INE Cloud Fundamentals Cert 'Beta'
Personal feedback and summary regarding INE's upcoming certification
Over the weekend I was very fortunate enough to participate in INE's cloud fundamentals 'beta' certification exam. With cloud being a very hot industry and the trend for the future, I decided to see if I had the chops to undergo its training. For those who are unaware of INE, INE is a training platform where they train you on various topics within the cybersecurity space. These trainings prepare you for their exams within the eLearnSecurity exams such as eJPT, eCIR, eWPT. These exams have a significant weight to them and are what hiring recruiters and industry professionals consider when looking at potential employee.
And now with the addition of Cloud/Cloud Security, INE is really pioneering their courses and certifications towards the cybersecurity industry.
Now let's dig into this course and dissect it.
The course
The course itself is about 10 hours long straight through. However my personal rule of thumb is to 1.5x-2x any time displayed to you, whether it be GPS arrival due to traffic or the time to finish courses. I probably clocked in about 15-20 hours alone writing notes and trying to comprehend the material itself.
Hint: Take good notes!
There were points in the course where you are needed to have and AWS, Azure, or GCP account to finish objectives and follow the lab training.
The lecture and course materials are understandable and Tracy Wallace is a great and personable teacher. He definitely knows his stuff and tries to keep the materials as simple as possible. With his quirky jokes and experiences you can't help yourself but to chuckle alongside him.
Now the lecture themselves are definition/conceptional based. So if you're used to writing and studying definitions like I am, you'll love this aspect. Tracy also illustrates diagrams the process of the cloud, its infrastructure, and how data is processed and stored. So for us visual learners this is also a plus.
Tracy also demonstrates procedures on how to create a cloud account, start building on it, and manage/create a cloud environment. This is where your hands on labs come in.
With that being said, there's still a few short-comings that came along with it.
The Exam
If you've read this and you're thinking "Great, I'll just write down some definitions, understand the concepts, draw some things, this exam will be a breeze," let me tell you you're in for quite a surprise.
This test will make the air around you condense (badum-tsss).
The notes I took, the diagrams I drew were only about 20% of the exam, which out of 100 is scary. (This is an arbitrary number. Just based on perception) The rest of the questions were based on scenarios and situation. I had to definitely google some of these questions due to the sheer precision of the question. Questions on the lines of "which of these providers do this specific thing or how much does this provider charge if....' these types of questions weren't clearly outlined in the lectures. There were procedural questions that focused on the steps of how to create, setup, or manage something in the cloud. So you really need to be logged onto AWS for it.
Now the exam consisted of multiple choice questions all the way through, so as of now, there is no practical to demonstrate your knowledge through the cloud. However, the questions speak otherwise. These questions felt more geared toward individuals who have had ample lab time on their cloud account. And with my free Azure trial subscription expired, I was S.O.L. Until I contacted the man Tracy himself. Here's our entire conversation regarding the exam and how helpful he was
Me: Hey Tracy. I just wanted to reach out and ask a few questions regarding your INE Cloud Fundamentals Beta Course. Regarding labs, I do have an Azure Portal setup, but I did run out of the free subscription they gave out.
Would I have to create a new account to obtain the free trial subscriptions to run the labs? Also, on the exam does it require the hands on labs, or is it more definition/concept based?
Tracy: Unfortunately, if you ran out of the free subscription and want to continue working on the labs you will have to try to get another trial account (which is not easy as they use your credit card to verify your id and if the id is the same you cant create another account) or switch to a paid account. If you switch to a paid account you will be responsible for paying for every resource you use. The exam does require hands on . You will be asked to do things in AWS.
An awesome instructor with a passion to help others learn. Thanks again Tracy!
During the exam
I was unprepared. All the notes, all the diagrams drawn, all the concepts wasn't enough to help me during this Fundamentals course. Now, you might be asking it might be the instructors fault, this is absolutely not the case. Tracy taught and explained everything thoroughly and as simple as he could in a fundamentals course.
So you must be saying "Well, who's at fault?" No one. (probably me)
Instructors and teachers who created the exam had the approach to curate the exam with Hands-on-labs. A great way to make students learn, however this wasn't fully rectified during the lesson.
The lectures themselves don't necessarily place your way of thinking in the way of the exams. They don't have you asking the difficult questions as to 'why and how' these concepts are related.
Remember this was a 'Beta', there's bound to be a few hiccups here and there. Being able to partake in this beta and being taught with an excellent teacher was a blessing within itself.
I'm sure when the actual certification from INE is published out to the public they will have their course, the labs, and the exam correlation ironed out.
Summary
Pros
Great teacher. Understands the materials and teaches you in the most fundamental way of learning the 3 major cloud services.
The provided labs that you're required to accomplish with your cloud account. (Mine was Azure)
Quizzes at the end of each lesson to help you retain information after each lecture.
Cons
Exam questions were curated with scenario/circumstantial questionnaire. A little difficult for those expecting a fundamentals course.
Since this course covers 3 of the cloud providers, the knowledge is broader than just studying for lets say Azure-900 fundamentals course or AWS Cloud practitioner
With such broad knowledge of these cloud providers, questions in the exam are so specified you might think you actually missed a lecture.
All in all this was a great experience learning about what Cloud services have to offer, how they are built, and a brief overview on how to build on them. This course in my opinion is a great stepping stone for those who want to learn about the cloud, however, the course and the curation of the exam aren't exactly lined-up hand in hand. Precise critical thinking and scenario based questions were a little overwhelming for a fundamentals course, and required more hands-on-lab time to fully grasp the exam questions.
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