Should You Do a Cloud Certification? The Four Reasons I Tell People Not to Collect Them, What the Exams Cost in 2026, and the One Case Where a Certificate Is Worth the Money

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Certifications are not bad; chasing them is. A badge proves you reached the passing mark on one exam on one day. It does not prove you have run the service in production, and the terms attached to every badge say so.
The four reasons from the video: certification overload (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, AI, security; you cannot watch every show on Netflix either); the asterisk effect (passing mark, not expertise); certificate-collector syndrome (badges as Pokémon cards on LinkedIn); and the 24 hours you have, which a day job already takes most of.
What they cost in 2026: AWS Solutions Architect Associate 150 USD, 65 questions, 130 minutes; AWS Cloud Practitioner 100 USD, 65 questions, 90 minutes; Google Associate Cloud Engineer 125 USD, 2 hours, valid 3 years; Azure Administrator priced by country and must be renewed. Plus the weeks of evenings.
Do one when the job needs it. If your work is Ansible automation on servers, an AI certification does nothing for Monday morning; the Ansible, bash and networking hours do. Pick the single exam that matches the work in front of you, or that a specific employer asks for in writing.
What to do with the time instead: answer questions on Stack Overflow, fix issues on GitHub, write up what you ran, and build things you can show. Those are the recommendations from the video, and the examples of real-world experience it names are securing data, building secure pipelines and automating on-prem as well as cloud servers.
Not your exact case? If you have decided to sit the Terraform exam, my Terraform Associate course is free; if you are starting from zero, read what to learn before cloud first.

Table of Content

Why I made the video
The four reasons, from the recording
What the exams cost in 2026
The one case where I would pay for an exam
What to do with the hours instead
What went wrong in the video
Conclusion

1. Why I made the video

In August 2024 I recorded a 5 minutes video called The Cloud Certification Trap. It became the most watched thing on my channel, past 104,000 views, which tells me the question is on a lot of minds: should I spend my evenings on a certification? My answer in the video was no, with four reasons, and two years later I still give the same answer to people who ask me after a course or in the comments. This post is that answer written down, with the prices and exam formats checked against the vendors' pages on 2026-10-21, and with the part I think I undersold at the time.

What to Learn Before (and Alongside) Cloud - the Six Non-Cloud Skills Every DevOps, SRE and Cloud Engineer Uses Daily: Code and Git, Scripting, CI/CD, Automation, Infrastructure as Code, Networking and Security

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Six skills, none of them cloud-specific, all of them used every day: 1) one programming language you can read the documentation of, plus Git and an editor; 2) scripting in bash first and Python second; 3) a CI/CD tool, Jenkins, GitHub Actions or GitLab; 4) automation with Ansible, with bash as the fallback; 5) infrastructure as code with Terraform or Pulumi; 6) networking and security: VPC, load balancers, proxies, DNS, SSL certificates, SSH keys.
Why bash first: 99% of the servers you will touch are Linux, and a utility script in bash works everywhere without installing anything. Python comes next for automation that outgrows a script.
Why networking last on the list and first in trouble: it is the one people skip, and the one they struggle on in every DevOps, SRE and cloud role, because every cloud service is a networking service underneath.
Learn them in parallel with a cloud, not before it. The video's title says before; the content says in parallel. Pick one small project and let it pull all six in.
All six are free to learn here: the Git and GitHub course, the Ansible course, the Terraform index, the Jenkins pipeline posts and the CIDR explainer that starts the networking series.
Not your exact case? If you are deciding between this list and an exam, read should you do a cloud certification first; if you want the one project that uses all six, it is the Terraform, Jenkins and Flask project.

Table of Content

The cloud is the smaller half of the job
The six skills and the tools I named
In what order
One project that uses all six
Lessons from the two years since the video
Conclusion

1. The cloud is the smaller half of the job

Every week someone asks me which cloud to start with, as if the choice of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud were the hard part. It is not. In 13 minutes in September 2024 I tried to explain why: the foundation under every cloud role is a set of tools that are not cloud at all, and the people who struggle with cloud services are almost always missing one of them, usually networking. This is the written version of that video, with the same six items and the places on this site where each is taught.

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Should You Do a Cloud Certification? The Four Reasons I Tell People Not to Collect Them, What the Exams Cost in 2026, and the One Case Where a Certificate Is Worth the Money

TL;DR

Table of Content

1. Why I made the video

What to Learn Before (and Alongside) Cloud - the Six Non-Cloud Skills Every DevOps, SRE and Cloud Engineer Uses Daily: Code and Git, Scripting, CI/CD, Automation, Infrastructure as Code, Networking and Security

TL;DR

Table of Content

1. The cloud is the smaller half of the job