWS Business Essentials, delivered by Global Knowledge Training LLC. For a cost of $695 students receive a six hour course in the values and benefits of the AWS cloud, ways to use AWS for business, robust security understanding of the AWS platform and how “articulate the financial impact the AWS cloud can have on an organization’s procurement cycle…”

DevOps engineering classes are only one of many education topics provided by AWS Training. Source: Amazon website screenshot

For the DevOps crowd Amazon has also set aside courses to better train developers and system administrators in DevOps engineering. “The course covers the core principles of the DevOps methodology and examines a number of use cases applicable to startup, small-medium business, and enterprise development scenarios.”

A typical DevOps engineering online course, such as this one provided online by Global Knowledge, can cost around $2,905—or this one from ExitCertified taught at a classroom in Dallas, TX, costs $1,950.

AWS developer training quick links

The easiest way to find the appropriate resources to train yourself or your team is through the AWS Training & Certification webpage. For those new to AWS looking to get a baseline of knowledge and grasp how the platform works there are free introductory labs and videos. For those seeking fundamental training on specific concepts or parts of the platform, classes and workshops are available.

Hands on experience can be gained via the AWS Self-Paced Labs provided by Amazon, by services area, use case or AWS for Windows.

Finally, for those IT professionals ready to display their colors and get a certificate, Amazon has AWS Certification. There are also training courses and labs (linked above) to help prepare certificate seekers for this process.

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