AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2023 Edition!

Explore the basics of cloud and AWS, with a focus on the AWS Global Infrastructure, to build a strong foundation for all subsequent sections.

Discover cloud advantages that shift capital expenditures to operating expenses, enable on-demand, pay-as-you-go deployments, and empower agility with autoscaling and the AWS shared responsibility model.

Explore the well-architected framework to design AWS architectures for operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

Explore how the AWS global infrastructure uses regions, three or more availability zones, and edge locations to deliver resilient, low-latency services with automatic data replication and CloudFront caching.

Explore AWS infrastructure components, including edge locations, regional caches, and CloudFront caching, to reduce latency. Learn how local zones, wavelength zones, Direct Connect, and Outposts bring resources closer to users.

Explore alternatives to the AWS management console with the AWS CLI and SDKs. Learn to install, configure, and use the CLI to manage S3, IAM, and EC2 permissions securely.

Explore AWS core services across compute, storage, database, and networking. Learn to use EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, VPC, CloudFront, and API Gateway to build scalable architectures.

Review the cloud's advantages, including pay-as-you-go economics and elastic scaling with EC2, Lambda, and S3. Highlight scaling options—out/in and up/down—and remember the well-architected framework and global AWS infrastructure.

Explore the security section of the AWS Solutions Architect course and leverage the shared responsibility model to dramatically improve the security posture of your workloads with AWS services.

Explore identity and access management in AWS, creating users and groups with least privilege, assigning roles for resources, and enabling secure access to S3 and EC2.

Perform a hands-on IAM challenge to create an IAM group with read-only RDS access, attach a user to that group with console access, then delete resources using defaults.

Create an IAM group in the AWS management console, attach the Amazon RDS read-only access policy, then add a console-access user and clean up.

Explore how security groups act as stateful firewalls on EC2 network interfaces and how network ACLs control subnet traffic with inbound and outbound rules, enabling defense in depth in AWS.

Explore AWS WAF protecting CloudFront, ALB, and API gateways with the core rule set, OWASP protections, and granular pricing; create a web ACL.

Learn AWS KMS for at-rest encryption, covering AWS managed and customer managed keys, symmetric vs asymmetric keys, automated key rotation, and applying a custom key to S3 encryption.

Explore sample exam questions on using IAM roles for interservice communication and selecting AWS Shield options for DDoS protection, with practical guidance for the solutions architect exam.

Join a live demo of launching an EC2 instance with security best practices, including security groups, VPC settings, key pairs, SSH access, and encrypted storage.

Review section four, secure architectures, and reinforce key AWS security concepts like identity and access management (IAM), IAM accounts, security groups, NACLs, WAF, encryption, and shared security model.

Explore how to design a robust multi-tier architecture in AWS by separating data access, business logic, and presentation tiers, and leveraging horizontal scaling and managed services.

Explore using a single EC2 instance to host a multi-tier architecture, deploy a lamp stack from the AWS marketplace, and configure auto scaling, VPC, security groups, and elastic IP considerations.

Explore the advantages of the multi-tier design, including improved security, performance, and scalability, with decoupling enabled by AWS services and tier-focused management.

Demonstrates connecting to an EC2 Linux instance from Windows using the built-in ssh client, including creating a key pair and tightening permissions for secure login.

Decoupling enables components to operate as black boxes using SQS, SNS, and API Gateway, with a loose, asynchronous workflow such as video captioning from S3 to EC2 back to S3.

Learn to use AWS simple queue service (SQS) to loosely decouple services with standard and FIFO queues, leveraging visibility timeouts, exactly once processing, message deduplication, and Lambda integration.

Explore the Simple Notification Service (SNS), set up topics and email subscriptions, and link SNS to billing budgets for alert-driven, decoupled system-to-system communication.

Discover how AWS API gateway provides a managed, scalable REST API solution with private or public endpoints, enabling secure, highly available, high-performance APIs for a demo pet store.

Compare AWS elastic load balancing options—classic, application load balancer, and network load balancer—to distribute traffic across nodes, enabling high availability and fault tolerance with appropriate listeners.

AWS delivers resilient storage across regions and availability zones through S3 replication, EBS snapshots, and EFS and FSx options, with flexible storage classes, versioning, encryption, and access controls.

Create a uniquely named Amazon S3 bucket and apply a 120-day lifecycle to move objects to Glacier. Create folders data, data one, data two, upload a file, and clean up.

Learn to create a globally unique s3 bucket, apply a lifecycle rule to transition to glacier after 120 days, and organize files with folders in the aws console.

Archive bulk data to Glacier, a low-cost, durable storage option within S3, with daily inventory updates and retrieval notifications, using a vault and cli or programmatic uploads.

Automate AWS infrastructure by creating cloud formation stacks from templates, either JSON or YAML, to quickly spin up solutions like a WordPress blog with a MySQL database.

Learn how AWS autoscaling uses launch templates within auto scaling groups to maintain elasticity, set desired capacity, min and max, and trigger scaling by CPU utilization.

Provision an Active Directory domain in the cloud with CloudFormation, using a Windows Server 2012 R2 base image, updating the AMI in the template, and validating the deployment.

Learn to spin up a Windows Active Directory using AWS CloudFormation, update an outdated AMI ID, manage templates in S3, and verify via EC2 and RDP.

Review sample exam questions for the AWS certified solutions architect associate, focusing on FSx for Windows File Server, network load balancer layer four, and the simple Q service for messaging.

Explore resilient AWS architectures through multi-tier design, decoupling, API gateway, auto scaling, load balancing, and storage options (S3, EBS, EFS, Glacier) powered by CloudFormation.

Build secure, resilient, high-performance architectures on AWS and improve storage performance across services using proven techniques.

Learn how CloudWatch delivers rich, integrated monitoring for EC2 and AWS services with status checks, metrics, dashboards, alarms, and notifications to support autoscaling.

Explore AWS container options, from EC2-backed containers to the serverless AWS Fargate. Store images in the elastic container registry and orchestrate with elastic container service, including EKS for Kubernetes.

Explore AWS lambda, the serverless compute service, using blueprints like lambda Canary to run scheduled health checks and monitor with CloudWatch and a test site on S3.

Explore AWS storage gateway, including file gateway for on-prem file access via NFS/SMB to S3 with caching, volume gateway with cached or stored volumes, and tape gateway for Glacier backups.

Explore how Snowball, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile move data to the cloud securely, with edge services bringing AWS to your data center and Snowmobile handling massive transfers.

Explore AWS virtual private clouds and their networking components, including subnets, route tables, internet gateways, and security controls like network ACLs and security groups.

Demonstrate AWS VPC mastery by building a VPC with a public subnet 10.110.0.0/24, attaching internet gateway, configuring route table, launching Amazon Linux 2, and testing SSH in the free tier.

Build a VPC with a public subnet, internet gateway, and route table, then configure SSH/HTTPS in the security group, launch an EC2 with a public IP, and test connectivity.

Explore Route 53 in AWS to register domains, manage hosted zones, and create DNS records A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, and TXT with alias to an IP address or another value.

Discover how CloudFront uses edge locations and regional caches within AWS’s global content delivery network to speed web and streaming content, with free tier and on-demand pricing.

Explore self-managed database solutions on EC2, using AMIs from the marketplace or community, to run relational, NoSQL, graph, or document databases with full admin control beyond RDS.

Explore AWS RDS, the managed relational database service, compare engines like Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server, and learn easy create for backups, security, replication, and high availability.

Explore how DynamoDB enables NoSQL data modeling on AWS, using a single table design with partition keys, global secondary indexes, streams, and global tables, plus DynamoDB accelerator for caching.

Learn how AWS ElastiCache provides high performance caching with Redis or Memcached, compare simplicity versus complexity, and review DAX integration with DynamoDB and pricing.

Explore how AWS Redshift enables petabyte-scale data warehousing as a managed, column based data warehouse with leader and compute node clusters, offering high performance, scalable storage, and cost-aware options.

Explore how the database migration service enables initial and ongoing migration from on-premises to aws, with sct for schema changes, endpoints, and secure replication.

Leverage Datasync to move non-database data from on-prem to cloud and back, using NFS, SMB, S3, EFS, or FSx, with agents, tasks, and archiving for protection.

Run serverless SQL queries on data stored in S3 with AWS Athena. Explore integration with the AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon QuickSight to discover schema and perform analytics.

Explore Macy, a machine learning service that analyzes S3 buckets to categorize sensitive data and PII, aided by a 30-day free trial.

Discover AWS Kinesis and its analytics-focused family, including data streams, data firehose, and data analytics, plus video streams and IoT streaming for real-time data capture and analysis.

Practice exam style questions for the aws certified solutions architect associate course, including selecting storage gateway for dynamic on-prem to cloud tiering and statements about the default vpc in hwc.

Master AWS high-performance architectures by reviewing CloudWatch, Lambda, and Elastic Container Service. Explore Storage Gateway, Snowball variants, Route 53, CloudFront, and databases such as Aurora and DynamoDB.

Explore cost optimized architectures for a cloud move, learning when moving to the cloud saves money and how to leverage services to maximize cost savings while balancing security and resiliency.

Set up AWS billing alarms by creating a monthly budget and a 75% alert with email notifications, using the billing dashboard to set a $25 budget.

Learn cost optimization for compute and databases in AWS, from cost visibility and trusted advisor insights to choosing Lambda, S3 static hosting, and DB options like DynamoDB, Neptune, and Redshift.

Learn how to use AWS Organizations to consolidate billing across multiple root accounts, invite accounts, and centralize control from the master account, with propagation latency considerations.

Explore the AWS EC2 instance purchase options, from on-demand and reserved to spot, savings plans, scheduled and dedicated options, and per-second pricing that lowers compute costs.

Explore cost-optimized network architectures in AWS, including VPC design and NAT gateway choices. Analyze elastic IP usage, subnets, and EC2 charges with Cost Explorer to optimize spending.

Explore evolving S3 storage classes and how to balance costs with retrieval performance using storage class analysis, including standard, intelligent-tiering, infrequent access, and Glacier Deep Archive.

Review sample exam questions on AWS costs, including consolidated billing via AWS organizations and free cost-saving guidance from the trusted advisor.

Thank you for attending the RWC solutions architect associate course and explore ongoing learning with additional certifications and a range of technologies and services in future training.

Explore cost optimized cloud architectures with AWS organizations, centralized billing, and cost alerts, then optimize compute (on-demand, reserved, spot) or serverless AWS Lambda, storage classes, and network architectures.

Explore a master list of AWS services likely to appear on the Solutions Architect associate exam, with 2023 updates and study tips for peripheral services that often appear in questions.

Explore the basics of JSON, including name-value pairs, data types (strings, numbers, booleans, arrays, objects, null), and best practices for readable, language-agnostic data interchange.