You can now get a professional certificate for the Amazon cloud

Amazon Web Services is introducing a new degree for people to gain as they strive to stand out with their knowledge of the popular public cloud.

Last year Amazon rolled out an associate-level certificate for solutions architects who design cloud infrastructures, developers who implement plans, and administrators who ensure everything runs as it should. Today Amazon came out with a professional certificate for solutions architects — one tier above associate. The certificate will recognize competency in security, scalability, high availability, data storage, and other areas.

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Professional certificates for devs and admins will become available in the next few months, Matt Wood, Amazon Web Services’ general manager of data science, said in an interview with VentureBeat.

“When we were out talking to customers … we saw customers were building up experience,” he said. “They wanted recognition for that experience, to validate to a certain level. And they wanted to take that validation with them as their career progresses.”

But the new training levels could also benefit Amazon. As more people become more proficient in using AWS efficiently and securely, more companies could warm to running their the bulk of their applications and storing large swaths of their data on Amazon’s cloud.

That feeds what Amazon likes to call its virtuous cycle. As more workloads run on Amazon, the cloud provider can buy infrastructure at better economies of scale, which in turn leads to price cuts for customers. Which in turn can entice more companies to jump aboard.

On top of that, as Amazon offers higher degrees of certification, trainees can become hooked on the Amazon way and potentially shirk other public clouds, like Microsoft Azure, IBM’s SoftLayer, and the Google Compute Engine.

The new professional-level exams cost $300, whereas the associate-level exams cost $150, an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email to VentureBeat.

Wood did not have statistics on how many people had received associate-level certifications.