If you’re a junior with little or no real-world experience, certificates can fill in gaps in your resume. We can’t always get the experience we want or need right away, so courses and certificates are one way to fill they gap and provide some proof.
If you’re 10 years deep into a career and trying to change into something cloud-related without prior experience, getting a certificate or two might help you open up more job opportunities. It probably won’t get you lead jobs, but it can help keep your resume from being disqualified before the tech screen.
On the other hand, if you’ve already got years of experience doing cloud work in the real world, getting certificates probably isn’t going to help much. Good real world experience is better than certificates.
There are exceptions: Some old school companies rely heavily on credentials over all else, so collecting credentials and certificates can be a way to get into these companies and get ahead. It’s less common at modern, reasonable tech companies though.
Beyond that, I find that most certificates don’t have a lot of value. Perhaps that you’re willing to put in a certain amount of work and pain to achieve a piece of paper, maybe.
There are some certificates that mean you actually know something — Netware, Cisco, etc…. Some of the AWS certificates mean something, but that’s limited to the higher level Professional certificates.
The Associate level certificates mean that you’ve memorized a few buzzwords, and not much more. You need to go beyond the Associate level to get to the ones that are actually meaningful.
Note that I say this as a person who recently obtained the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certificate, which is a level below the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate cert, but that will be the next one I work on. I’ll start by taking some practice tests to see where I might need some fill-in training, but then I’ll probably just launch into the actual test.
Devops - less so important
Coding/programming - useless, just have example code like a github portfolio with your work instead.
Honestly, I see "old guard" companies be the strictest about certs/formal education. If you are going to work at a startup or newer company they might care less about these things
If you're using it to check off a box for HR, you may want to work on some projects that use the more major components of these offers (for AWS: EC2, S3, etc. but not all the niche components).