As a recent grad in Computer Science I recently ggot a job as a Deployment Enginneer.
My end game is to be a DevOps engineer. I am interested in cloud computing and would like to learn more with AWS.
That being said would getting an AWS certificate be worth it? If so which Associate ones would align with my goals. If not is there any other certificates (non AWS) but DevOps or cloud related that would be recommended?
It's worth doing it. There's a LOT of ground to cover beyond lambda, ec2 and s3 and they pretty much hand you a bunch of best-fit cookie cutter solutions as part of the training. There's a number of recommended paid training courses but the official courses are free and can at least lay foundational knowledge.
Definitely worth it to have AWS certs! You should ask your job if they'd cover the costs, most places worth staying at will happily pay for extended learning. I just picked up this humble bundle of DevOps books because it's a wide range of topics for really cheap - https://www.humblebundle.com/books/devops-2023-oreilly-books?hmb_source=humble_home&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_3_layout_index_2_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_devops2023oreilly_bookbundle
I have an AWS DevOps Pro cert. The test very much focuses on DevOps using AWS services. If you plan on going DevOps in AWS it is certainly worthwhile in lieu of experience.
However, they are not easy certs and you have to renew every 3 years. Dip your toes in the practitioner cert for a basic understanding of AWS services, the Developer cert to have an idea of how AWS connects services together for development purposes, and the DevOps pro for solutions architecting for DevOps in AWS.
For something less AWS-centric, look into getting Hashicorp Terraform certifications. Lots of IaC uses Terraform and that's a cloud-agnostic tool you should definitely highlight as a skill set if you plan on doing DevOps.
I've got the devops associate and I would probably pass and instead just deploy a couple apps using terraform or cloudformation with some boto3 and put it in github. It could help land your first job in the devops space though if that's a concern. In practice I find the certification path to be very AWS specific things and many companies will be avoiding the ultra managed services services for core apps as the lock in is quite high and there's nearly-as-managed services which keep your app more portable.
