[02V ]AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Exam Review

Discover the fundamentals of AWS, including regions, availability zones, edge locations, and core services like EC2, S3, Route 53, and VPC, plus managed vs unmanaged options.

Identify the 13 tested AWS services for the solutions architect associate exam, including S3, EC2, VPC, RDS, EBS, ELB, autoscaling, SQS, IAM, CloudFront, DynamoDB, Lambda, Route 53, from 1625 questions.

Examine the most frequently tested AWS services, such as security groups, Kinesis, EFS, API Gateway, CloudWatch, Aurora, and Direct Connect, covering about 90% of exam questions.

Provide a rapid review of AWS services with four or more questions, covering WAF, Global Accelerator, Elastic Beanstalk, EMR, ACM, Cognito, Athena, Transit Gateway, Step Functions, SWF, CloudHSM, and STS.

Master exam readiness by following a focused learning guide that analyzes common question patterns, reinforces S3 concepts, lifecycle management, and cost considerations through mock exams.

Explore the scope of IAM, S3, and EC2 questions for the AWS certified solution architect associate exam, and learn how IAM users, groups, policies, and roles control access.

Understand how IAM groups manage permissions for multiple users, differentiate IAM roles from users, and compare user-based, resource-based, SCP policies and permission boundaries.

Explore IAM role trust policies for temporary privileges to third parties, and review authentication methods (access keys, secret keys, X509, MFA) with monitoring tools IAM Access Analyzer and CloudTrail.

Master aws s3 as a scalable object storage with buckets and objects, covering access management, public access, signed urls, versioning, lifecycle rules, and cross-service integrations like CloudFront and Route 53.

Explore how S3 uses globally unique bucket names and unlimited capacity, assigns object URLs, and navigates storage classes such as standard, one zone iAa, glacier, glacier deep archive, and intelligent-tiering.

Analyze S3 cost factors by region, data stored, retention, requests, and data transfer, and review lifecycle management, versioning, MFA delete, and bucket policies for secure access.

Master access control with pre signed URLs and bucket policies, and explore S3 access points, cross-account sharing, static web hosting, and encryption options such as S3, KMS, and client-side encryption.

Explore cross-region replication between S3 buckets, driven by versioning and bidirectional setups, and learn to analyze replicated data with S3 Select, Athena, Redshift Spectrum, and EMR.

Learn to speed up S3 uploads with multi-part and transfer acceleration using edge locations, parallel requests, custom prefixes, lifecycle management cleanup, and batch operations.

Explore EC2 fundamentals, from virtual servers and AMIs to cost optimization and pricing models, including on-demand, reserved, spot, and data transfer impacts.

Learn to launch an EC2 instance by selecting AMI, instance type, storage, tags, security group, and key pair, and use AMIs for backups, sharing, and regional moves.

Explore EC2 configuration aspects, including user data bootstrapping, VPC subnet selection, storage options (instance store, EBS), tagging, security groups, key pairs, and launch templates for internet access.

Explore EC2 purchase options, including on-demand, reserved, scheduled, spot, and savings plans, and learn how capacity reservations, zone and region variants, and dedicated hosts affect cost and licensing.

Examine AWS EC2 reservation types, including standard and convertible, and how spot instances, spot fleets, and spot blocks cut costs; cover placement groups and enhanced networking EFA ENA, run command.

Explore EC2 automatic recovery using AMI backups and EBS snapshots, with CloudWatch alarms and multiple AZs to restart instances while preserving public IP. Understand status checks, hibernation, and instance metadata.

Explore common AWS VPC exam questions, covering default and custom VPCs, subnets across availability zones, CIDR ranges, gateways (internet, NAT, VPN), VPC endpoints, peering, ACLs, bastion, DNS, and flow logs.

Explore Amazon VPC subnets, CIDR ranges, and IP addressing, including public and private subnets, route tables, internet gateways, NAT and egress gateways, and VPN gateways.

Understand nat gateway traffic from private subnets via the internet gateway, compare nat gateways with nat instances, and learn VPC gateway and interface endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB.

Explore how VPC network ACLs control subnet traffic and differ from security groups, including stateful vs stateless rules, defaults, bastion, NAT gateway, and VPC flow logs.

Master autoscaling fundamentals to automatically add EC2 instances as traffic increases. Configure launch templates or launch configurations, target groups, health checks, and scaling policies within an auto scaling group.

Explore how to create and compare launch configurations and launch templates, and configure auto scaling with multi-AZ deployment, target tracking, and health checks using CloudWatch.

Explore AWS RDS for relational databases on the cloud, covering engine options (MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Amazon Aurora), storage types, encryption, backups, maintenance, and scaling strategies.

Learn how to design RDS architectures with multi-AZ failover, public and private access configurations, cross-region read replicas, and boost performance with scaling, elasticache caching, and Aurora migration.

Learn how RDS encryption works, including in transit and at rest with KMS, and how the database instance, automatic backups, read replicas, and snapshots stay encrypted.

Discover elastic block storage (EBS) for EC2, including volume types, snapshots, encryption, and raid configurations, and how it differs from instance stores, S3, and EFS.

Master EBS snapshots as backups with incremental saves to S3, restore from snapshots, share and schedule via Data Lifecycle Manager, copy across regions, delete-on-termination, and encrypt with KMS.

Explore elastic load balancers (ALB, NLB, CLB) and how they distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances to ensure high availability, cross-zone load balancing, and health-aware routing in multi-AZ architectures.

Compare ALB, NLB, and CLB, focusing on layer 4/7 support, path based routing, ECS with container tasks, health checks, cross-zone distribution, SSL/TLS, sticky sessions, and logging.

Discover how aws sqs enables parallel task processing by queuing messages, comparing standard and fifo queues, and using features like polling, visibility timeout, delay, and dead-letter queues.

Compare standard and FIFO SQS queues, highlighting order and duplication trade-offs, and explore visibility timeouts, long polling, delay and dead-letter queues, deduplication IDs, and batch actions for reliable processing.

Learn how CloudFront, a content delivery network with edge locations, delivers from origin servers, caches at edge, supports S3 or custom origins (EC2/ELB), and enables gzip compression, security, and logging.

Explore how regional edge caches and edge locations optimize CloudFront delivery near the viewer. Understand TTL settings: minimum, maximum, default, and cache-control headers that govern web and RTMP caching.

Learn how CloudFront maximizes cache hit rates with path-based caching, language-region rules, and header, cookie, and query string matching.

Explore CloudFront regional restrictions to limit delivery to specific countries, enforce origin access with IP-based or header-based controls, and implement encryption, field level encryption, logging, and security features.

Explore how DynamoDB, a NoSQL key-value and document database, enables real-time processing of streaming data with Kinesis and Lambda, and supports exam-focused concepts like consistency models, indexing, and scaling.

Choose DynamoDB capacity modes on-demand or provisioning and learn billing by read and write capacity units while exploring keys, indexes, streams, autoscaling, Dax, and global tables.

Explore DynamoDB streams, Lambda integration, and global tables for cross-region replication, then optimize performance with autoscaling and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), and enable reliable backups.

Explore how Lambda functions run code without servers, including runtimes, handlers, deployment packages, and integration with API Gateway, VPC, and CloudFront for event-driven processing.

Learn how lambda connects to a vpc with subnet and security group and uses iam roles; leverage lambda layers to share code and integrate with AWS IoT, SQS, and DynamoDB.

Explore the scope of Route 53, including DNS name resolution, hosting zones, record types and alias records, routing policies, and configuring domain registration and on-premise integration.

Explore the varieties of Route 53 routing policies: simple, weighted, failover, multivalue, latency, geolocation, and geographical proximity, plus how traffic flow, TTL, and on-prem resolver link enable complex, resilient configurations.

explains security groups as stateful firewalls for ec2 and databases, compares with network acls, and covers default and custom sources, inbound/outbound rules, and common ports like ssh 22 and 5432.

Explore Amazon Kinesis for real-time IoT data processing, including data streams, Firehose and analytics, with topics on scaling, retention, encryption, and integrating Lambda and other services for end-to-end streaming applications.

Discover how API gateway creates and manages RESTful, HTTP API, and WebSocket APIs, integrates with Lambda and EC2, and uses authentication, caching, and throttling to optimize performance and costs.

Explore Aurora, a cloud relational database with multi-az architecture, multi-master options, read replicas up to 15, serverless, endpoints, and global deployment for exam readiness.

Explore ElastiCache as an in-memory data store, comparing Redis and Memcached, their use cases, configurations, and security options to optimize real-time processing and high-speed querying.

Learn to connect on premise environments to AWS using direct connect or VPN, configure direct connect gateways and VPN cloud hub options, and manage redundancy with VPN backups.

Explore how CloudFormation automates infrastructure deployment from json or yaml templates, and use features like change sets, drift, and stack sets for cross-account deployments.

Discover how AWS Elastic Container Service runs Docker containers with EC2 or Fargate, uses ECR for images, supports Kubernetes via EKS, defines tasks, and configures ALB with dynamic port mapping.

Explore the AWS Redshift exam scope as a managed data warehouse, covering configuration, traffic control, encryption, Redshift Spectrum, S3 data lake integration, workload management, and reserved nodes for cost optimization.

Explore Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for push notifications and asynchronous event notifications, topics and subscribers, integration with AWS Lambda, S3 events, CloudWatch, and architectures using SNS.

Explore how AWS storage gateway enables hybrid on-premise storage with S3 for backups. Learn to choose among file gateway, volume gateway, and tape gateway for your needs.

Explore AWS Organizations to centrally manage multiple accounts, set a master and member accounts, apply service control policies, enable consolidated billing, and share resources via RAM and organizational units.

Master multi-AZ configurations for high availability by deploying EC2, ELB, autoscaling, and RDS across multiple AZs, with public/private subnets and redundant NAT gateways.

Discover Amazon FSx, a fully managed file storage service offering Windows and Lustre options, and compare with EFS and S3 for data layer and high-speed computing use cases.

Define instance store as ephemeral, block-level storage directly attached to the EC2 host for temporary data, specified at launch, lost when the instance stops, and included in the instance price.

Explore how aws kms creates and manages customer master keys and data keys for envelope encryption, enabling secure use with S3 and EBS, including key rotation and access logging.

Explore the AWS Snow Family options—Snowball, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile—and learn encrypted data transfers, capacity details, and use cases for large-scale migrations.

Explore Glacier, a low-cost long-term storage class of S3, storing data as archives in vaults up to 40 TB with 256-bit encryption and slower data retrieval.

Explore AWS DataSync for migrating data to S3, EFS, and FSx, and review disaster recovery concepts such as hot, warm, cold standby, backups, and region copies.

Explore AWS security services like WAF, GuardDuty, Inspector, Shield, ACM, and CloudHSM, and review related network, data and user management topics for the solution architect associate exam.

Explore selecting AWS data services for analysis and migration, comparing EMR, Athena, Redshift, migration services, and network options like AWS Global Accelerator and Transit Gateway.

Explore environmental automation on AWS, comparing services for coding, provisioning, deployment, and monitoring. Learn to select tools like CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks, and CodePipeline for automated infrastructure and app delivery.

Understand AWS user management and authentication, including Simple AD, AD Connector, and AWS managed Microsoft AD; implement SSO with SAML 2.0; use STS and Cognito for authentication.

Compare AWS messaging and workflow options for task processing, including Amazon MQ, SNS, SQS, SES, and Step Functions versus SWF, and learn when to use each in state machine workflows.

Explore cost optimization in AWS with cost explorer, cost and usage reports, budgets, and pricing calculators. Use trusted advisor and CloudWatch alarms to visualize and control spending.