AWS System Operations Associate Certification Crash Course

Explore elastic load balancers, how they distribute traffic across targets and availability zones, perform health checks and cross-zone balancing, enable SSL, and choose among classic, application, and network types.

Compare EBS and instance store options, evaluate IOPS and throughput trade-offs, and decide when to use provisioned IOPS, general-purpose, or cold HDD for persistent versus volatile storage.

Explore how to configure, attach, snapshot, and protect AWS EBS volumes for EC2 instances, including volume types, provisioned IOPS, encryption, delete on termination, tagging, and lifecycle policies.

Explore cloud watch monitoring and logging to track metrics, dashboards, and alerts, monitor resources like EC2, RDS, and ELB, understand performance versus availability, and apply cost optimization and audit trails.

Learn that CloudWatch is a metrics repository for resources linked to applications, not direct application management, and use alarms, notifications, namespaces, and event driven monitoring, with optional analytics exports.

Explore AWS RDS monitoring and performance, covering multi-AZ deployments, read replicas, CloudWatch metrics, Performance Insights, and tuning practices to optimize CPU, memory, IOPS, and connections.

This Lightsail demo walks through creating a WordPress instance, selecting the type, tagging for billing, and deploying in Ohio zone A, with basic connect and management steps.

Learn how SAS, a flexible managed notification service, enables push notifications through a distributed pub-sub system by publishing to topics with subscribers and endpoints, integrated with CloudWatch and Lambda.

Explore how to create estimates for AWS services using the pricing calculator, choosing quick or advanced modes, selecting on-demand or reserved options, and saving or sharing groups.

Discover how the AWS service catalog standardizes assets and enables self-service provisioning of ready-to-use products, like a CRM app, across versions, regions, and governance constraints.

Review managing and monitoring resources with CloudWatch, focusing on metrics, dashboards, and logs. Export logs to S3 for cost efficiency, and organize resources with tags, groups, and appropriate instance types.

Explore billing management, cost audits, CloudWatch concepts like subscriptions and dashboards, spot instances for non-critical workloads, and SQL query optimization with proper indexing to reduce costs.

Explore how IAM roles, groups, and users work together, with policies defined in JSON and attached to entities, plus federated access and service roles.

Create IAM roles and policies for auto scaling, specifying actions, resources, and conditions to apply minimum permissions. Validate with a policy simulator and review naming and scope before deployment.

Explore how security groups and NACLs differ: security groups are stateful, instance-level firewalls controlling inbound and outbound traffic, while NACLs are stateless, subnet-level rules applied top-down.

This demo shows how security hub aggregates alerts from guard duty, inspector, Macy, and ciass benchmarks to monitor security posture and identify compliance findings across resources.

Learn how AWS Config continuously monitors and audits resources, validates configurations, detects deviations, and notifies changes via Amazon SNS, with customizable rules and templates for governance in Northern Virginia.

Leverage AWS inspector to automate security assessments for network and host targets by installing an agent, creating templates and rules, and generating findings and reports with CloudWatch integration.

Assess AWS security compliance from audit logs, cloud trail records, policies, credentials, and roles. Use inspector, guard duty, and trusted advisor to identify vulnerabilities and reinforce best practices.

Navigate storage and data management in AWS, covering S3, EBS, EC2 migration, and data transfer options like Snowball and Avalanche, plus storage gateway and database migration to cloud.

Explore storage and data options with emphasis on Amazon elastic block store, elastic file system, and glaisher, plus Aurora, RDX, Dynamo DB, and Redshift.

Learn how to migrate virtual machines to AWS from on-premises or other clouds using CloudEndure, migration database service, migration hub, and discovery service.

Explore EC2 instance types, AMI images, and deployment options, including marketplace, community, and free tier images, with guidance on judicious resource sizing, volumes, encryption, keys, security groups, and spot pricing.

Review s3 object storage in buckets, dns-compliant naming, and storage classes; compare ebs versus instance store, noting iops and the role of read replicas to ease the primary workload.

Explore review questions on S3 storage options and classes, bucket and object concepts, and EBS versus instance store for persistence and IOPS, with guidance on Snowball for large data transfers.

Enable VPC flow logs to capture traffic for a VPC, subnet, or ENI, publish to CloudWatch and S3, and use the data to verify rules, monitor destinations, and troubleshoot applications.

Demonstrates configuring a VPC flow log per region, selecting filters and aggregation, sending logs to CloudWatch or S3 with log group, and cost and delay considerations.

Demonstrates security groups and network ACLs in AWS, highlighting two-layer security, inbound and outbound rules, default outbound behavior, and the stateless design of NACLs requiring explicit rules.

Explore nat gateways for address translation and outbound access. Discover Route 53 DNS features, including failover and routing policies like geo location, geo proximity, and weighted routing.

Compare classic, application, and network load balancers, and learn how elastic load balancers and auto scaling manage traffic, health checks, TLS termination, and monitoring via CloudWatch and VPC flow logs.

Explore Amazon VPC as a sandbox, a logically isolated network with subnets and security groups controlling traffic. Understand subnet-level deny rules, routing decisions, and API Gateway for external connections.

Explore elasticity and scalability for deploying workloads, including auto scaling, load balancing, and multi-region deployment to meet demand and ensure high availability.

RDS read replicas offload reads from the primary, enable storage type options, and support backups in another AZ. Aurora offers better performance with six replicas, while RDS supports five.

Demonstrates Amazon Aurora, a managed relational database engine compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, with higher throughput, integrated storage, and scalability up to 64 terabytes.

Identify cloud maintenance issues and outages using the AWS service health dashboard and personal health dashboard, and apply live updates and multi-region availability strategies to minimize outages.

Learn about AWS DevOps tools—CodePipeline, CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and Artifacts—and their use cases for source, build, and deploy in cloud pipelines, with GitHub and Bitbucket integration.

Learn how CloudFormation enables repeatable, predictable infrastructure deployment using templates in JSON or YAML, with stacks, change sets, drift detection, and optional stack sets.

Explore how the service catalog enables self-service discovery and controlled, standardized deployment of approved products through a portal, with agility and reduced costs as key benefits.

Create and connect to a MySQL database named artists, then delete, clean up, and consider database names, subnet groups, and VPC options in a 10-15 minute exercise.

Explore the US cloud engineer market, salary ranges, and how experience and location affect pay from starting around 70k to six-figure levels in major cities.