Today (Monday 27th of November) is the first day of a new AWS Certification: The AWS Certified Data Engineer —Associate. This is in a beta period now, and as such, any candidates who sit this certification won’t get a result until up to 13 weeks after the end of the beta period.
That beta period is November 27, 2023 – January 12, 2024; so in some time in February or March candidates will find out how they went. During that period, AWS will be assessing where the pass mark should be.
I’ve been pretty forthright in attempting most AWS certifications; I’ve always like to lead from the front to help demonstrate even an aging open source tech geek sys admin like myself can do this. And to that end, I reserved a quiet meeting room at 0200 UTC today (10am AWST) to do the online-proctored exam for this certification.
As always there are terms & conditions on disclosure, so I can only speak at high level. It was 85 questions, the vast majority where to select one correct answer (key) from four possibilities; only a handful had the “select any TWO” option.
The questions I received focuses on Glue, Redshift, Athena, Kinesis, and in passing, S3 and IAM. I say “I received“, as there is a pool of questions, and I would have only had 85 from a larger pool; your assessment would likely be different questions.
It took me around ne hour fifteen minutes, and I went back to review just 2 questrions.
Overall I found this was perhaps a little more detailed and domain based than the existing Associate level certifications. There were use cases for Redshift that I’ve not used that stumped me. There were Glue and Databrew use cases I haven’t used in production.
All in all I think its well placed to ensure that candidates have a solid understanding of data engineering, fault tolerance, cost, and durability of data. For those that are doing cloud native data analytics pipelines, then I would say this should be on your list of certs to get.
We’ll find out in Q1 if I am up to speed on this. 😉