I recently heard my manager (Ariel Kelman, VP of Marketing for AWS) talk about the important role that education plays in our work. In fact, he assigned it a significantly higher priority than traditional marketing activities that focus on leads or conversions. I’ve also heard our other leaders talk about their work to create highly scalable education programs that will allow developers, architects, and other IT professionals to improve their skills and to earn AWS Certifications.

AWS Developer Professional Series

Today I would like to tell you about the new AWS Developer Professional Series. The AWS Training and Certification team has teamed up with edX to create this new three-part series. Founded by MIT and Harvard, edX is the leading non-profit online learning destination, with a global community of over 14 million learners, backed up by 130 global partners including universities, non-profits, and institutions. This collaboration expands our offerings, and gives you another training option!

The new series is designed to help you and your colleagues to build development and DevOps skills on AWS. The courses are self-paced and build on each other in order to help you to create Python applications that run on AWS by way of the AWS SDK for Python (also known as Boto). Here are the courses:

AWS Developer: Building on AWS – This course will give you an introduction to AWS services and to the AWS SDKs. You’ll create and manage an AWS account, learn about Regions, AZs, and VPCs, and install SDKs. Then you will learn how to launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, set up AWS Lambda functions, and use managed services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). You’ll also learn how to use our AI services for image analysis and text-to-speech, and wrap up by focusing on availability and durability.

AWS Developer: Deploying on AWS – This course will teach you about the concepts and practices that allow you practice DevOps on AWS. You will learn how to use developer tools like AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeDeploy, while monitoring your development and production environments using Amazon CloudWatch.

AWS Developer: Optimizing on AWS – This course focuses on performance optimization and tuning of the application that you built in the predecessor courses. You will learn how to use caching and content distribution to increase performance and to improve the end-user experience for your app. You’ll also learn how to use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to encrypt data at rest and in transit.

The courses are built with the expectation that you already have one to three years of software development experience, including some Python skills. Each course runs for six weeks and requires three to four hours of work per week on your part. Courses start in February (Building), April (Deploying), and May (Optimizing), and you can enroll now at no charge. You can also pursue a Verified Certificate for a fee of $149 per course.

— Jeff;