Alibaba Cloud Academy vs Simplilearn Cloud Computing

Alibaba Cloud Academy is Alibaba Cloud’s training and certification division for clients, partners, and developers. Programs include Clouder, Specialty, and short video courses, with certification routes across Associate, Certified, Expert, Professional, Capability and Competency, Clouder, and developer credentials. The listed Academy Membership costs $19.90 a year and includes unlimited access to 130+ online training courses, free Apsara Clouder certifications, and up to four attempts for each Apsara Clouder and Specialty certification. Other courses, specialties, credentials, vouchers, and subscriptions may require payment. Academy activities require a main Alibaba Cloud account; RAM accounts are unsupported. Pearson VUE exams can be taken at test centers or online, except online-proctored exams are unavailable in the Chinese mainland. Professional certifications last two years, and status can be verified through a one-step process. Badges can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, but not through Credly.

Simplilearn Cloud Computing offers learning options from free fundamentals lessons to specialized certification training and master’s programs. Its Cloud Computing Fundamentals course is two hours of self-paced video, with 90 days of access. Lessons cover cloud service and deployment models, architecture, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and introduce AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The syllabus also includes cloud security frameworks, identity and access management, and industry use cases. Learners who complete the free course receive a certificate they can share on LinkedIn. For more extensive study, the Cloud Computing and DevOps Certification Program combines on-demand videos, live virtual classes, simulated labs and peer collaboration. Listed elements include more than 30 projects, sandboxed labs, over 100 live learning hours and more than 50 hours of on-demand curriculum. The program covers the three cloud providers and tools including EC2, Lambda, IAM, CloudFormation, DynamoDB, Azure Security Center and Azure Cosmos DB. It is delivered with Virginia Tech and includes official AWS and Microsoft Azure courses. The free fundamentals plan costs nothing.