Summer of Certs - AWS Advanced Networking Specialty and MegaCertapalooza

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I thought it would be a good time to do a brain dump of my notes for the certifications in the last 6 months so this article has two parts: my detailed notes on the Advanced Networking Specialty Certification provided by AWS and a quick rundown of the micro certs I completed as part of Versent MegaCertapalooza.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty

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Back in October 2025 I sat and passed the AWS Advanced Networking Specialty Certification. Between this and the Solutions Architect Professional I found these the most useful certifications to pursue as a Cloud Architect. Networking comes up a lot in Cloud Migrations and greenfields builds and knowing what is and isn’t possible can unlock possibilities, opportunities and accelerate projects.

Details

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Notes

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• It holds up to its reputation for a tough exam, if you do this from home make sure to eliminate distractions. It is really worth going to the exam centre rather than Pearson Vue Online for this one if you can’t guarantee quiet. 170 minutes allows ample time to get distracted. I had a neighbours car alarm go off for a while. In the end, I finished with 20 mins and a lot of flags to re-review.

• I used both the Stephane Maarek Udemy and Adrian Cantrill courses, both were great resources but some newer AWS features were not mentioned so it is worth seeing what’s new and reviewing the in-scope services.

• Transit gateway featured a lot, know how to configure it with a Direct Connect & Direct Connect Gateway and the considerations across regions. Study this thoroughly. I didn’t get any specific questions on Multicast or appliance mode however definitely worth knowing as these are features of Transit Gateway that affect default behaviour.

• I thought BGP community tags would be more important but I didn’t get many questions where it was relevant. Knowing which VIF to use for different networking conditions was important and knowing what you can reach with a Public VIF came up in many questions. Knowing you need a Transit VIF whenever a Transit Gateway is used was common.

• Route53 had a lot of questions, you’ll get asked about resolver endpoints and hybrid DNS, DNSSEC (know the flow for KSKs, ZSKs, the records that get produced and what resources they get attached to) and different types of routing policies.

• Global Accelerator can point to an ALB, NLB, EC2 instance or Elastic IP (link). Know the difference between CloudFront and Global Accelerator and what each is used for in different scenarios. How Global Accelerator works.

• I had questions related to Private Site-to-site VPNs. A lot of AWS documentation references Site-to-site VPNs requiring a Public VIF, this makes use of a Transit VIF and Direct Connect Gateway.

• Accelerated Site to Site VPNs came up for a question or two and are worth knowing about. Accelerated Site to site VPNs are scalable up to 50Gbps with aggregated VPN tunnels via ECMP.

• Private NAT Gateways are now a feature and I had questions that listed them as an option for NAT translation in a solution.

• MQTT protocol uses TCP -> Use an NLB, relevant article.

• Know when to use VPC flow logs, traffic mirroring, wireshark, AWS Guard Duty (Guard Duty specifically for RDS Aurora is a thing), Inspector.

• I had a question on EC2 enhanced networking and ways to improve networking performance, including understanding concepts like jitter, latency, throughput and bandwidth.

• I got a question about Reachability Analyzer automation to make sure a path isn’t blocked, and to alert in the case the path through to a web server via a load balancer is blocked.

• There were a lot of questions about load balancers, which should be used under different circumstances. Know about connection draining with classic load balancers, know about path and host based routing. This can be found in the course content. Another load balancer question related to Application Load Balancers involved the best way to load balance with one target group in AWS and another target group on prem, would need IP targets, understand this scenario).

• Direct Connect MACsec came up so study what do to in a key compromise (detach old key, attach another, what the names of the keys are).

• I got questions about WAF and IP Sets as a way to block malicious IPs. Make sure to understand AWS WAF and the difference to Shield and Shield Advanced.

• There were questions on Gateway Load Balancers so understand those thoroughly.

MegaCertapalooza @ Versent

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Yearly Versent runs a company wide certification competition to encourage our teams to get certified across different technologies relevant to the business.

For 2026 I decided to take a different tack and tried micro-certifications, associate and practitioner level certifications to get a wider view of available technologies. There’s so much going on in the field of AI and Cloud and I wanted to make sure I had exposure to a lot of different services to get more of a sense of what is out there. I began studying back from holiday break of 27th of January and finished up 15th March.

Amazon Web Services

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Some great bread and butter AWS service certifications to get started. The Cloud Practitioner is an AWS entry level cloud exam for people just getting into AWS. I didn’t need to study it given I’ve done the more difficult exams, however the AI Practitioner did need some study to complete, mostly just because of how new the content is. The AI Practitioner covers general AI theory but it is detail you can pick up in a week or two, or by doing the instructor-led courses, good certifications.

The CloudOps & Solutions Architect Associate are foundational certifications by AWS and throw in some scenario based questions, the CloudOps leaning more on the implementation and Architect leaning on design around a cloud solution. For both I did sporadic study over a week, it was a good opportunity for revision.

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner here
• AWS Certified AI Practitioner here
• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate here
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate here

Anthropic

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Given the rise of Claude Code & Anthropic over the last year getting an understanding of how to make the best use of Claude features was a valuable process. One of the requirements to get Anthropic partner status is to have 10 engineers who have completed four of the Claude Courses so also useful if your company is becoming an Anthropic partner. Also The courses are free and anyone can sign up to do them. These courses are well worth your time if you’re getting into AI assisted coding. There are mini quizzes at the end of every course which are straight forward if you’ve been following along with the content.

• AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations here
• Building with the Claude API here
• Claude 101 here
• Claude Code in Action here
• Claude with Amazon Bedrock here
• Introduction to Model Context Protocol here
• Model Context Protocol: Advanced Topics here

Google

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Google has pedigree in the AI space and this can be seen in its service offerings. Google AI services are worth your time to get across, the Google Generative AI Leader is a straightforward cert to get if you’ve already passed the AWS AI Practitioner as a lot of the theory is already covered there. Also, Google host free webinars, the Google Cloud Technical Series, which review their AI offerings and provide free labs to get experience with their tooling. I highly recommend catching these when they come around quarterly.

• Google Generative AI Leader here
• Cloud Technical Series CTS here

GitHub

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At Versent, we use Github for our repository hosting service and engineers have access and are encouraged to use Copilot to accelerate tool development where possible. It was a no-brainer to do the GitHub Copilot certification. Microsoft offer a free course to get hands-on experience with the copilot environment and accelerate your development workflow.

• GitHub Copilot GH-300 here

Notion

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Versent has recently adopted Notion for documentation and wikis and I thought while MegaCertapalooza was running I’d study the onboarding courses Notion offers.

Of the four courses Notion offers, 3 are available for free. The Notion Certified Admin has a paid course and the associated exam follows a classic exam format. If you completed the three courses before it and studied the Admin course content the exam is straight forward. Notion has a free tier for individual users and it is extremely useful for organising your notes, especially Databases. Notion have also done an awesome job with AI integrations which can use your notes for context.

• Notion Essentials here
• Notion Workflows here
• Notion Advanced here
• Notion Certified Admin here

Lucid

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At Versent we use LucidChart for developing architecture diagrams for our cloud environments and the results that come out are excellent. I spent some time with Lucid Training Labs courses to see if there was anything I’ve missed to improve my diagram creation workflow and mind mapping for engagements. Lucid make all of their courses free online and have a very generous free tier to start using it.

• Basics in LucidChart here
• Intelligent Diagramming here
• Technical Systems in LucidChart here
• LucidSpark Fundamentals here
• LucidChart Fundamentals here
• Lucid Admin Training here

Miro

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Similarly to LucidChart, we’ve made use of Miro for workshopping and I’ve found it’s a really effective tool for team collaboration. I took the Miro essentials course to get a better sense of features available in Miro. The courses are free also and worth a look.

• Miro Essentials here
• Agile Practitioner here
• Innovation Essentials here
• Supporting Miro Users here

Linux Foundation

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Not only is general Linux knowledge valuable on cloud engagements, I use it for homelabbing and my laptops. Back in the day (circa 2004-2006) I studied Systems Programming for Unix and have setup SOE environments with RHEL in the cloud. Nevertheless getting a free refresher course from the Linux Foundation was both interesting and enjoyable.

• LFS101 - Introduction to Linux here

See Also

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AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty: Exam Notes and Observations

29 July 2018·3000 words·15 mins