Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️)Are you just starting out learning AWS? AWS has lots of services and it can be daunting when you’re just starting out. Staring at all those online resources, articles and courses gets you wondering: How easy will it be to learn all AWS?
Learning AWS can be quick an easy — the exact time it’ll take you to learn AWS depends on your past experience. Learning AWS can take as little as a few days up to a few months to become relatively proficient.
Okay, so that gives you a rough idea of how long you can expect to learn AWS. But exactly how easy AWS is to learn depends on your past experience. So let’s dig a little deeper into factors which affect how easy learning AWS will be.
How Long To Learn AWS?
We briefly mentioned the rough timeframes to learn AWS. Let’s take a closer look at (roughly) how long it will take you to learn AWS, dependent on your desired level of proficiency. Remember: these are only rough estimates, your mileage may vary.
Entry Level — Has an understanding of the basics, is competent with some supervision. Roles: Junior Software Engineer, Graduate, Administration Type Role. (1-6 Months)
Mid Level — Has a good understanding of services for their role, mostly independent. Roles: Software Engineer, Data Scientist. (6-12 Months)
Senior Level — Has an in-depth understanding of many services, and can lead and guide others. Role: Architect, or Senior Software / Cloud Engineer. (1-3 years)
So you may look at the above and notice that each timeframe is quite wide, right? For instance, becoming entry level can take between 1 to 6 months.
Which might have you wondering: “What causes some people to learn AWS faster and easier than others?”. Let’s take at what those factors are which affect how easy it it will be for you to learn AWS…
4 Factors Affecting Time To Learn AWS
The factors affecting how long it takes to learn AWS are: your past experience, how you structure your learning, how much you need to know and your support network. But how much do these factors affect how easy it is to learn AWS?
1. Your Past Experience
One (possibly obvious) factor which affects how long it takes to learn AWS is your experience. If you’ve already worked with similar technologies, such as in systems administration or with other hosting and cloud services, AWS may be slightly easier for you to learn. However, no past experience, specialist knowledge, or programming experience is required to learn AWS.
2. How You Structure Your AWS Learning 
The second big factor that’s going to affect how long it takes you to learn AWS is how you structure your learning. Many newcomers to AWS choose to use the AWS certification programs as a way to structure their learning.
AWS have published a series of different certifications, each targeting different career paths. Whilst you may not be interested in taking or paying for a certification, you can definitely leverage the structure of these courses to help make AWS easier to learn.
The courses follow a tiered structure. Starting at the most basic level: “Cloud Practitioner”, and working their way up through the “associate” level certifications, and ended with “professional” certifications. You can go take a look at the different courses and see which learning path suit you.
3. How Much You Need To Know About AWS
AWS Services
Another factor affecting how long it takes to learn AWS is how much you need to know. Some roles, such as cloud engineers, will be required to know more than others how are using it in a less complicated manner, such as an admin uploading resources and reports into S3.
Regardless of how much you need to know, what affects how long you take to learn AWS is how disciplined you are to focus only on the services that you need to know for your role and don’t get distracted or confused with other services.
4. Your Support Network
There’s no denying it: learning with others makes life easier. When it comes to learning AWS, if you can join a group of people, find some friends, or take part in a community, that’s going to help both your motivation and your success.
If you choose to learn with a platform such as ACloudGuru, there are different forums you can join to ask questions and learn more about AWS.
Ready to Learn AWS?
I don’t mean to downplay the time required to learn AWS. AWS is a big topic which some have built an entire career out of. But, the important thing to remember is…
If you stick to the AWS services specific to the job or role you want (or have), build a good support network of peers and friends, and structure your learning in a logical fashion, then learning AWS will be much easier.
Still thinking of learning AWS? I highly recommend this article: Where (And How) to Start Learning AWS as a Beginner. Which breaks down what you need to know about AWS, and give you an approach for learning it.
The post Is AWS Easy To Learn? (And How You Can Make It Easier) appeared first on The Dev Coach.
Lou is the editor of The Cloud Native Software Engineering Newsletter a Newsletter dedicated to making Cloud Software Engineering more accessible and easy to understand. Every month you’ll get a digest of the best content for Cloud Native Software Engineers right in your inbox.
