AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate - Hands-On+Exam

Explore cloud computing as on-demand compute and storage with pay-as-you-go economics, and learn AWS global infrastructure, regions, availability zones, and public, private, and hybrid cloud.

Explore AWS global infrastructure, including 33 regions with many availability zones, 600+ points of presence, local zones and wavelength zones for ultra-low latency, and on-premises outposts.

Explore a high-level tour of AWS services across compute, storage, database, networking, analytics, and application integration, with upcoming lectures detailing each category.

Explore a comprehensive overview of AWS services, from blockchain and business apps to developer tools, IoT, and governance, empowering you to design scalable, cost-aware architectures.

Explore AWS security, identity, and compliance services in part three, including firewall manager, IAM, IAM Identity Center, KMS, network firewall, resource access manager, and Secrets Manager.

Explore how AWS categorizes services into zonal, regional, and global by fault isolation boundaries, with examples like EC2, EBS, SQS, and Route 53.

Learn how Amazon Athena enables serverless, interactive SQL queries directly on S3 data, with ad hoc analysis, Spark notebook support, and Glue Data Catalog integration for metadata management.

Create an S3 bucket and configure Athena’s query results location. Build a database and an external table for CloudFront logs, then run browser-by-user-agent counts and download or save the results.

Explore how AWS Data Exchange enables secure data sharing and entitlement management, from data grants and marketplace data products to Open Data on AWS and API data sets.

Explore the AWS Data Exchange catalog and subscribe to datasets. Download, store in an S3 bucket, and analyze the Covid data with Athena, then clean up resources.

Explore Amazon EMR, a managed cluster platform for running Hadoop and Spark on Amazon Web Services, covering clusters, nodes, steps, the cluster life cycle, and data integrations.

Create S3 buckets, launch an EMR cluster, upload and run a spark job, monitor progress and view results, then clean up all resources.

Explore AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that discovers, cleans, and transforms data and builds ETL pipelines with a centralized catalog; visualize workflows with Glue Studio.

Participate in a hands-on AWS Glue demo that builds an ETL pipeline from S3 to a Glue data catalog and crawler, runs an ETL job, and queries with Athena.

Learn how Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enable real-time data processing with shards and records via partition keys and sequence numbers, using producers, consumers, and the Kinesis Client Library.

Demonstrates end-to-end Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Lambda, and DynamoDB integration by creating a demo stream, generating sample sensor data, processing it, and storing results.

Explore amazon managed streaming for Apache Kafka, including craft mode, tiered storage, MSK serverless, and MSK Connect for scalable, fully managed streaming data with existing Kafka tools.

Learn to deploy an Amazon MSK cluster, configure IAM roles and policies for EC2 access, create a Kafka topic, test the setup, produce and consume messages, then clean up resources.

Explore Amazon OpenSearch Service for real-time log analytics and full-text search using inverted indexes, storage tiers, and integrations with Data Firehose, CloudWatch Logs, DynamoDB, and AWS IoT.

Learn to deploy an OpenSearch domain, ingest data, create index patterns and visualizations, run searches, and clean up resources using AWS OpenSearch service.

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud based business intelligence service connecting data from multiple sources into interactive dashboards, using Spice for fast analysis and machine learning insights with row level security.

Perform a hands-on quickstart to Amazon QuickSight by signing up in the AWS console, connecting data sources, and using Spice to create visualizations, dashboards, and shared insights.

Explore Amazon Redshift serverless and provisioned modes, with rpu-based capacity that scales on demand. Manage namespaces and work groups, secure data with IAM and KMS, and use snapshots for analytics.

Participate in a hands-on Amazon Redshift demo that covers creating a cluster, configuring access, loading data from S3, querying for performance, and cleaning up.

Master AWS AppSync to build secure, serverless GraphQL and pub/sub APIs with real-time data updates. Explore schemas, resolvers, data sources like DynamoDB, Lambda, and OpenSearch, plus security and authorization options.

Learn how Amazon EventBridge enables decoupled, event-driven architectures with event buses, rules, and targets. Explore pipes, scheduler, schema registry, and delivery guarantees for scalable AWS applications.

Stop an EC2 instance to trigger an EventBridge rule that sends an email via an SNS topic, illustrating EC2 instance state change notifications.

Explore Amazon MQ, a managed broker service supporting Active MQ and Rabbit MQ, with single instance and high-availability deployments, cross-region replication, and storage options like EFS and EBS.

Discover how Amazon SNS enables pub-sub messaging with topics and subscriptions, fan-out to SQS, Lambda, Email, SMS, and mobile push, plus message filtering, dead-letter queues, and FIFO vs standard topics.

Walk through a hands-on demo of Amazon SNS by creating a standard topic, configuring an email subscription, confirming it, publishing a test message, and deleting the topic and subscription.

Explore Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), a fully managed decoupled messaging system, covering visibility timeout, dead-letter queues, standard and FIFO queues, polling, message retention, integration patterns, and exam-day tips.

Learn to create and test Amazon simple queue service queues in the AWS console, using standard and FIFO queues, send and receive messages, apply deduplication, then delete the queues.

Explore AWS Step Functions to orchestrate microservices and data pipelines with state machines, covering standard and express workflows, branching, error handling, human in the loop, parallel processing, and service integrations.

Explore a hands-on demonstration of AWS Step Functions coordinating three Lambda functions to check inventory, process payment, and update order status, with a runnable state machine and practical testing.

Track and control your AWS costs with budgets, alerts, and automation. Learn budget types, update frequency, consolidated billing, and integration with Cost Explorer and budget reports.

Explore hands-on AWS budgets with a cost budget, a zero-spend budget, and an EC2 usage budget, using IAM roles and Systems Manager automation to stop instances when thresholds are met.

Learn how AWS cost and usage reports provide detailed cost and usage data with hourly, daily, or monthly granularity, delivering results to an S3 bucket for querying via Amazon Athena.

Learn to create and query AWS cost and usage reports by configuring an S3 bucket and Athena integration with Glue databases and tables.

Discover how AWS Cost Explorer visualizes and manages your cost and usage with 13 months of history and a 12-month forecast, showing unblended, net, amortized costs, trends, and reports.

Learn to use AWS Cost Explorer hands-on to build cost reports for the last three months, grouped by service, EC2 instance type, and usage type, with amortized cost insights.

Explore savings plans to reduce AWS compute costs with compute, EC2 instance, and SageMaker plans, compare with reserved instances, and optimize flexible usage across regions and services.

Explore AWS Batch basics, including job definitions, queues, and compute environments for running containerized workloads. Learn the job life cycle from submitted to failed and how Batch integrates with EKS.

Demonstrates an AWS batch workflow: create IAM role, ECR repo, and S3 bucket; build and push a Docker image; configure compute environment, job queue, and job definition; submit and monitor.

Explore Amazon EC2, virtual machines in the cloud, with on-demand, savings plans, reserved, and spot options, plus AMIs, instance types, storage, security groups, and lifecycle management.

Launch and connect to an Amazon EC2 instance using SSH and EC2 Instance Connect, configure security groups and key pairs, and clean up resources.

Explore how Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling uses Auto Scaling groups and launch templates to maintain desired capacity, balance across availability zones, and integrate with load balancers and event-driven actions.

Create a launch template and an auto scaling group, configure a target-tracking policy at 50 percent CPU, test scaling with stress, then clean up all resources.

Discover how Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deploying and managing web and worker applications and environments by provisioning resources, load balancing, and auto scaling, including application versions and configurations.

Explore how AWS Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deploying a Python web app by provisioning EC2 instances, load balancing, IAM roles, and environment variables through a hands-on demo.

Discover AWS outposts, a fully managed solution delivering AWS compute, storage, and databases on premises with the same hardware, software, and APIs for a seamless hybrid cloud.

Discover Amazon elastic container registry (ecr), a fully managed private registry for Docker and OCI images with repositories, IAM access control, image scanning, and cross-region replication.

Explore Amazon Elastic Container Registry with a hands-on demo: create a private repository, tag and push a docker image, then delete the image and repository.

Learn Amazon Elastic Container Service basics, including ECS on EC2 and Fargate, task definitions, services, launch types, and capacity scheduling across local zones and outposts.

Create an Amazon ECS cluster on AWS Fargate, define a web app task with Apache, run a long running service, and verify the deployment via the ECS service URL.

Explore Amazon elastic kubernetes service (EKS), its deployment options and node types—managed node groups, self-managed, and AWS Fargate—plus EBS CSI driver storage, VPC and subnet requirements, and logging and monitoring.

Join a hands-on demo of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to create ECS cluster roles, launch an EKS cluster and node group, and deploy nginx with a load balancer.

Explore Amazon Aurora, a fully managed, MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible database that scales with auto storage, supports multi-AZ clusters, replicas, blue-green deployments, security, analytics integrations, and serverless options.

Watch a hands-on demo of Amazon Aurora MySQL compatible database, launched via EC2, with a PHP application connecting to Aurora, testing high availability and exploring Aurora features.

Explore Amazon Aurora serverless v2, an on-demand auto scaling service that uses acres to scale writers and readers. Enjoy pay-per-use pricing, independent scaling, multi-az, and automatic capacity management.

Launch an Amazon DocumentDB cluster with MongoDB compatibility, configure read replicas, connect from an EC2 client, create a product catalog database, perform CRUD operations and queries, and clean up resources.

Explore Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed serverless NoSQL database delivering single-digit millisecond latency at scale, with primary keys, partition keys, secondary indexes, and features like DynamoDB Streams, TTL, and transactions.

This hands-on demo walks you through creating a DynamoDB table in the AWS console, configuring partition and sort keys, adding items, querying, and using a global secondary index.

Explore ElastiCache, a managed in-memory caching service offering serverless and custom cache clusters for Redis and Memcached, enabling database query caching, session management, and real-time analytics with scalable, low-latency performance.

Demonstrates building a cache-aside pattern with Aurora serverless MySQL and ElastiCache serverless, using IAM authentication, VPC endpoints, and Lambda to deliver faster in-memory caching and monitoring.

Discover how Amazon RDS streamlines relational databases with engines such as Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, and automates provisioning, patching, backups, scaling, security, and monitoring.

Explore a hands-on Amazon RDS demo guiding you to create an EC2 instance, deploy a PostgreSQL RDS database, connect via SSH, and create a database, table, and a record.

Explore how AWS X-Ray traces requests across instrumented microservice apps, building segments, subsegments, and a service map with sampling to diagnose performance issues.

Set up iam roles for x-ray integration, create lambda functions with x-ray tracing, configure api gateway and dynamodb with tracing, and generate traffic to analyze traces with x-ray service map.

Learn how Amazon API Gateway front door for REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs with stages, resources, methods, and integrations, including Lambda proxy, AWS service integrations, VPC links, and URL structure.

Create a lambda function and a rest api in api gateway, connect them with lambda proxy integration, deploy and test the api from a browser, then clean up resources.