Amazon announces global certification scheme for AWS

New qualifications designed to widen appeal of public cloud to enterprise customers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a global certification programme to allow developers, operational staff and solutions architects to demonstrate their skills by taking examinations in a range of cloud-related subjects.

This is widely seen as an attempt by Amazon to broaden the appeal of its public cloud service to enterprise customers. Traditional vendors such as IBM, Cisco and Microsoft have long provided such certification schemes to individuals and partner organisations to increase both confidence in their services and the competence of the staff implementing and managing their products.

Amazon's AWS is increasingly attracting larger organisations, one being News International, which recently announced that it is to shift IT 100 per cent to Amazon's cloud. In a further sign of this push to appeal to enterprise customers, who have long been wary of security and compliance guarantees offered by public cloud services, AWS has also launched a security blog that provides a timeline of all recent security and compliance releases.

According to Amazon's certification page, AWS certifications are designed for the following roles:

• Solutions architect - a technical individual who is skilled at designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform;
• SysOps administrator - a technical individual who is responsible for the operational health of an application on the AWS cloud;
• Developer - a technical individual who has designed and built an AWS-based application.

These individuals will be able to gain qualifications at three different levels: Associate, Professional and Master.

Currently only the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Level certification is available. Additional certifications are being developed for the Developer and SysOps administrator roles across the three proficiency levels and these will be introduced on a rolling basis later this year.

Examinations are to be administered through Kryterion, which has testing centres in more than 100 countries, including 13 in the UK. Supporting materials are available from Amazon's web site.

Amazon's competitors are also making moves to attract enterprise customers, with both Microsoft and Google recently announcing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings in Azure and Compute Engine.