About

This learning path is designed for individuals who design and implement AWS services to derive value from data. Learn about collection, ingestion, storage, processing, and visualization. Then get AWS Certified to validate the skills you’ve learne

For best results, we recommend, but do not require, that individuals have technical AWS Cloud experience related to big data before beginning this learning path.

Learning Path

The AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty certification is intended for individuals who perform complex Big Data analyses with at least two years of experience using AWS technology.

A new version of the AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty exam will be available in April 2020 with a new name, AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty.

My Path to AWS Big Data Specialty Certification

I recently sat for the Amazon AWS Certified Big Data Specialty exam and passed it! In this article I would like to provide an outline of the topics covered and my learning path towards certification. The exam is for anyone who wishes to validate their technical skills and experience in designing and implementing big data solutions using AWS cloud services.

For anyone interested in gaining this certification, having an existing AWS Associate level certification is required, and some experience with data analysis is recommended. For myself, I have recently obtained the Certified Solutions Architect Associate and Certified Developer Associate along with at least 5 years experience in the business intelligence & data analytics field.

A Cloud Guru’s AWS Big Date Certification Course was my main source for training. The course is regularly updated to the fast changing pace of AWS and topics cover over a range of AWS services that will be examinable. Once you have an idea of which AWS services make up the big data ecosystem, proceed with deep diving into each AWS service via documentations and whitepapers, and further study via YouTube videos. Note that this course alone won’t get you through the exam; though it helps a lot.

Read the Documentations

There is a plethora amount of online documentation and resources on the AWS website alone. I looked at the Developer Guides for each AWS service covered for the exam. The Big Data Blog was also another source of learning material, however I only paid attention to the blog posts as mentioned in the A Cloud Guru course. I felt it would have been beneficial to read up more articles there.

Big Data Analytics Options on AWS
Streaming Data Solutions on AWS with Amazon Kinesis
Data Warehousing on AWS
Best Practices for Amazon EMR

How did I get certified with AWS Big Data Specialty

There are no straight forward rules to achieve any certification in general. It all depends on how much you explored during your homework before you appear for the exam. I had to complete multiple courses on AWS cloud created in learning services sites like A Cloud Guru, Linux Academy and Udemy and also had to read various AWS white papers to build my confidence for appearing in this exam.

Exam Tries To Test You On Below Topics

AWS S3 is almost on every question for storage.
Redshift is the second highest time you will see in the exam. Questions like copy snapshot or regenerate only one table from the snapshot etc.,
Kinesis Streams & firehose also appear very frequently.
Security services like VPC , Security token service, etc.,
how does encryption happens for objects in AWS S3, at-rest/in-transit, client-side/server-side, HSM.
Dynamo DB and accelerator
Machine Learning & Sage Maker, GPU units
EMR concepts and the techs like HIVE , HBASE , spark , spark streaming
Lambdas
Few questions on data pipeline, data migration services from on-premise, DirectConnect.
Few more on QuickSight and Chart types like Bubble chart, Heat map, etc.,
Athena, Pipeline, Glue (Catalog/Crawler)