Build your serverless knowledge and earn digital badges

Editor’s note: The guidance in this blog is aimed at those who have a fundamental understanding of the cloud. If you’re just starting out, start with the AWS Cloud Essentials Learning Path, which also provides a digital badge. Then come back to the courses listed in this blog to continue your learning.

The last decade has seen a massive evolution in how businesses operate their IT centers. Traditionally, compute and data centers would be on premises where organizations would manage these physical machines themselves. From there we saw the shift to virtual machines, allowing for hardware independence, the ability to speed up provisioning, while also reducing maintenance work. This shift continued onward to containers allowing for applications to be platform independent, and quickly deploying them to any server while also allowing infrastructure utilization rates to be optimized.

So, with each evolutionary step, we see another layer between the application and the hardware on which it sits being abstracted, which brings us to serverless today.

Demand for individuals with serverless skills is growing

As businesses continue to build new applications using serverless, event-driven architectures, the need for individuals with serverless expertise also continues to grow. For those interested in developing their serverless skills, this blog outlines a learning path that individuals can follow to not only build their skill set, but also earn badges and certifications that can be shared with professional networks. After completing these courses, you will have a deep understanding of serverless services, constructing architectures following best practices, and AWS digital badges and certifications to showcase your achievements!

AWS serverless managed services

AWS offers serverless managed services, which are technologies used for running code, integrating applications and managing data without the need to run any servers. Instead, AWS manages this for you, so that organizations can reduce the time they spend on infrastructure management tasks.

Businesses continue to see massive growth with serverless adoption because of four key advantages:

• No infrastructure provisioning or management. There is no longer a need to manage physical or virtual machines, which allows more time to work on business applications.
• Automatic scaling. As requests or data comes in, serverless platforms can automatically scale to handle any volume size.
• Pay per use. Serverless platforms offer a pay-for-value consumption model. Business no longer pay for resources that are sitting idle.
• High availability and security. Serverless platforms have built in fault tolerance and availability so your business applications are highly available from day one.

Building your skills and confidence in serverless services

AWS Training and Certification provides more than 600 on-demand cloud skills training across 30+ AWS service areas, including serverless via AWS Skill Builder. The Serverless learning plan helps you build in-demand cloud serverless skills.

The Serverless Learning Plan is made up of eight digital courses that help you build your knowledge about AWS Lambda, designing event driven architectures with services like Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS and Amazon EventBridge, using Amazon API Gateway, microservices and designing scalable serverless solutions. You will then learn about observability with AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, and AWS X-Ray. Finally, you will learn about AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) and deployment of serverless solutions.

Once you complete the course and score 80% or higher on the online assessment, you will earn your free AWS Digital Badge through Credly. AWS Digital Badges provide a verifiable way for individuals to showcase their AWS knowledge, skills, or accomplishments on various platforms, including resumes, social networks, or email signatures, and come with a unique link to verify the badge earner’s specific achievement.

You can then go on and earn another digital badges for AWS Cloud Quest Serverless Developer. AWS Cloud Quest is the only role-based game that helps you build practical AWS Cloud skills. As you play, you’ll learn and apply cloud skills to help the citizens of your virtual city. Once you finish all the assignments in your role, you’ll be awarded a digital badge to showcase your achievement.

Once you have some experience with foundational serverless services, there are learning plans with associated digital badges focused on serverless storage services.

• Storage Learning Plan: File helps you build knowledge about Amazon EFS, a simple, serverless, set-and-forget, elastic file system and the Amazon FSx family of fully managed storage service solutions.
• To go deeper on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, check out Storage Learning Plan: Object. For more storage related badges, check out the following blog.

Additional Skill Builder courses and Serverless Land

After completing the digital badges, there is always more to learn! You now have a great foundation on serverless concepts and services. However, there’s more depth to explore, such as learning how to develop and deploy serverless applications, understanding event-driven architecture patterns, and exploring advanced serverless service features. AWS Skill Builder offers a number of courses that help you elevate your skills in serverless. Please note: while the following courses don’t offer digital badges, you’ll receive a certification of completion

• Build and Deploy APIs with a Serverless CI/CD. Building an API engine or managing a CI/CD pipeline historically took managing a number of instances with all the associated operational overhead. In this course, you’ll learn how serverless application methods (SAM) can streamline your operations.
• Introduction to Serverless Development. This course will orient you to key serverless concepts to help you start developing serverless applications. You will learn how development best practices you already use in server-based development apply to serverless development, and how to adjust your development processes for serverless application development.
• How AWS Step Functions Work. You’ll learn how to build AWS Step Functions using Standard and Express Workflows and implement three service integration patterns. You will also learn how to handle errors and retries, how to select the information to pass to the next task, and how to integrate Step Functions with other AWS services.
• Amazon DynamoDB for Serverless Architectures. This digital course provides an in-depth and hands-on introduction to Amazon DynamoDB and how it is leveraged in building a serverless architecture.

Another great resource to look into extending your learning is Serverless Land. This AWS website contains a collection of workshops, architecture patterns, blogs, and code snippets all centred around real-life use cases. It’s a great way to apply the knowledge you have learned in a practical way, and try building out best practice event-driven architectures using the serverless services.

Test your knowledge: AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification

Your learning doesn’t have to end with the above digital trainings and badges. AWS Certification is an industry-recognized credential that validates your cloud skills and expertise in specific roles or domains to future employers and colleagues. After completing the above training, you’ll be well on your way to sitting for the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam. Your newly acquired serverless on AWS knowledge aligns well with the skills needed to excel in the exam, providing a solid foundation for aspiring developers. Be sure to read the exam guide to fully understand the knowledge needed to succeed in earning this certification.

We hope the above resources will help you on your way to growing your skills in serverless. Be sure to check out the Serverless learning plan and share your digital badge(s) and/or AWS Certified Developer – Associate credentials when you earn them. We can’t wait to cheer you on. Don’t forget to tag #AWSTraining on social media!