I signed up a number of months ago for AWS Educate, a program that is offered for free through my enrollment at AU.

It took a bit of a song and a dance to get working (my school address wouldn't actually let me sign up), but that got sorted out after a few e-mails.

The interface is a bit clunky, but the idea is interesting. I think Amazon sees if they can lure in students, they will see some loyalty and "push from inside" to get their offering (as opposed to the other dozen or so Cloud providers) once their employed.

There are actually some good learning materials in there. This is split up into shorter "badges" that you can acquire, and longer "pathways" which are more akin to normal courses.

I am trying out the "startup" badge, which is an attempt to give students a leg up into launching their own startup. There are some short videos (which are good), and then there are two hour-long conference sessions, which seem there to pad out the learning a bit. Then there are a dozen or so blog articles, which touch on the major themes related to using AWS for your startup.

I also just started the Cloud Computing 101 course. It says it should take about 25 hours to complete, so we'll see how that works out. This one seems to be put together more thoughtfully so far, and hopefully that will continue.

Now, I'm not entirely new to AWS -- I did do a project using Ansible to allow people to spin up their own Cloud instance -- but I'm not an expert at all things cloud just yet.

So far, there hasn't been anything earth shattering about Educate, but I'm going to keep plugging at it and I'll keep writing about it.