AWS Certified Big Data - Specialty

Hello, and thank you for watching IT.Pro.TV. We're gonna be talking with Justin Denison about AWS Certified Big Data Specialty. Justin, hi, how are you? Can you tell us about what is AWS Certified Big Data Specialty, what is that? This is a series of the specialty exams that are provided by AWS, more specifically about how to use the AWS platform, okay. Now use the AWS platform for what? Well your data, there's certifications, though long named are usually self-explanatory, especially the specialty ones okay. And so the main goal is to provide you with information on how to do big data type work inside of the AWS ecosystem. So, Justin, who is this show targeted towards? Now, this is a tricky question to answer, because as of recently, as of this recording, AWS removed the prerequisites for the specialty exams. It used to be, the specialty exams, you had to have associate-level certification. Either the developer one, the solutions architect one, or the sysops admin. That was also true of the professional exams. They removed that requirement and in doing so like Zach wanted to, he could go down to the testing center. Actually, our testing center is decently far away, he could sit for it. He could go, I want to sit for the big data specialty exam. I have no other experience inside of AWS. Part of the reason for that is if you've been doing that kind of work inside of AWS. This is a good way to validate that your understanding. Even if you don't have an associate level certification. However, if you got a little bit of experience. You know a little bit about AWS. And you're I wanna make sure I know what I'm talking about before I start this new job role. Or maybe there's an advancement opportunity, I actually recommend having one of the associate level certifications. Personally if it was more even given my background, I would probably get with the solutions architect, and then take this one. But do keep in mind, if you've used IWS a little bit you kind of know a little bit about big data you could sit for this exam and be good to go. Well is there a certification available for the course? There is a certification actually if we take a look at my screen here we'll talk a little bit about the certification and I think it's funny this. It used to be a requirement. Now it's a recommendation, just like you said. It does say 5 years’ hands on experience in data analytics. That is fairly subjective about what is data analytics. The certification is called a certified big data specialty certification. It lies between the associate level and the professional level AWS, again, it's very focused. Especially certifications are very focused. The main goal of this certification is to verify that you can design a scalable and cost effective data processing architecture. Storage, processing, analysis, visualization and also do that secure. Do I secure it at rest? Do I secure it in transit? How do I manage those things? That's where having the solutions architect or even the Sysops admin associate level cert would be helpful as you focus a great deal on security basics using some of the more the other services that aren't necessarily big data specific that manage access to your infrastructure. Now this certification is multiple choice, multiple answer, right? Select all that apply or select all that are false, or select A, B, C, or D. Luckily, on these certification exams you typically- I really hate the ones that just say select all that apply, and there's like 17 answers. Yeah, you gotta select there's your 16 out of 17. These are actually fairly high-level questions. The ones I've seen, heard about, you're gonna be told to select 3, right? Even if there are 17 possible answers. So that is helpful, that does reduce the bearing, but you should be comfortable I'm doing this. It is offered in English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. So 170 minutes, right, 3 hours. And gotta pay $300 for it, that's [INAUDIBLE] could be a [INAUDIBLE] change for it. But if it's an advancement opportunity, you wanna validate your learning, you will, right, you're gonna have to pay the $300. Now this is administered through PSI exams as they used to use Web Assessor. Now you have to go to a physical testing location. Ours used to be at our airport. That has recently moved so other possible airports or training facilities will have PSI. Click on this little button, it'll take you, you sign up for an AWS certification account, you log in, and you say schedule an exam. And then it just, it asks you the serious questions, it tells you where the closest place is and available time slots. Very similar to other certifications that you may have encountered, okay? Now this is one of those things where, what's on it right? What's on this exam right? Well let's see here. I know it's multiple choice, what do I need to know about it? I need to know about collection, storage, processing, analysis, visualization, and data security. Those are the 6 domains, they're roughly equally distributed. Except for Visualization is 12% and Data Security is a little higher. Data Security plays into those other top 4 domains. Collection, how do I securely collect? Storage, how do I securely store? Processing, how do I securely process? Part of that is, do I encrypt it in transit? Do I encrypt it at rest? How do I manage it, how do I manage access, those type of things? And within those it says, we get these little mini blurbs. I'm not gonna go through all of these for you. I definitely recommend you reading this. Identify the appropriate data processing technology for a given scenario. Do I pick IT or do I pick Kinesis? Or is it okay just to build like a web service, that uses http? So making those decisions, for a given customer requirement, is part of this exam. And in preparing for this exam, you're like the questions scare me, I don't really know how they're gonna ask it. There is an associated exam guide that you can take, and it has answers at the bottom. It is not comprehensive, but it does give you an idea of the difficulty level of the question, and you can check yourself. And I would recommend, if you're like, I feel really uncomfortable with I think there's 15 questions, let's go down here and see. Oops, too far, there's 10 questions. If you're like, I don't know, then yeah, you should probably dig in a little deeper. [LAUGH] So, running up at the certified big data specialty certification. That is, certified big data specialty, there's some redundancy in there. And that exam covers these topics. So aside from what we've just been talking about with domains and so forth. What other topics might be covered inside of AWS? All right so within the AWS ecosystem these domains, right, are fairly high level. But more specifically what are we going to be talking about? We're going to be talking about IoT collection, and that's fairly superficial. We're not going to get crazy about like deployment models and management models. How do I collect IoT data? Internet of Things. How do I process IoT data, how do I store IoT data? We're gonna be talking about the Kinesis service, which could be part of that collection process. Comes into the IoT hub, it goes into Kinesis, and then I do some streaming type analytics on it. Or pre-processed, post-processing and the sort. Well, okay, IoT data, that works. But I have a lot of data, it's all in CSV files. All right, guys, it's in JSON files or it's in Parquet files. I really need to be able to use my traditional Hadoop set up with the associated tools. We'll talk about elastic map reduce and the associated technologies with that, including using S3 for it. And if you get really big scale and you're like, I don't know how it's organized. I need to be able to query it very easily. We'll be talking about services like Athena or Redshift that provide us an easier interface to these large pools of data. So those are some of the services. Now behind the scenes, there are some more basic services that AWS like Lambda, right, maybe even SNS, SQS. They're behind there, you may not necessarily always see them. But they're there so it's good to know a little bit. We will talk about SQS, Lambda using those 2 services at a fairly high level. Thanks, Justin, good stuff. And if AWS Certified Big Data Specialty sounds like a course you might be interested in. And you should be, make sure you watch every single episode in our course library. Thanks, for watching ITProTV, ITProTV is binge worthy. [MUSIC]