The 10 Highest-Paying Cloud Certifications In 2023

A new report from online boot camp provider Simplilearn reveals the cloud computing certifications with the highest average annual salaries, including those from AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud.

“Google Certified Professional-Cloud Architect,” “Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert” and “AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Associate” are among the cloud certifications linked with the highest average annual salaries.

That’s according to Simplilearn, a San Francisco-based online boot camp provider that partners with universities as well as companies.

Simplilearn recently published a report on the cloud computing certifications with the highest average annual salaries, featuring certifications from top cloud computing vendors Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud.

[RELATED: 10 New Google Cloud Programs, Certs, Incentives For Partners]

CRN has ranked the list according to average annual salary, from lowest to highest.

CRN also has reached out to Simplilearn, Microsoft, Google Cloud and AWS for comment.

AWS is still considered the dominant cloud business with about one-third of the market. Microsoft is No. 2 with less than a quarter of the market. And Google ranks third with about one-tenth of the market.

A longtail of other vendors including IBM and Oracle are far behind the three vendors.

According to Simplilearn, all of the exams on this list require a 70 percent or higher score to pass. They also feature multiple-choice questions as well as those with multiple responses.

Some other certifications mentioned include:

*AWS Certified Developer Associate

*Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

*Google Associate Cloud Engineer

Here’s what you need to know.

Average Annual Salary: $107,683

The “Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate” is an intermediate exam on Simplilearn’s list.

The exam shows who can deploy, monitor and manage Azure services with significant compute, storage, network and security involved.

The exam has 40 to 60 questions, according to Simplilearn. It lasts 120 minutes and costs $165.

Simplilearn recommends that test takers be familiar with Azure security, privacy, pricing, support and other concepts.

Average Annual Salary: $109,415

Google Associate Cloud Engineers deliver and protect apps and infrastructure, according to Simplilearn. These engineers also oversee project operations and maintain corporate products and services to make sure performance goals are met.

These engineers, programmers and developers demonstrate an ability to work with public clouds and on-premises systems. They deploy, monitor and manage operations of cloud-based web apps.

This intermediate exam costs $125 to take and lasts 120 minutes, according to Simplilearn. The exam has 50 questions.

Simplilearn recommends that test takers have an understanding of virtual machines, containers, networking and other cloud concepts.

Average Annual Salary: $110,000

The “Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals” exam shows which professionals understand Azure services, workloads, security, privacy, pricing, support and principles, according to Simplilearn.

The exam is considered an easier one, along the lines of AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate and Developer Associate, according to Simplilearn.

The exam costs about $99 and lasts 85 minutes. It has at least 40 questions, according to Simplilearn.

Average Annual Salary: $111,966

The “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator–Associate” exam is another intermediate difficulty one akin to the AWS Certified Developer Associate certification.

Systems operations (SysOps) administrator associates can develop, manage and operate AWS workloads.

The $150 exam lasts 130 minutes and has 65 questions, according to Simplilearn.

Simplilearn recommends that test takers have at least one year of AWS deployment, management and operation experience. They should understand AWS CLIs (command line interfaces), SDKs and APIs. They also should understand AWS tenets, network technologies, security concepts and compliance.

Average Annual Salary: $113,932

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification holders understand essential cloud infrastructure, architectural concepts and AWS services.

The exam ranks on the easier side of the difficulty spectrum, akin to AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate and AWS Certified Developer Associate, according to Simplilearn. The exam costs $100, has 65 questions and lasts 90 minutes.

Simplilearn recommends test takers have experience in creating a cloud implementation strategy, AWS apps deployment, AWS platform architecture creation oversight and cloud platform management and monitoring.

Average Annual Salary: $118,266

At $300, this is the most expensive exam on Simplilearn’s list. The “AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Professional” certification is meant to show acumen in creating distributed apps and systems on AWS.

Certification holders can develop, implement and evaluate AWS apps under a variety of conditions, according to Simplilearn.

The exam is on the harder side of the difficulty spectrum, akin to Google Professional Cloud Architect and Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert. The exam has 75 questions and lasts 180 minutes.

Before taking the exam, professionals should understand AWS CLI, AWS APIs, AWS CloudFormation templates, Windows environments and Linux environments, according to Simplilearn.

They also should know best practice architectural design across multiple corporate apps and projects.

Average Annual Salary: $130,272

This exam shows programmers’ and software developers’ ability to develop and maintain applications on AWS, according to Simplilearn.

The exam costs $150 and is considered intermediate in difficulty, according to Simplilearn. Simplilearn ranks this exam harder than the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate one but easier than the Google Professional Cloud Architect and Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert exams.

This exam runs 130 minutes and has 65 questions, according to Simplilearn.

Simplilearn recommends that before people take the test they should gain an understanding of the AWS shared responsibility model and practice writing applications with AWS’ CLIs, APIs and SDKs.

Simplilearn also recommends learning the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) method popular with DevOps engineers.

Average Annual Salary: $130,883

The “AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Associate” certification shows that a professional can work with an enterprise architecture, build distributed systems on AWS and deploy those systems.

The exam costs $150 and is considered an easier exam than others, according to Simplilearn. The exam has 65 questions on the harder end of these certifications and lasts 130 minutes.

Simplilearn suggests that, before taking the exam, professionals work with AWS for at least a year and understand Java, Python, C# or another programming or scripting language.

Before taking the exam, professionals should also develop an understanding of data storage fundamentals, networking and cloud technologies.

Average Annual Salary: $135,000

Programmers, developers and engineers who pass the “Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert” exam demonstrate the ability to work with cloud administrators, cloud database administrators and customers, according to Simplilearn.

They can advise stakeholders and translate business requirements into dependable, scalable and safe products and services.

The exam costs $165 and lasts about 150 minutes, according to Simplilearn. The exam features at least 40 questions on the harder end of these certifications.

Before taking the exam, professionals should demonstrate an ability to implement workloads, implement security, deploy infrastructure, configure infrastructure, create and deploy applications for the cloud and Azure storage, implement authentication and secure data, according to Simplilearn.

Average Annual Salary: $140,000

The certification with the highest average annual salary is the “Google Certified Professional-Cloud Architect.”

These cloud architects must show abilities in designing and planning cloud service architectures and managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure.

The certification measures designs for security and compliance, according to Simplilearn. Certification holders can work with Google tools such as Big Table, Big Query and the Google Cloud Platform.

The exam costs $200 and lasts about 120 minutes, according to Simplilearn. The exam has 40 questions.

Simplilearn suggests test takers become proficient with CLI, Linux operating systems, systems operations and have more than three years of industry experience.

CBSE Class 11 Syllabus 2023-2024 PDFs RELEASED: Download New Curriculum of All Subjects

CBSE Class 11 Syllabus 2023-24: CBSE has made available the latest senior secondary curriculum for 2023–24. Class 11th is the first year in the senior secondary curriculum where students choose a stream from Arts/ Humanities, Commerce and Science. The CBSE curriculum of all the streams reflects the nation’s shared vision of education and equips the learners with knowledge encompassing local, national, and global requirements and expectations. Now, candidates entering class 11th in the new academic year can refer to the latest CBSE Class 11 syllabus to check their course structure, course contents, any addition or removal of topics from the curriculum, question paper design, typology of questions, project work details, and unit-wise weightage of marks.

Before diving right into the syllabus of the new academic year, let us see why and how the syllabus serves an important role in exam preparation:

In the tables given below, students can download the subject-wise syllabus PDFs of CBSE Class 11.

Now check the remaining academic elective papers below:

Google vs Bing: Is one search engine really much better than the other?

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

When it comes to searching the internet, your mind probably jumps to Google. But what about Microsoft’s search engine — Bing? It isn’t as popular or commonplace, but it’s certainly a viable alternative to Google and offers a handful of exclusive features to sweeten the pot. The latter includes a new ChatGPT-like chatbot that can assist you with complex search queries. But what else separates Google vs Bing and which search engine comes out on top? Here’s everything you need to know.

Google vs Bing usage: Which search engine has the most market share?

Bing captured a third of US searches at one point.

Neither Google nor Microsoft discloses the exact number of searches or active users they serve each day, but third-parties paint a clear picture of who is in the lead. Broadly speaking, nine in every ten searches take place on Google.

According to Statista, as of February 2023, Google enjoys an 83.5% market share in the desktop search engine race and the lead extends to 95% in the mobile market. Bing puts up an admirable fight with over 9% market share in the PC space, but it doesn’t even break past the one percent market share mark on mobile. While these numbers may seem bleak, it’s worth keeping in mind that Bing gets over 12 billion searches every single month.

Bing serves one in every ten computer searches worldwide, but it's more popular in some countries.

To summarize, Google’s worldwide market share ranges between 85 and 95%. Bing, meanwhile, is a clear underdog, despite the fact that it has been around since 2009. Still, it has managed to corner nearly 10% of the desktop search engine market all by itself. What’s more — many smaller search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo rely on Bing’s results as well, making it far more dominant than the numbers might suggest.

Moreover, Bing has the upper hand in certain regions like the United States where it claims to have served over 30% of total search results at one point. It’s also used by Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri digital assistants behind the scenes.

Despite the long road ahead, Microsoft remains committed to Bing and it’s not hard to see why. The company told analysts that it expects $2 billion in additional revenue each time Bing increases its market share by a single percentage point. And even with Bing’s currently minuscule presence, its ads division brings in roughly $18 billion in yearly revenue.

Google vs. Bing: Functionality and quality of results

It’s difficult to gauge the quality of results for the billions of possible search terms out there. Generally speaking, though, Google and Bing will both meet the needs of the average user. Both search engines allow you to search for text, videos, images, news, and even popular shopping websites.

In our use, we found that both search engines delivered reasonably accurate results. Both offer a list of links to relevant web pages as you’d expect from a search engine. In fact, the result pages don’t look that different from each other too. Bing and Google will sometimes pull snippets of text from trusted sources like Wikipedia. Finally, Bing will often also provide a visually rich infographic alongside the search results, as shown in the above screenshot.

Both Bing and Google deliver similar results, at least for simple search terms.

Moving on, Bing will often summarize text from multiple sources if you ask a yes or no question. Google will attempt to do the same thing, but its response only ever includes a single source. That doesn’t necessarily make Bing better, however, as we’ve seen both make mistakes even if they cite the correct sources.

Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority

(Left) Bing video search, (Right) Google video search

If you prefer using Google products like Maps, you might prefer using the search engine as well. Bing Maps, for example, doesn’t offer the same depth of traffic data and businesses as Google’s mapping service. On the other hand, Bing takes the win when it comes to searching for videos as it provides a visual interface and embeds the video player directly within the website. These are minor differences, but they have a noticeable impact on the usability of either search engine.

Does Bing or Google have the better AI chatbot?

In 2023, Microsoft announced Bing Chat — a conversational chatbot that makes searches seem more personalized and interactive — later renamed to Microsoft Copilot. It’s based on the same technology as ChatGPT, which Microsoft has poured over ten billion dollars into so far.

AI chatbots like Bing Chat shine when you need answers to complex questions. Some examples include planning a holiday or picking out a gift for a close one. Here’s a sampling of Bing Chat in action on mobile:

The difference between ChatGPT and Bing Chat is that Microsoft allows its chatbot to search for live information on the internet. This makes it incredibly powerful in practice — you can use it to find matching pieces of furniture or compare various products from a certain standpoint. With traditional search, you’d need to perform multiple individual searches and do your own research.

Google does have a rival in the form of its Bard AI chatbot, but you need to access it separately for now. That said, some regions do have access to a feature that adds AI-generated answers directly to search results. Google calls it Search Generative Experience. In my testing, it holds up quite well when compared against Bing Chat but you do need to enable it first.

Can Bing manage to overtake Google?

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority

It’s unlikely that Bing can steal Google’s thunder and become the top search engine globally. This is largely because Google pays billions of dollars to keep its position as the default search engine on many devices.

According to analysts’ estimates, Google pays Apple roughly $15 billion to maintain its default status on the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. We also know that the company mandates the installation of Google Mobile Services (GMS), Chrome, and other apps on virtually all Android phones. Microsoft, meanwhile, uses Bing as the default search engine on Windows and the Edge web browser. For the past decade and a half of Bing’s existence, Microsoft hasn’t tried to make it the default search engine for rival operating systems and web browsers. That means it’s unlikely to change now either.

Google is still king, but Bing has a fighting chance.

Users can change their default search engine, of course, but most people simply do not venture into the settings menu. That’s a key reason why the Microsoft Rewards program exists — it incentivizes users to download the Bing app and use it on all possible platforms.

Having said that, Microsoft does have an ace up its sleeve in the form of Bing Chat. According to Microsoft, Bing Chat helped the search engine surpass 100 million daily active users for the first time ever. But by the company’s own admission, Bing remains a “small, low, single-digit share player” vs Google. Will that change in the future? Only time will tell.