Cloud skills are absolutely essential for anyone working in IT, from developers to operations engineers you need to rapidly skill up in order to handle the changes in the industry. Most on premises workloads are currently being migrated or plans are being made to migrate shortly.
Where Cloud Certification itself fits in is being able to provide the necessary training and exams to validate these Cloud skills. By getting cloud certified this can assist you with gaining professional credibility as well as improve your hiring and promotion chances.
In my opinion the best Cloud certification paths are with the two biggest currently growing cloud providers in the market. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. These providers are in the process of quick growth and constantly growing their product portfolios.
Lets discuss the certification options provided by both Microsoft and Google. Both vary slightly in exams and certification paths. Microsoft's are more complicated requiring a series of exams to achieve various certifications... MCSA Cloud Platform as well as the MCSE Cloud platform and Infrastructure. I will be focusing on these certifications as coming from an infrastructure background in an operations team or technical architect experience. There are other cloud certifications related to data science, machine learning and big data.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft's Cloud certification for Azure starts with the 70-533 exam. This is related to implementing Azure Infrastructure Solutions. Once this is achieved you will require one more exam from the 70-532, 70-535, 70-473, 70-475 in order to achieve the MCSA Cloud Platform. However this is the path that I took but any two of these exams will count towards the MCSA Cloud Platform certification. If you would like to go further to achieve the MCSE Cloud Platform and Infrastructure you will need to achieve an additional elective exam also from this list. So to achieve the MSCE in Cloud Platform you will need to pass 3 exams.
Microsoft has partnered with Acclaim which provides badges for your passed exams as well as certifications. Microsoft also provides downloadable certificates from your MCP profile.
The Acclaim badges can be used to verify your certifications:
Google Cloud Platform
Google makes certification a lot more simple and only one exam is required in order to become Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect. However this exam is high level and contains a very large course content. Once passed you will become certified. This is not an easy exam and is comparable to Microsoft's 70-535 Architecting Azure Solutions. These are both architect level exams that require strong cloud architect knowledge.
Google provides certificates for your achievement that are verified by credential.net
I strongly recommend certifying across different cloud providers. The reason for this is that a lot of businesses these days are adopting multi-cloud deployment strategies which means you are quite likely to find multiple cloud providers in production or even cross platform migrations. Being able to work across the various cloud providers is becoming essential.
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