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Welcome to March’s post announcing new training and certification updates — helping equip you and your teams with the skills to work with AWS services and solutions. This month we launched eight new digital training products on AWS Skill Builder, including four new AWS Builder Labs and a free learning plan called, Generative AI Developer Kit. We also have three new, and one updated AWS Classroom Training courses—two of which have AWS Partner versions—including Developing Generative AI Applications on AWS. A reminder: registration is now open for the new AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate exam. You can begin preparing with curated exam prep resources, created by the experts at AWS, on AWS Skill Builder. Missed our February course update? Check it out here. New AWS Skill Builder subscription features AWS Skill Builder subscriptions are available globally, including Mainland China as of this month, and unlock enhanced AWS Certification exam prep and hands-on AWS Cloud training including 1,000+ interactive learning and lab experiences like AWS Cloud Quest, AWS Industry Quest, AWS Builder Labs, and AWS Jam challenges. Select plans offer access to AWS Digital Classroom courses to dive deep with expert instruction. Try a 7-day free trail of Individual subscription. *terms and conditions apply AWS Builder Labs Migrate On-Premises Servers to AWS Using Application Migration Service (MGN) (60 min.) is an intermediate-level lab providing you an opportunity to learn how to use AWS Application Migration Service to migrate an existing workload to AWS. Migrate On-premises Databases to AWS Using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) (75 min.) is an intermediate-level lab providing you an opportunity to learn how to use AWS Database Migration Service to migrate an existing database to Amazon Aurora. Data Modeling for Amazon Neptune (60 min.) is an intermediate-level lab providing you an opportunity to explore the process of modeling data with Amazon Neptune to meet prescribed use cases. Analyzing CloudWatch Logs with Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Analytics(4 hr.) is an advanced-level, challenge-based lab allowing you to learn how to use Amazon CloudWatch to collect Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) system logs and use Amazon Kinesis to analyze the collected data. AWS Certification exam preparation and updates Now available: AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate Registration is now open for the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate. Showcase your knowledge and skills in core data-related AWS services, implementing data pipelines, and providing high-quality data for business insights. Gain confidence going into exam day with trusted exam prep on AWS Skill Builder, including an Official Pretest, available now in all exam languages. Free digital courses on AWS Skill Builder The following digital courses on AWS Skill Builder are free to all learners, along with 600+ free digital courses and learning plans. Digital learning plan Generative AI Developer Kit (includes labs) (16h 30 min.) is a collection of curated courses, labs, and challenges to develop the skills needed to build generative AI applications. Software developers interested in leveraging large language models without fine-tuning will benefit from this collection. You’ll receive an overview of generative AI, learn to plan a generative AI project, get started with Amazon CodeWhisperer and Amazon Bedrock, learn the foundations of prompt engineering, and discover the architecture patterns to build generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock and Langchain. Digital courses Decarbonization with AWS Introduction (15 min.) is a fundamental-level course that teaches you about AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool and other resources that can be used to advance your sustainability goals. You’ll learn how businesses use the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, how it helps you reduce your carbon footprint and achieve decarbonization goals with AWS, and considerations for using the tool for a variety of optimal usage and cost savings considerations. Amazon Redshift Introduction (15 min.) is a fundamental-level course that provides an introduction to Amazon Redshift, including its common uses and benefits. AWS Mainframe Modernization – Using Replatform Tools with Amazon AppStream (60 min.) is an intermediate-level course teaching the setup and usage of Micro Focus tools from OpenText, such as Enterprise Analyzer and Enterprise Developer, with Amazon AppStream 2.0. AWS Classroom Training Designing and Implementing Storage on AWS is a three-day, intermediate-level course teaching you to select, design, implement, and optimize secure storage solutions to save on time and cost, improve performance and scale, and accelerate innovation. You’ll explore AWS storage services and solutions for storing, accessing, and protecting your data. An expert AWS instructor will help you understand where, how, and when to take advantage of different storage services. Learn how to best evaluate the appropriate AWS storage service options to meet your use case and business requirements. Build Modern Applications with AWS NoSQL Databases is a one-day, intermediate-level course to help you understand how to build applications that involve complex data characteristics and millisecond performance requirements from your databases. You’ll learn to use purpose-built databases to build typical modern applications with diverse access patterns and real-time scaling needs. AnAWS Partner version is also available. Running Containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is an updated, three-day, intermediate-level course from an expert AWS instructor that teaches container management and orchestration for Kubernetes using Amazon EKS. You’ll build an Amazon EKS cluster, configure the environment, deploy the cluster, and add applications to your cluster. Learn how to also manage container images using Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and automate application deployment. Developing Generative AI Applications on AWS is a two-day, advanced-level course that teaches you the basics, benefits, and associated terminology of generative AI. An expert AWS instructor will guide you through planning a generative AI project and the foundations of prompt engineering to develop generative AI applications with AWS services. By the end of the course, you’ll have the skills needed to build applications that can generate and summarize text, answer questions, and interact with users using a chatbot interface. An AWS Partner version is also available. View the full article

In the previous blog, SQL vs NoSQL Database, we discussed the difference between two major database categories. In a nutshell, the main difference between NoSQL and SQL is that NoSQL adopts a ‘right tool for the job’ approach, whilst SQL adopts a ‘one tool for all the jobs’. While SQL remains a standard in organisations worldwide, many other database systems have recently emerged. This is mainly due to the rising volume of highly varied data, scalability, changing storage requirements, the need for high processing power, low latency, and evolving requirements in analytics that database applications have to cater to. NoSQL is a class of newer database systems that offer alternatives to traditional RDBMS so it can cater for one or more of these specialised needs... View the full article

IT leaders, engineers, and developers must consider multiple factors when using a database. There are scores of open source and proprietary databases available, and each offers distinct value to organisations. They can be divided into two primary categories: SQL (relational database) and NoSQL (non-relational database). This article will explore the difference between SQL and NoSQL and which option is best for your use case... View the full article

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB is a client-side application to help visualize and build scalable, high-performance data models. Starting today, NoSQL Workbench adds support for table and global secondary index (GSI) control plane operations such as CreateTable, UpdateTable, and DeleteTable. View the full article

You now can design and visualize Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) data models more easily by using NoSQL Workbench. NoSQL Workbench now provides you a point-and-click interface to create nonrelational data models for Amazon Keyspaces, a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service. View the full article

NoSQL Workbench support for Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is now generally available. You can design and visualize Amazon Keyspaces data models more easily by using NoSQL Workbench, which has a point-and-click interface for creating nonrelational data models. View the full article

Databases like MongoDB, a NoSQL document database, are commonly used in environments where flexibility is required with big, unstructured data with ever-changing schemas. This post explains what a NoSQL database is, and provides an overview of MongoDB, its use cases and a solution for running an open source MongoDB database at scale... View the full article