The Amazon AWS Certified Database – Specialty is the certification that proves your skills to recommend, design, and maintain optimal AWS database solutions. It’s the best designation for candidates that are experienced in working with on-premises and AWS Cloud-based rational and non-rational databases. To earn this AWS certification, candidates have to pass one exam.
What you should know before enrolling in this certification process is that you should have 5 years of experience with common database technologies, 2 years of practical experience dealing with NoSQL, on-premises and AWS Cloud-based relational databases. In addition, your understanding of the main features of AWS database services, as well as ability to analyze needs and requirements to design relevant database solutions with the help of AWS services will be assessed.
The exam you have to pass is coded DBS-C01. It is aimed at candidates who perform a database-focused roles and deals with database concepts that relate to access, maintenance, automation, design, migration, security, troubleshooting. It contains 65 questions which you have to tackle within 180 minutes. To pass this specialty-level exam, you are to score 750 points. Note, that 15 items are unscored, thus, you should be prepared for that. And before taking this test, you will have to pay $300.
Speaking of the exam content, the evaluation contains 5 domains, each of them checks one’s definite skills. The first domain is about work-specific database design. It testifies your skills to choose suitable database services intended for specific types of data and workloads, implement strategies for disaster recovery and high availability, as well as design database solutions for performance, and scalability. In addition, you need to demonstrate your skills to compare database solutions.
The second domain is dedicated to deployment and migration topic. In this section, your skills to implement automated database solution deployments, selection of migration strategies, and performing data migration will be checked.
The third domain spins around management and operation. Here, you should be able to offer suitable maintenance window strategies, distinguish major and minor engine upgrades, provide restore and backup strategies, and automate operational tasks.
The fourth domain deals with monitoring and troubleshooting. Your skills to estimate monitoring tools (Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS Performance Insights), choose suitable parameters for alert conditions, resolve common database issues, and troubleshoot database performance issues will be tested.
The fifth domain refer to database security. In this section, you should be able to encrypt data in transit and at rest, assess auditing solutions, and define access control and authentication mechanisms. Besides, your skills to detect potential security vulnerabilities within database solutions will be checked.
If you are still in doubts whether to obtain the Amazon AWS Certified Database – Specialty certification or not, one motivating fact that will pursue you to follow it sounds as follows: according to Indeed.com website, certified candidates earn about $125,000 annually with this AWS designation.
