
Ask HN: Google Cloud Certification vs. AWS Certification - lsiunsuex
I&#x27;m curious if anyone has taken both the AWS certifications and the Google Cloud certifications.<p>Long story short - 20 years a sys admin &#x2F; developer and I&#x27;ve never pursued a certification in anything. I&#x27;ve done just fine, career wise, but I think it&#x27;s time to get something on paper.<p>I&#x27;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)<p>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&#x27;s wrong) - BUT - systems are systems and a basic knowledge in 1 should be helpful in the other, no?<p>(I&#x27;m a Linux guy - No Azure here...)<p>I don&#x27;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 &quot;I think I&#x27;m gonna do x&quot; right now, then a &quot;I&#x27;m doing it next week&quot; type question.
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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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dkarapetyan
Pretty sure certification is a racket. Why would you play into it?

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fspear
AWS certs seem to be valued by enterprise clients in my experience.

