
Scott Pletcher
Cloud Computing & Cloud Security
Core AWS certification paths for cloud teams standardizing role coverage across architecture, operations, data, AI, development, and security. Each course pairs expert-led video with hands-on labs and unlimited practice exams.
Certification architecture
Bring everyone to a shared cloud baseline (Cloud Practitioner), match associate-level certs to the roles your team holds (architects, developers, CloudOps, data engineers, ML engineers), then develop specialty depth in security, networking, and generative-AI development.
Certification tier
Bring the whole team to a shared AWS vocabulary. Cloud Practitioner is the prereq baseline every AWS-adjacent role should hold; AI Practitioner is the new foundational cert for teams adopting Bedrock and AWS-native AI services.
The foundational baseline. Covers cloud concepts, AWS core services, security, compliance, and billing/pricing fundamentals. The shared vocabulary that prevents misaligned design conversations between cloud, security, and data teams.
The fundamentals-tier cert for teams adopting AWS AI/ML services (Bedrock, SageMaker, Comprehend, Q). Useful for analysts, PMs, and non-ML engineers your team needs to bring into AI-enabled workflows.
Hands-on grounding in the AWS primitives every cloud engineer touches in week one — S3 storage, EC2 compute, VPC networking. A prerequisite layer for new hires before SAA-C03 prep.
Certification tier
Match associate-level AWS certs to the roles your team actually holds — solutions architects, developers, CloudOps engineers, data engineers, and ML engineers. These are the credentials AWS Partner Network tier requirements are calibrated against.
The most widely-held AWS cert. Covers designing resilient, secure, performant, and cost-optimized AWS architectures. The credential AWS Partners require for Advanced/Premier tier eligibility.
For application engineers building on AWS — Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, CodePipeline, X-Ray. The cert your application team should hold before they own production AWS-native services.
Operations and reliability for production AWS workloads — monitoring, automation, deployment, security operations. The associate-tier cert for SREs and CloudOps engineers carrying the on-call pager.
For data engineers building pipelines on S3, Redshift, Glue, Lambda, and Kinesis. The newest associate-tier cert and a fast-growing standard for data team hiring rubrics.
For ML engineers operationalizing models on SageMaker, PyTorch, and TensorFlow inside the AWS stack. Pairs the AI Practitioner foundational with the associate-level MLOps depth your data-science team needs to ship production models.
Certification tier
Develop the senior bench that owns architecture, security, and AI strategy. Specialty certs prove deep platform expertise; the new Generative AI Developer Professional is the expert-tier credential for teams shipping production GenAI on AWS.
Expert-level AWS security: identity, data protection, infrastructure hardening, threat detection, and incident response. The credential your security architect should hold when signing off on AWS production environments.
Hybrid cloud networking at scale — VPC design, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, Route 53, and multi-account network architectures. For network engineers operating large AWS estates or hybrid connectivity.
AWS's newest professional-tier cert. Covers production-ready generative-AI development on Bedrock, including prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and responsible-AI guardrails.
Customer leaders describe the value in operational terms: AWS Partner-tier requirements satisfied, faster cloud onboarding for new hires, and the ability to point AWS account managers at concrete cert coverage instead of headcount. That's the outcome leadership cares about — not seat-time or completion percentages.
Role-based paths
Match AWS training to the actual roles your team holds. Each path bundles the right cert tracks plus the operational depth engineers need day-to-day.
Architecture, networking, and design depth for engineers owning production AWS topology. SAA-C03 plus the advanced networking specialty and the operational depth (VPC, Transit Gateway, S3 design) that day-to-day architecture work demands.
For application engineers building on AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and the broader serverless stack. DVA-C02 plus operational depth in compute, messaging, and developer tooling.
Operations, automation, and reliability for production AWS workloads. COA-C03 plus PowerShell/Python automation depth and the management/governance services SREs ship with.
Data engineers and ML engineers building pipelines and operationalizing models on AWS. DEA-C01 + MLA-C01 plus the operational depth across S3, RDS, DynamoDB, and the AI/ML automation tooling.
Defenders running AWS-native security tooling — IAM, GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector, Macie, KMS. The Security Specialty cert plus the operational depth (access management, data security, compliance) day-to-day security work demands.
Platform depth
Platform-by-platform deep dives for the specificAWS tools your team operates.
EC2, Lambda, and the broader AWS compute stack. From foundational EC2 admin through Python/PowerShell automation patterns CloudOps teams use to manage fleets at scale.
S3, EBS, EFS — the AWS storage fabric. Foundational usage through automation, data security, and storage tier-management for cost optimization.
VPC design, automation, and the Advanced Networking specialty. For network engineers operating production AWS topology, hybrid connectivity, and multi-account networking.
RDS for relational, DynamoDB for NoSQL, plus Python automation and the Data Engineer cert path for teams owning production data infrastructure on AWS.
IAM, KMS, GuardDuty, and the broader AWS security control plane. From access-management foundations through the Security Specialty cert path for teams hardening production AWS estates.

Hands-on AWS practice
Human-led training is the point: engineers practice real skills with expert guidance, not just video playback.
Why CBT Nuggets
The platform features IT directors evaluating us against Pluralsight, Udemy Business, and LinkedIn Learning ask about most often.
Practitioner-led
Built and taught by engineers who have spent decades running production AWS infrastructure — not crowd-sourced contributors.

Cloud Computing & Cloud Security

Cloud Computing & DevOps

Data Science, Machine Learning & AI
Team outcome
Role-aligned AWS paths help managers assign the right training without building a certification plan from scratch.
Best fit for: teams standardizing cloud fundamentals, hands-on labs, and certification coverage across a growing engineering group.
Common questions IT directors ask when evaluating AWS training for their team.