AWS Solution Architect Associate (SAA-C03): Exam Readiness

Explore Amazon EC2, the compute cloud with scalable virtual machines. Launch instances from Amazon Machine Images and scale size or count across general purpose, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, and accelerated computing types.

Explore a study of EC2 instance types, including general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized, and accelerated computing, with use cases across web apps, databases, and machine learning workloads.

Explore six EC2 instance purchasing options, including on-demand, spot, scheduled, reserved (standard, convertible, scheduled), dedicated instances, and dedicated hosts, with notes on cost, use cases, and discounts.

Learn how to access EC2 instances using key pairs, monitor two status checks with CloudWatch, and choose between EBS-backed and instance-store backups, including metadata and user data handling.

This lecture introduces auto scaling, explaining horizontal and vertical scaling, instance configurations, and the components: launch configuration, auto scaling group, and scaling policies with metric type and target value.

Understand how a regional auto scaling group balances instances across availability zones. See imbalances arise from adds, removals, or manual termination, and standby state and load balancers are managed.

Learn how EC2 and elastic load balancing health checks interact with auto scaling, including the five-minute grace period to avoid premature termination and replace unhealthy instances.

Explore auto scaling policies for EC2, including manual, scheduled, dynamic, and predictive scaling, with minimum, maximum, and reserve capacity, scheduled actions, and alarms to balance load.

Explore how elastic load balancer distributes traffic across instances in multiple availability zones within a region for high availability, with DNS name and listeners, target groups, and health checks.

Explore how elb health checks monitor instance health, route traffic away from unhealthy instances, and verify 200 ok responses on port 80, with default timeouts and healthy and unhealthy thresholds.

Explore how elastic load balancers distribute traffic across availability zones, enable cross load balancing, and route to targets via target groups, with auto scaling and subnet considerations.

Sqs is a managed, reliable queue service that stores messages for processing, enabling decoupled components and fault isolation, with standard and fifo queues supporting at least once delivery and ordering.

Learn sqs polling uses short and long polling, and how messages can be sent and read simultaneously. Delays and retention up to 14 days with visibility timeout lock for read.

Explore how AWS Lambda runs code without provisioning servers, a serverless platform with auto scaling, high availability, monitoring, pay-per-usage in 100 ms, and sync, async, and poll-based invocations.

Explore how a virtual private cloud creates a logically isolated network across regions and availability zones, detailing default and non-default subnets, routing tables, internet gateways, and elastic IPs.

Explore the main VPC components: subnets, route tables, internet gateway, virtual private gateway, security groups, NACLs, Elastic IP, and peering connections, and how default VPC and availability zones interconnect.

Understand how NAT gateways and internet gateways enable VPC subnets to reach the internet, with elastic IPs and route tables, while controlling inbound traffic.

Trace the packet journey through security group one, subnet two, security group two, noting how stateful security groups remember traffic and stateless use explicit allow rules.

Establish VPC peering to enable private communication between VPCs across accounts and regions, using routing tables, noting non-transitive behavior, and leveraging VPC endpoints or AWS PrivateLink.

Explore how AWS Route 53 functions as a global DNS service for domain registration and routing, IPv6 support, generic and geographic top-level domains, and health checks with CloudWatch alerts.

Route 53 creates public or private hosted zones to route domain traffic. It assigns a four-name-server delegation set with a start of authority record you must not change.

Explore Route 53 routing policies, including failover, geolocation, geoproximity, latency-based routing, weighted routing, and multivalue answer, and learn how health checks guide DNS traffic across multiple resources.

Explore AWS CloudFront, a global content delivery network that caches content at edge locations for low-latency, high-speed delivery and efficient origin fetches.

Download the notes on storage to review essential storage concepts and prepare for the AWS solution architect associate exam.

Download the notes on identity and access management for the AWS solution architect associate exam readiness.

Download the notes on databases to reinforce your understanding of database concepts for AWS SAA-C03 exam readiness.

Download the notes on miscellaneous topics to support AWS solution architect associate exam readiness and streamline focused study.