After two years immersed as a principal software developer and infrastructure architect focusing on AWS solutions and public cloud architecture in general, I felt it was time to sit down and write a few AWS certification exams. These are my thoughts on the certifications, exams, preparation, and value of them after the fact.

What follows is a brief tale of cloud adoption caution, and describes what happens when AWS makes something better, you don’t update your code, and your builds start failing sometime in the future because of it.