by Justin Cook
Hi All,
As we know, the new certification came out this month for the AWS Data Engineer. This associate-level certification didn’t have a lot of documentation out there since it was new but here is what breakdown before and after.
Before I took it I focused on this:
• Developing data ingestion and transformation techniques and coordinating data pipelines with programming concepts.
• Identifying the most effective data store, creating models, organizing schemas, and managing lifecycles.
• Maintaining, operating, and monitoring data pipelines. Evaluating data quality and analyzing data.
• Implementing proper authentication, authorization, data encryption, and governance. Enabling logging for security purposes.
• Competence in configuring and maintaining extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines, covering the entire data journey from ingestion to the destination.
• Application of high-level, language-agnostic programming concepts tailored to the requirements of the data pipeline.
• Proficiency in utilizing Git commands for effective source code control, ensuring versioning and collaboration within the development process.
• Utilizing data lakes to store data.
• Having general concepts related to networking, storage, and computing, providing a foundation for designing and implementing robust data engineering solutions.
But after taking the exam, I have to say these are the topics that I would focus on instead:
Start with Analytics:
• Amazon Athena
• Amazon EMR
• AWS Glue
• AWS Glue DataBrew
• AWS Lake Formation
• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
• Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
• Amazon OpenSearch Service
• Amazon QuickSight
Then look into databases:
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
• Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
• Amazon Neptune
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon Redshift
You have to have a rough understanding of Developer Tools:
• AWS CLI
• AWS Cloud9
• AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)
• AWS CodeBuild
• AWS CodeCommit
• AWS CodeDeploy
• AWS CodePipeline
A fundamental understanding of monitoring and governance tools is good as well:
• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs
• AWS Config
• Amazon Managed Grafana
• AWS Systems Manager
• AWS Well-Architected Tool
There were quite a few questions about migration services so get to know those:
• AWS Application Discovery Service
• AWS Application Migration Service
• AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
• AWS DataSync
• AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT)
• AWS Snow Family
• AWS Transfer Family
Odd I have a few questions of backup solutions as well, so get to know these:
• AWS Backup
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• Amazon S3
• Amazon S3 Glacier
Here is the outline: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-data-engineer-associate/
Overall, the exam went fast, and if you know Glue, Data Pipelines, you will need much less than 130 minutes for the 65 questions.
Thanks & Contact Us with any questions!
