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Swiss Championships 2023

Learn more about the national championships 2023 in Cloud Computing, which will be held on the 22th September 2023. Over 20 young talents which previously competed in the regional championships have qualified themselves and will once again show off their skills at a higher level, potentially even qualifying themselves as the next WorldSkills competitor for Switzerland!

General Information #

As there is no official SwissSkills event this year, the competition for all ICT skills will be held at SIX convention point in September 2023. Every competitor will have a total of 7.5 hours to compete in various challenges, covering the usual daily tasks of modern cloud engineers. This page will provide more information about the structure and scope of the competition, as well as some of the available training materials for the competitors. If you are not a competitor yourself, you do not have access to any of the training materials mentioned down below, but can still inform yourself about the skills involved with this championship.

Competition Structure #

The competition itself takes a total of 7.5 hours and features three different modules, all of them held separately (one after another) with their own time limits:

  • Module 1) Swiss Cloud Skills (SCS): You will work on our own competition platform called Swiss Cloud Skills and have a variety of tasks to complete. Just like with AWS GameDay, you will receive access to the AWS Management Console as well as a session token for API/CLI usage, so you can use AWS normally apart from a couple restricted permissions. The structure is similar to the regional championships from this year, but the tasks have a strong focus on AWS services and do not involve other areas like Linux apart from the very basics needed to complete certain tasks. You can complete these individual tasks in whichever order you prefer, can check your own score at any time without it being visible to others and the more tasks you complete, the more points you will earn. There will also be a hint system available for obtaining additional information, but these come with a cost.

  • Module 2) AWS GameDay: You will work on one bigger overall task on the official AWS GameDay platform. Just like with SCS, you will receive access to the AWS Management Console as well as a session token for API/CLI usage, so you can use AWS normally apart from a couple restricted permissions. This bigger task has scoring which is active all the time and the quicker you get your infrastructure up and running, the more points you will gather. The total amount of points is open-ended and you will most likely be able to see the scores from other participants, although anonymized.

  • Module 3) Speed Challenge: You will work on various small challenges and tasks for one hour, once again hosted on our competition platform SCS. As the name already implies, the goal is to solve as many of these more simple tasks as quickly as possible, giving you yet another chance of obtaining a lot of points.

Further information about the specific duration of these parts will be provided at the day of the competition, but you can expect the first two modules to have a roughly similar length, whereas the speed challenge will just be one hour.

Competition Scope #

The upcoming skills competition will involve the use of various AWS services. As of August 2nd, the following list of services is conclusive, and no additional technologies will be added:

  • Amazon Application Auto Scaling
  • Amazon CloudFormation
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  • Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
  • Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
  • Amazon Route 53
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
  • AWS CloudShell
  • AWS CloudTrail
  • AWS CodeBuild
  • AWS CodeCommit
  • AWS CodePipeline
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • AWS Lambda

Please note that it is not necessary to master every single one of these services. During the competition, you will have internet access, and having a solid foundation in these topics is more important. It’s essential to have a general understanding of what each service does and how it works. This will enable you to quickly research any smaller knowledge gaps during the competition.

This especially applies to Kubernetes with EKS; there is no need to fully master Kubernetes and basic knowledge of how you can deploy simple services based on some available templates and further research conducted by yourself is sufficient. You do not need to troubleshoot any complex Kubernetes scenarios yourself, as this would be considered out of scope.

The overall knowledge level is roughly similar to certifications like AWS Solutions Architect Associate, but take this with a grain of salt - there might be easier and harder challenges, there might be some topics which are out of scope for this certification, etcetera. It is just meant to indicate a rough guideline.

Good luck with your preparation, and we look forward to seeing your skills in action!

Training Materials #

The following list of training materials are available to all competitors and can be used to prepare yourself in the best way possible:

  • AWS Academy Learner Lab [51851]: This official AWS Academy course is a free sandbox environment where you can use up to 100$ worth of cloud resources for testing various scenarios. You do not have to provide any credit card information and can safely test your newly gathered knowledge or strengthen your knowledge by building own scenarios with AWS services.
  • AWS Academy Cloud Architecting [51854]: This official AWS Academy course provides you with a solid foundation regarding various important infrastructure services available on the AWS platform. You can work yourself through the various modules offered and most of them also feature a final lab exam, which you can attempt to check your gathered knowledge. This course is a bit smaller than the training course mentioned further down below, but a great alternative for gathering more AWS knowledge by yourself.
  • AWS Training Course: Just like last year, AWS is once again offering a free training course called Architecting on AWS. It will feature various important topics of dealing with the AWS cloud over a course of three days, which will be held remotely from 7th to 9th August 2023. You received multiple emails previously for signing yourself up as a participant.

We will also provide 1-2 simple example tasks on our competition platform Swiss Cloud Skills during early September. These tasks are not directly related to the upcoming competition, but will give you a chance of familiarizing yourself with this platform that has first been used as part of this years regional championships. Additionally, the competition will also feature the AWS GameDay platform just like last year.

Frequently Asked Questions #

Is the usage of tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, or other AI-based services allowed? No, the usage of any form of generative AI during the competition is strictly forbidden. While you will have full unrestricted internet access during the competition and can use it for researching any topic of your choice, it is important to note that the work you submit must be developed by yourself without the assistance of AI-generated content.

What kind of difficulty level can I expect for the upcoming competition? There is not really a definitive answer to this, as the exact scope can not be shared without revealing too much of the tasks themselves, but the section “Competition Scope” of this site has been extended to provide additional guidelines regarding the scope and difficulty setting of the competition.

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