AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Full overview

Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam requires understanding the components and operation of the core AWS services as well as how those services interact with each other. Read through the official documentation for the various AWS services. Amazon offers HTML, PDF, and Kindle documentation for many of them. Use this course as a guide to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can focus your study efforts properly

This course prepares a student to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate national certification exam.

The cloud is where much of the serious technology innovation and growth happens these days, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), more than any other, is the platform of choice for business and institutional workloads. If you want to be successful as an AWS solutions architect, you'll first need to understand what the cloud really is and how Amazon's end of it works.

The ultimate focus of a traditional datacenter/server room is its precious servers. But, to make those servers useful, you'll need to add racks, power supplies, cabling, switches, firewalls, and cooling.

AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is designed to replicate the datacenter/server room experience as closely as possible. At the center of it all is the EC2 virtual server, known as an instance. But, like the local server room I just described, AWS provides a range of services meant to support and enhance your workloads’ operations. Those include tools for resource monitoring and administration, and platforms built for container orchestration.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is where individuals, applications, and a long list of AWS services keep their data.

S3 provides inexpensive and reliable storage that can, if necessary, be closely integrated with operations running within or external to AWS.

Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service provides the networking layer of EC2. A VPC is a virtual network that can contain EC2 instances as well as network resources for other AWS services. By default, every VPC is logically isolated from all other networks. You can, however, connect your VPC to other networks, including the Internet, on-premises networks, and other VPCs.

In addition to EC2, VPCs are foundational to many AWS services, so understanding how they work is fundamental to your success on the exam and as an AWS architect. Don't assume you can ignore VPCs just because you're not using EC2.

In this lesson, you'll learn the differences between these two database types and how to select the right one for your application. You'll also learn how to use the managed database services that AWS provides to get the level of performance and reliability your applications require, as well as how to protect your data and recover it in the event of a database failure.

This lesson will introduce three different managed database services provided by AWS:

In this lesson, you're going to learn about IAM identities—which are sometimes described as principals. An identity represents an AWS user or a role. Roles are identities that can be temporarily assigned to an application, service, user, or group.

CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and AWS Config are three services that can help you ensure the health, performance, and security of your AWS resources and applications. These services collectively help you keep an eye on your AWS environment by achieving the following goals:

Making your cloud resources accessible to the people and machines that will consume them is just as important as creating them in the first place. Facilitating network access to your content generally has three goals: availability, speed, and accurately getting the right content to the right users. Amazon's Route 53 is built to manage domain services, but it can also have a significant impact on the precision, reliability, and speed with which resources are delivered. CloudFront, Amazon's global content delivery network (CDN), can take both speed and accuracy a few steps further. You're going to learn about how AWS addresses all three of those functions in this lesson.

In Lesson 5, “Database Services,” you learned how to store and query both structured and unstructured data in AWS using relational and nonrelational databases, respectively. In this lesson, we'll build on that knowledge and dive deeper into data ingestion, transformation, and analytics. In this lesson, you'll learn about the following services:

In this lesson, you'll learn how to design your AWS environment to tolerate resource failures so that the failure of an instance or even an entire availability zone doesn't cause your entire application to become unavailable. You'll also learn how to recover from unavoidable failures. If all of your application's instances go down or if your application crashes because of a bug, security breach, database corruption, or just human error, you'll know how to recover quickly.

This lesson will teach you the design principles that'll help you squeeze the most performance possible out of your cloud resources. It's not enough to just make sure everything is running; getting full value from AWS requires that you leverage the features that set the cloud apart from legacy environments.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to apply security controls to every system that touches your data—storage, compute, and networking—to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data throughout its life cycle.

Even if you do everything right and design the perfect, multitiered, scalable, and highly available application environment, it'll be a complete waste if it ends up costing too much. No plan is complete without a solid cost assessment. And even if you did make it all happen for the right price, are you sure nothing expensive has accidentally been left running on any of the accounts under your control or you haven't been compromised by hackers?

The best protection from unpleasant surprises is by understanding how you're billed for using AWS services, how you can deploy resources in the most cost-effective way, and how you can automate cost event–alerting protocols. That's what you'll learn about here.

This course prepares a student to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate national certification exam.

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