AWS Certified Developer Associate - Practical Guide [15H]

Explore the 2018 AWOS certified developer associate exam through a beginner-friendly, hands-on course with self-paced labs, guided video quizzes, and fundamentals reinforced in the AWOS console.

Obtain a free AWS account and use a UNIX or Linux terminal (including Windows Subsystem for Linux) to follow along with this course.

Discover the AWS free tier, a 12-month discount for new US accounts, and how this course’s labs aim to keep costs minimal while you learn.

Create a new Cloud9 environment by clicking the create environment button, choose the North Virginia region, and configure a free tier t-2 micro instance with a dark theme and terminal.

Follow this course to deploy and tear down resources for hands-on experience, spin them back up as needed, and learn the policy for resource use.

Explore cloud computing basics, including on-demand compute power, storage, and pay-as-you-go pricing, and learn how economy of scale, elasticity, agility, and lower maintenance enable scalable global deployments.

Gain a high level understanding of AWS compute services—EC2, Lightsail, ECS, EKS, Lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk—and core storage options like EBS, S3, EFS, and Glacier.

Explore AWS regions, availability zones, and edge locations to understand global infrastructure and how region-wide deployments deliver high availability and fault tolerance.

Learn the shared security responsibility model: AWS secures the cloud while you secure your cloud with IAM, firewall rules, VPC, MFA, credential rotation, and OS patches.

Discover how AWS soft service limits govern account resources, and request a higher limit like CloudWatch events via the AWS console support center by creating a case.

Explore realistic AWS decision scenarios, comparing EC2 and Lambda and long-term storage options like Glacier, while learning patch management, DDoS protection, and high availability via availability zones.

Access essential AWS fundamental resources through the linked documents from Amazon, covering the basics discussed in this module, with the PTF download for reference and module conclusion.

Use end-of-module iterative summaries and highlights to reinforce essential topics through repeated exposure, strengthening exam readiness for the AWS Certified Developer Associate.

Explore the basics of cloud computing with AWS services like EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, EFS, and Glacier, and learn about regions, availability zones, shared responsibility, service limits and requests.

Explore the basics of EC2 instances in the AWS console, including running instances, security groups, elastic IPs, AMIs, volumes, and VPC subnet details to manage global regions and availability zones.

Learn to configure and launch a free-tier EC2 instance: select Amazon Linux, t2 micro, set VPC and subnet, key pair, security group, storage, and basic SSH access.

Explore AWS storage options, including general purpose SSD (gp2), provisioned IOPS, throughput-optimized HDD, cold HDD, instance store, elastic file system, and S3, with practical setup and mounting guidance.

Learn to configure auto scaling and load balancing by creating a launch configuration, an auto scaling group with two instances across subnets, a target group, and a load balancer.

Engage in two videos per lab—goals and solutions—and practice launching a basic instance with an SSH-enabled security group and a reusable snapshot.

Walks through launching an EC2 instance, securing SSH from your IP with a security group, creating a snapshot, and building an AMI to launch a new instance.

Build a load balancing setup with a lamp stack ami using a launch configuration and an auto scaling group, then create a load balancer to serve traffic to multiple instances.

Follow along to load balance a lamp stack on AWS by creating a launch configuration, an auto scaling group, and a load balancer serving traffic to two instances.

Engage in scenario-based quizzes to diagnose an SSH connection timeout caused by a security group. Evaluate on-demand pricing for variable workloads and choose a shared, scalable storage solution across instances.

Master core AWS concepts, from EC2, Lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk to S3, EFS, and Glacier, explore regions and availability zones, the shared responsibility model, service limits, and auto scaling basics.

Learn the basics of Amazon S3, including buckets, objects, keys, and regions, plus permissions and REST interfaces for scalable storage. Grasp read-after-write and eventual consistency for overwrites and deletes.

Explore Amazon S3 storage classes, including standard (default) and reduced redundancy for non-critical data, and infrequent access options like standard IA and one-zone IA, plus Glacier archiving through lifecycle transitions.

Manage S3 access by configuring resource-based policies and user policies, including ACLs, bucket policies, and public access, to control bucket and object permissions for AWS accounts.

Master aws compute and storage concepts, including ec2, s3, efs, and glacier, across regions and availability zones, plus the shared responsibility model and scalable deployment patterns.

Learn how cloud formation templates model and provision AWS resources, deploy stacks, and automate configuration across regions with version control and easy rollback.

Explore cloud formation templates, declaring AWS resources in text files, with resources, parameters, mappings, and outputs, plus region-aware AMI IDs and get attribute usage.

Learn how to create and manage stacks with CloudFormation templates, explore stack options, parameters, and termination protection, and deploy stacks across accounts using StackSets.

Discover how AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store stores configuration data and secrets. Reference values by unique names in CloudFormation templates, store plaintext or encrypted data, and separate data from code.

Explore an AWS CloudFormation template that provisions a WordPress deployment behind an application load balancer, with launch configuration, auto scaling, subnets, VPC, security groups, and a WordPress database.

Deploy an EC2 instance using CloudFormation templates in any region, and configure a security group to allow SSH access from your IP address.

Walk through the club permission lab using CloudFormation to deploy an EC2 instance into a security group that allows access from your IP.

Master core AWS compute and storage concepts, including EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, Glacier, plus regions, availability zones, and the shared responsibility model.

Discover Amazon DynamoDB basics, a managed NoSQL service offering fast, predictable performance and seamless scale. Learn tables, items, attributes, primary keys, and schema-less design, plus backups, PITR, and replication.

Explore DynamoDB primary key types such as the partition key and the composite primary key, and show how global and local secondary indexes enable flexible queries with alternate keys.

Understand DynamoDB throughput for reads and writes by configuring read and write capacity units, item sizes, and strongly vs eventually consistent reads.

Enable point in time recovery to provide continuous backups for DynamoDB tables and restore to any point in the last 35 days, including indexes and capacity settings.

Explore core AWS services like EC2, S3, Glacier, and DynamoDB. Learn to deploy, secure, and scale infrastructure with CloudFormation, IAM roles, security groups, and auto scaling.

Master the basics of Amazon VPC, including subnets, route tables, and internet gateways. Learn how default and non-default VPCs use NAT gateways and security groups.

Explore how vpc security groups and network acls differ in scope and behavior. Security groups are instance-level and stateful, while acls are subnet-level and stateless, guiding inbound and outbound traffic.

Explore the default VPC in the AWS dashboard, inspect subnets across availability zones, and review the main route table and internet gateway to understand VPC components.

Create a VPC in a region, configure public and private subnets with internet gateway, NAT gateway, and route tables, deploy a lamp stack EC2 in public subnet, test access.

Walk through creating a VPC with public and private subnets, an internet gateway and NAT gateway, and launching a public EC2 instance to verify web access.

Engage in scenario based quizzes on Amazon VPC basics, diagnosing why a public subnet instance can't reach the internet and the roles of internet gateways, NAT gateways, and route tables.

Explore core AWS services like EC2, S3, EFS, and DynamoDB, learn regions and VPCs, security groups, auto scaling, CloudFormation, and the shared responsibility model for practical cloud development.

Learn how identity and access management securely controls access to AWS resources by authenticating users, authorizing their permissions, and applying best practices like MFA, root user avoidance, and granular policies.

Create an administrators group and grant administrator access for the user to manage AWS resources. Enable both programmatic and console access, issue credentials, and enforce a password reset.

Learn about four policy types in AWS: identity-based policies (AWS managed and customer managed), resource-based policies, service control policies, and permission boundaries, with examples and an MFA condition.

Understand how AWS IAM roles grant permissions by attaching to roles, not users. Explore service roles, service-linked roles, trusted entities, cross-account use, and attaching an admin role to EC2.

Complete a self-guided identity and access management lab by creating a user with full program access but no console access, following best practices. The next video shows the lab solution.

Create an IAM group and a user with programmatic access, assign the 'Amazon easy to full access' policy, and enforce no console access—demonstrating group-based user management best practices.

Create two IAM users using groups, grant console-only access, and verify each user can sign in and perform functions in their respective consoles.

Create two aws users with console access only, assign them to groups for easy access and s3 full access, then sign in to verify permissions.

Create an instance profile in the IAM dashboard to grant administrator privileges, attach it to an EC2 instance, and verify access by running aws ec2 describe-instances from within the instance.

Create an instance profile giving the easy to service administrator privileges, attach it to an Amazon Linux 2 instance, and verify SSH access with the generated credentials.

Explore guided IAM quizzes to learn efficient permission management by job type using IAM groups, and diagnose common issues like enabling programmatic access for IAM users to obtain access keys.

Master AWS compute, storage, and networking basics, from EC2 and Lambda to S3, Glacier, VPC, and DynamoDB. Understand security, scaling, and deployment tooling like CloudFormation and Parameter Store.

Explore how AWS Lambda runs code without servers, scales automatically, and charges only for compute used. Learn Lambda components—functions, event sources, downstream resources—and how events may trigger multiple functions.

Create and deploy a hello world lambda function on the console, selecting runtime and a role. Test with events, view logs, and configure environment variables, memory, timeout, and VPC settings.

Learn how to create and deploy lambda packages by zipping your project and uploading the zip to lambda or via s3, and install nodemailer with npm in cloud 9.

Create a lambda function using any runtime, configure iam roles for ec2 and cloudwatch, and start or terminate an ec2 instance based on parameters.

Build a python 3.6 lambda function with iam roles for cloudwatch and ec2 access to create or terminate ec2 instances using an ami id and instance id. Test with events.

Explore core AWS services including EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, EFS, Glacier, and CloudFormation, and cover regions, availability zones, VPC, IAM, security groups, and shared responsibility model.