Alibaba ACA Cloud Computing Certification Study Guide
In my opinion, the ACA Cloud Computing certification will be the one of the best ways to get an introduction into Alibaba Cloud. It gives you an overall view of the most-used services within Alibaba Cloud and touches on basic cloud computing concepts. It should be the first certificate to attempt before proceeding to other certificates.
Alibaba Cloud certificates comes in a number of flavours, namely:
- Associate
- Professional
- Expert
This certificate is one of the 3 Associate certifications currently on offer at time of writing.
Pre-Requisites
There is no official pre-requisites required to take this certification. However, a background / experience in other cloud providers will really help speed up the learning process. In my case, I already have some Azure / AWS experience before this, hence really expedited my preparations.
Step 1 - Exam / Certification Outline
As with any exams / certifications, we start off by looking at the syllabus.
Here is the main link to the syllabus:
Syllabus Link
Alternatively, in case the above URL changes, you can always go to the syllabus through their Cloud Associate Certification site. Click on the link on the right side of the page to access the syllabus
At the time of writing (August 2020), this is the syllabus:
As you can see, each component has a different content weightage. This can be used as a guidance on where we should focus more of our efforts on.
Step 2 - Preparation Resources
Videos
Alibaba Cloud Academy provides official training videos for their certifications. Here is the link to their video course: Alibaba Cloud Associate Video Course
At the time of writing, this is currently offered at a discounted rate of only USD0.99! There is basically no reason to not purchase this course, even if you do not want to take up the exam!
The video course takes you through all the topics to be covered in the exam. There will be a mixture of theoretical explanations (high level) as well as demos by the presenter.
Documentation
Alibaba Cloud provides detailed documentation for all of their services. The official documentation home page can be found here:
Alibaba Cloud Documentation
For each service, I reckon reading the ‘Quick Start’ section (marked in red) will be sufficient for the exam. However, it will be best to read up the ‘Product Information’ (marked in green) for each for further understanding. As this is an Associate-level certification, it does not go into really detailed stuff, however, it will only be for our own good to be well-prepared and actually know a product which is the main reason why we are studying anyways.
Below are the direct links to each of the services covered:
- Elastic Compute Service - ECS
- Server Load Balancer - SLB
- Object Storage Service - OSS
- Relational Database - RDS
- Auto Scaling
- Cloud Monitor
- Security Center
- Anti-DDoS
Practice Questions
Unlike other cloud providers, there are no practice questions available for their certifications. Alibaba Cloud Academy does however provide you with a few sample questions to give you a glimpse of the style of questions you might be facing.
Practice
Along with video tutorials and reading documentation, being able to do hands-on is ultimately what actually matters!
Alibaba currently also offers free trial credits that can be used, if cost is of a concern.
Forums
For questions and help from the community, I reckon the official forum will be the best way as it is comparatively more active than the usual places like Stack Overflow.
Also, I find the search feature within the documentation site really useful, which should get you the information you require.
Step 3 - Take the Exam
Currently at time of writing, I took the online version of the exam, which can be done at the comfort of your home. As it is a closed-book exam, there will be proctoring, where an examiner will be monitoring through Zoom which will be required to install on a separate device that will be monitoring your exam. Hence, you will need to prepare 1 device with a web cam (For online proctoring) and 1 laptop (For your exam).
Exam comprises of 50 questions and must be completed within 90 minutes. Passing score is 60%.
Results and certificate will be generated right after you click ‘Submit’ if you do pass.
Good luck!
