AWS Certification - Knowledge levels and study recommendations required to pass

As I've recently taken a couple of AWS certification exams I thought it might be useful to share my experiences.

I've been working with AWS in production for 4+ years so decided it was time to firm things up and took the ACSA back in August. I did about a months worth of supplemental prep for it, 2-3 hours a day, predominantly using the Linux Academy online syllabus.

Configure, Deploy and Manage with AWS OpsWorks

Nurturing ‘master’ images of static server instances is time consuming and admin-heavy, requiring full instance re-creation when changes are made with dedicated snapshot regimes for archiving and disaster recovery.
Such legacy methods of infrastructure and application management are inefficient and out of date. A version controlled configuration management environment is substantially more effective.

Flat and Responsive - The all new cirroNIX

It seems like ages since I blogged and looking at the last post date it would seem it is, four months in fact, shameful. In my defence it's been a busy time with plenty going on and a steady stream of project development, the latest of which has been a push into AWS OpsWorks (with superb results) however more on that later. To get the ball rolling again I thought I'd kick off 2014 by steering you toward the newly remodelled cirroNIX website and branding (the more alert of you may have noticed the new blog header design). So, here we go......