The ICCA certification courseware introduces you to the foundational and fundamental aspects of the cloud, and not just one specific provider but a high level approach to working with the methodology across a range of providers. Everything from provisioning cloud resources, the shared responsibility model, all the way through to security and compliance was covered by this course.
The course does however focus on three of the more prominent cloud providers, that being: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud (GCP).
The learning material is extremely well structured and the instructor Tracy Wallace explains each topic carefully and is a really great speaker. The course is broken down into three sub courses namely:
- Cloud Foundations
- Cloud Management Concepts
- Fundamentals of Cloud Identity, Security, and Compliance
The duration of the course is 10 hours and 13 minutes. There are questions in-between the sections which test your knowledge of the topic before moving on. There are also lab exercises for you to perform, however they do not provide the cloud accounts for you to practise these labs, you will need to sign up for a free account on each of the cloud providers and then use their free tier to perform the operations (unlike other platforms like acloud.guru, but I am sure they will add that functionality at some point in time).
Once I got through all the course material I decided to look at the mentioned resources as well as going through some of the security and compliance documentation for each cloud provider on their respective web sites.
I took all the questions from the course and added them to a spreadsheet and kept reviewing the notes I had taken from all the videos and worked through it 2 hours per evening for about 10 evenings until I felt confident that I had covered everything that was in the course.
The date I decided to write the exam had come and I fired up the exam software and was presented with a really streamlined testing process. The exam time is set for 1 and a half hours. It was so easy to go through the questions and when I was done with the questions it was time for the hands on lab. Luckilly this time the cloud credentials are provided to you and you need to perform the hands on lab tasks. Don’t forget that when you complete the lab you will need to submit it and keep your instances running on the cloud provider so you can be graded. After the lab I went back to some of the questions I marked (about 4) for review as they were slightly tricky. When I was happy with my answers I submitted for marking and within seconds a screen popped up to say congratulations you have passed. I scored 93% !!! I got 3 questions wrong, luckily the minimum score required is 70%. It must have been those questions I reviewed :) This was a very smooth process and I had no issues.
I am extremely suprised that this is the first certification from INE and that the testing framework is structured well and operates well, they have done an absolutely amazing job.
Obviously I cannot go into too much detail about the questions asked but I can highlight some things you need to be aware of. For me the videos only helped with about 80% of the questions asked. The other 20% of questions suprised me a little bit, but I have been working with cloud for a while now. In addition to going through the video material I would suggest you read the high level documentation about each cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) and spend quite a bit of time on their Security offerings and know which platforms adhere to certain compliance requirements. There were quite a few questions on security and compliance.
For the labs, I cannot tell you exactly what tasks to perform, but I can tell you all the tasks were described in the video material accompanying the course, so practise, practise, practise.
The cost of the exam is $99 and you get 1 retake (even immediate).
Read up for more information about the certification here: https://info.ine.com/icca-certification/
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with INE at all, this was just my personal experience that I thought would be helpful to share.
Medium Article: https://craignewtondev.medium.com/how-i-passed-the-ine-certified-cloud-associate-icca-exam-d46b65664a63