Are cloud certifications worth it?

Not sure to be honest from a content perspective. I never did any certification and only used parts of AWS and Azure until now. Both have quite good and extensive documentation, but I still needed to invest some time to get everything running. I guess it wouldn't hurt to get some official training, best if you have an employer to pay for it. Some employers like certificates, other don't care. May also depend on your country.

I like the DIY approach too and believe that some things are easier to host yourself. Depends on your use case. These cloud services offer reverse proxies, automatic TLS cert renewals, load balancer, mail servers and of course a lot of bandwidth among other things. If you need to maintain that manually you can end up with quite some work while you can use the cloud provider to basically manage everything aside from updates of your software.

But to really learn it, you also have to do it and also might need to invest a few $ here and there. I did that with the credit card of my employer, which of course helps. Cost transparency is quite low for many services I am afraid.

Requirements in job offers shouldn't discourage you though. Worst case is that you lack the experience and they don't hire you. But I wouldn't chase proficiency here because you read that a lot in job offers. Use the time to perhaps apply to another offer to really determine what they are asking of you.

I think what really helped me to gain insight was to rent my own server and play around with it. The knowledge you gain here will certainly help you to understand any other cloud landscape from any provider. They also come with fixed costs, which is a plus if you want to dabble by yourself.

Ask HN: Are cloud certifications worth it?

There's really no way to answer that question as posed. Not enough information.

What do you mean by "worth it?" What are your goals? What's your current experience level? What companies are you looking to work for? Etc., etc. yadda, yadda.

What I can say is that some companies do value certifications highly, while others do not. And which certifications are valued varies a lot, depending on what providers a given company uses.

All of that said, my take on certifications has generally been "do them, if you do, for the actual learning itself first and foremost."

Eg, don't just find and study brain-dumps and then go take the test to get the cert. Study the material to where you can actually pass the test based on knowledge you've internalized. Then you'll benefit from the knowledge whether or not you ever take the test, and - perhaps more importantly - regardless of how any particular employer values whatever certification you do test for (and attain). As far as employment goes, certifications may or may not help, but they'll probably very rarely hurt. If you really want to micro-optimize, look at the LinkedIn profiles of people who work for the companies that you want to work for. If lots of them list related certifications, that's a hint in favor of pursuing those certs. If not, that may be a clue in favor of the obverse.

One last thought: in my experience, I've found that big, bureaucratic companies (imagine a Fortune 500 insurance company or something) tend to value this kind of stuff more, as opposed to say, a 10 person startup in SV.

YMMV. HTH. OMGPONIES. WTFBBQ.