That’s added another badge, albeit the primary reason was to understand AWS’s products and services in order to suss how to build volumes via resellers for them – just in case I can get the opportunity to be asked how i’d do it. However, looking over the fence at some of the technical accreditation exams, I appear to know around half of the answers there already – but need to do those properly and take notes before attempting those.

(One of my old party tricks used to be that I could make it past the entrance exam required for entry into technical streams at Linux related conferences – a rare thing for a senior manager running large Software Business Operations or Product Marketing teams. Being an ex programmer who occasionally fiddles under the bonnet on modern development tools is a useful thing – not least to feed an ability to be able to spot bullshit from quite a distance).

The only AWS module I had any difficulty with was the pricing. One of the things most managers value is simplicity and predictability, but a lot of the pricing of core services have pricing dependencies where you need to know data sizes, I/O rates or the way your demand goes through peaks and troughs in order to arrive at an approximate monthly price. While most of the case studies amply demonstrate that you do make significant savings compared to running workloads on your own in-house infrastructure, I guess typical values for common use cases may be useful. For example, if i’m running a SAP installation of specific data and access dimensions, what operationally are typically running costs – without needing to insert probes all over a running example to estimate it using the provided calculator?

I’d come back from a 7am gym session fairly tired and made the mistake of stepping through the pricing slides without making copious notes. I duly did all that module again and did things properly the next time around – and passed it to complete my certification.

The lego bricks you snap together to design an application infrastructure are simple in principle, loosely connected and what Amazon have built is very impressive. The only thing not provided out of the box is the sort of simple developer bundle of an EC2 instance, some S3 and MySQL based EBD, plus some open source AMIs preconfigured to run WordPress, Joomla, Node.js, LAMP or similar – with a simple weekly automatic backup. That’s what Digital Ocean provide for a virtual machine instance, with specific storage and high Internet Transfer Out limits for a fixed price/month. In the case of the WordPress network on which my customers and this blog runs, that’s a 2-CPU server instance, 40GB of disk space and 4TB/month data traffic for $20/month all in. That sort of simplicity is why many startup developers have done an exit stage left from Rackspace and their ilk, and moved to Digital Ocean in their thousands; it’s predictable and good enough as an experimental sandpit.

The ceiling at AWS is much higher when the application slips into production – which is probably reason enough to put the development work there in the first place.

I have deployed an Amazon Workspace to complete my 12 years of Nutrition Data Analytics work using the Windows-only Tableau Desktop Professional – in an environment where I have no Windows PCs available to me. Just used it on my MacBook Air and on my iPad Mini to good effect. That will cost be just north of £21 ($35) for the month.

I think there’s a lot that can be done to accelerate adoption rates of AWS services in Enterprise IT shops, both in terms of direct engagement and with channels to market properly engaged. My real challenge is getting air time with anyone to show them how – and in the interim, getting some examples ready in case I can make it in to do so.

That said, I recommend the AWS training to anyone. There is some training made available the other side of applying to be a member of the Amazon Partner Network, but there are equally some great technical courses that anyone can take online. See http://aws.amazon.com/training/ for further details.