MLA-C02 replaced the English MLA-C01 on September 29, 2026. The four domains weigh 28 / 24 / 24 / 24, and each domain name now carries AI or FM: the official comparison lists 45 added skills covering vector databases, embeddings, RAG, selecting and fine-tuning foundation models, and deploying and monitoring agents, with 7 removed. It is currently an English-only beta (exam code ME1-C02, 170 minutes, 85 questions, $75). The standard version per the exam guide is 65 questions, pass at 720, valid 3 years, with Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese arriving at general availability; there is no Traditional Chinese version.
10+ new AI security certifications launched in just 18 months (2025–2026), while the classic trio — Security+ ($439), AWS Security Specialty ($300), CISSP ($749) — remains foundational. For AI platform developers who aren't security specialists, a three-phase path works best: Security+ → AWS Security → SecAI+ or CAISP → CISSP, totaling $1,780–$2,700.
Security+ ($439) takes 2–3 months, no published pass rate, +$10K–$20K salary premium. AWS Security Specialty ($300) takes 2–3 months, 45–55% pass rate, highest ROI at 40–67x. CISSP ($749) takes 3–6 months, 50–60% pass rate, +$25K–$35K premium but requires 5 years of experience. Five-year cost to earn and maintain (including estimated study materials): Security+ about $619, AWS Security $200–$350 (no annual fee), CISSP about $1,524.
Amazon Bedrock is more than a reseller for multiple model APIs. It brings model invocation, IAM, Regions, Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, and CloudWatch into one AWS control plane. It fits teams already on AWS that value governance overhead more than the lowest token price.
App Runner packages build, deployment, TLS, load balancing, and autoscaling as a web service, trading orchestration control for a simpler platform with explicit VPC, instance, and health boundaries.
Lambda fits short-lived, event-driven, bursty work; its design center is invocation, retries, idempotency, and downstream capacity—not merely smaller containers.
SST v3 composes cloud resources through TypeScript, high-level app components, Pulumi and Terraform providers, and resource linking; it is application-first IaC, not a hosted PaaS.
Agent Plugins 1.0 is a packaging format that bundles Agent Skills (markdown instructions) and MCP server configs into a single directory, loadable by ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro, and VS Code. It's not a new protocol — it's the wrapper above protocols. Vercel initiated it, OpenAI/AWS/Microsoft/Cursor co-authored it, and Google joined on launch day. Anthropic isn't on the governance board, but MCP is a core primitive of the spec.
AIF-C01, MLA-C02, and AIP-C01 are not a difficulty ladder but three job-function slices: AIF tests AI business judgment, MLA tests whether you can put traditional ML, foundation models, and agentic workflows into production, and AIP tests whether you can integrate foundation models into a GenAI system. The MLA-C02 English beta is open for registration; general-availability dates and non-English versions remain unannounced.
The AIF-C01 exam guide moved to v1.1 on April 30, 2026, adding seven objectives — MCP, multi-agent patterns, context engineering, token-based pricing, and hallucination detection all became testable, with Bedrock AgentCore, Kiro, and Strands Agents joining in-scope services. Almost every summary online describes the older version. This guide builds on the official five-domain weighting, integrating AWS's four-step prep method and field-tested advice from 10+ candidates who passed. $100, 90 minutes, 65 questions (50 scored), pass at 700, valid 3 years — and it is offered in Traditional Chinese.
AIP-C01 tests integrating foundation models into production AWS applications: RAG, agents, security, cost, and evaluation. This guide follows the five official domains with a prerequisite self-check, four-step preparation plan, resource choices, and hands-on checkpoints, plus a ten-week schedule, an AI study prompt, and exam-day guidance. Start with a diagnostic, then close gaps through one RAG-and-agent project.
Most prep guides start at chapter one. This one works backwards: derive the exam date from each vendor's retake rules (AWS makes you wait 14 calendar days, Google escalates 14 → 60 → 365 days, Microsoft allows a retake after 24 hours, and Taiwan's iPAS has no retake at all — you wait six months for the next session), then order your study by domain weight rather than domain number, and take a free official practice set before studying anything. Includes weightings for seven certifications and a five-week AIF-C01 example.
Every AI certification an engineer can register for in 2026, listed one by one: AWS AIP-C01 / MLA-C02 / AIF-C01, Google PMLE, Microsoft AI-103 and AI-500, all twelve NVIDIA exams, Databricks, Snowflake, Oracle's Agentic AI track, IBM watsonx, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub GH-300, Anthropic's four Claude exams, Taiwan's iPAS AI Application Planner, plus the governance and audit line (IAPP AIGP, ISACA AAISM / AAIA, CertNexus CAIP) — prices, validity, and registration gates all checked against vendor pages. Two things that hit your wallet: Google's PMLE exam guide has renamed Vertex AI to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform throughout, making pre-mid-2026 study material worthless, and the iPAS intermediate certificate is valid 5 years, not permanently.
Kiro has five tiers: Free 50 credits, Pro $20/1,000, Pro+ $40/2,000, Pro Max $100/5,000, and Power $200/10,000, with add-on credits at $0.04. Auto mode mixes models to cut cost (the same task costs 1.3x credits via Sonnet), and the spec-driven flow turns vibe coding into traceable, structured development.