Alibaba Cloud is an increasingly well known brand in the world of public cloud. Founded in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (hereon referred to as ‘ABC’) spent a few years in establishing dominance in China before expanding to rest of the world. With close to 45% market share in public cloud in China, ABC is also the largest IaaS public cloud provider in APAC region with 28.2% market share closing in 20191. Globally, ABC stands third behind AWS and Microsoft, at 9.1% market share with a healthy growth of 62% YoY.
With this increasing global footprint, lot of professionals are focused on understanding the platform and getting certified on it. ABC has introduced range of certifications which are aimed towards demonstration and verification of knowledge in various fields of cloud.
Professional Certifications: These certifications are focused on broad areas of cloud computing, security and big data and have three paths designed from beginner to expert level.
Specialty Accreditations: These are a list of learning path courses available on technologies along with certification test. Currently, the available fields are DevOps, Networking, Data Analysis and Machine Learning.
Apsara Clouder Technical Certifications: A list of light-weight certifications that aims to help trainees to quickly understand a technique and learn how to use it as a practical skill.
Along with these certifications, there are two more certification families which will be made available in coming months: Cloud Native, which is focused towards cloud native solutions like containers, kubernetes, container registry, service mesh etc; and Enterprise Database Transformation which is focused towards expertise on understanding database solutions and how can customers migrate to Alibaba Cloud DB solutions to experience increased performance and lower latency.
There are various sources available for preparation for these certifications and some of them are as follows:
Alibaba Cloud Documentation: As with any other certification, the official documentation is the single source of truth for these certifications as well. ABC documentation is comprehensive and well written to take the user from basics to in-depth deployment scenarios.
Alibaba Cloud Academy: This is the education base for ABC solutions and certifications. There are multiple e-learning courses available on the platform for various solutions which are neatly packaged into learning paths.
Alibaba Cloud Youtube Channel: Official channel of Alibaba Cloud which has videos on various cloud solutions as well as recordings of various Alibaba Cloud events like Apsara Conference, Computing Conference and Summit Infinity.
Alibaba Cloud on Coursera: Beginner level courses on Alibaba Cloud available at Coursera.
Apart from this, the ABC learning and development team has set up a nation wide learning group on the communication tool Dingtalk. With more than 800 participants currently, the group has regular learning sessions organized which are focused on preparing participants for upcoming certification exams. Post training, there are opportunities provided for participants who want to appear for free ACA certification exams. This group can be joined by downloading Dingtalk and scanning the below QR code:
Furthermore, ABC is running a Public Course on Cloud Native technologies which comprises of multiple lectures, self test and course content on Cloud Native learning path, and has been divided into Basic and Advanced sections. One lecture is released every week with a total of 30 lectures to cover the relevant topics.
There is a dingtalk group specifically for cloud native public course which can be joined using the below QR code:
With the above list of resources for learning, it is easy to get started on the platform. To complement this with hands-on learning experience, an Alibaba Cloud account can be created with some free credits at www.alibabacloud.com
This article will be updated on an ongoing basis as and when new certifications and learning paths are released by the Alibaba Cloud team.
