AWS Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03

Learn to create iam users and groups, assign administrator access via a group, and manage sign-in with an account alias while avoiding the root account for daily tasks.

Explore IAM policies by managing Danielle’s admin and read-only access, attaching policies, and testing permissions with user groups like DevOps in the IAM console.

Learn to organize AWS accounts with organizations and organizational units (OUs), move accounts between OUs, and implement service control policies to govern access, including denying S3 actions.

Explore IAM conditions and their role in policies, including source IP, requested region, EC2 resource tag, and multifactor authentication, plus S3 bucket and object permissions and principal orgid.

Explore how AWS Directory Services mirrors Microsoft Active Directory in the cloud, including AWS Managed AD, AD Connector, and Simple AD, with on-premise trusts, MFA, and seamless IAM integration.

Learn to create and manage an Amazon S3 bucket, set region and public access, upload objects, create folders, and use pre-signed URLs for secure access.

Learn how IAM policies and S3 bucket policies control access, enable cross-account and public access, use ACLs vs bucket policies, and apply encryption and block public access settings.

Enable bucket-level versioning to track file iterations; uploading with the same key creates new versions and delete markers protect against accidental deletions with easy rollback.

Explore cross region replication and same region replication in Amazon S3, with versioning on both buckets, IAM permissions, and batch replication for existing objects and delete markers.

Explore Amazon S3 storage classes, including standard, infrequent access, one zone infrequent access, glacier instant retrieval, glacier flexible retrieval, glacier deep archive, and intelligent-tiering, while noting durability and lifecycle rules.

Demonstrates configuring S3 event notifications to send all object-creation events to an SQS queue, with optional EventBridge routing for broader processing.

Explore the S3 performance baseline, including per-prefix throughput and low latency for fast data access. Learn how multi-part uploads, transfer acceleration, and byte range fetches enable scalable, parallel transfers.

Engage in a hands-on s3 cors lab that uploads files to buckets, enables static website hosting, updates index.html across origins, and configures cross-origin resource sharing with correct headers.

Enable S3 access logs to audit all requests by storing entries in a separate logging bucket, in the same region, and analyze with Amazon Athena, avoiding logging loops.

Create a dedicated logging bucket and enable server access logging on the source bucket. Verify the bucket policy permits log writes to the destination bucket in eu-west-1.

Explore how EC2 delivers infrastructure as a service with virtual machines and EBS storage. Configure OS options, CPU, RAM, EBS or EFS storage, and boot with EC2 user data.

Understand AWS IPv4 costs, including $0.005 per hour per public IPv4 and $3.60 monthly per address. EC2 free tier offers 750 hours monthly; beyond that, charges apply to other services.

Explore how public and private IP addresses work on EC2, the role of elastic IPs, and how stop-start actions affect public IPv4 while keeping private IP constant.

Explore elastic network interfaces by launching two EC2 instances, creating and attaching an ENI, and performing failover between instances to manage private and public IPv4 addresses.

Launch an EC2 instance, configure httpd via user data, and create a custom AMI to speed future launches, then deploy and manage from the AMI.

Explore EC2 instance store, a hardware disk attached to an EC2 instance, delivering high IOPs and throughput for caching and temporary data, with data loss on stop; EBS offers persistence.

Compare EBS and EFS: EBS attaches to a single EC2 in one AZ with scalable IOPs and snapshots, while EFS is a multi-AZ network file system shared by many instances.

Explore the application load balancer (alb) at layer seven, routing HTTP traffic to target groups including EC2, Docker, ECS, and Lambda, with path-based routing, host-based routing, and HTTP/2 WebSocket support.

Explore connection draining (deregistration delay) for classic, ALB, and NLB; let in-flight requests finish while deregistering, with ELB rerouting to healthy instances. Configure 1–3600 seconds (default 300); zero disables.

Grant direct access to the operating system and database with rds custom for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, enable deeper customization, disable automation, and take snapshots.

Explore how the RDS proxy pools connections to RDS and Aurora databases, reducing open connections and boosting performance within a VPC, with serverless scaling and IAM authentication via Secrets Manager.

Explore AWS snowball for secure, portable data transfer at the edge with a physical device, enabling petabytes of data migrations to and from S3.

Explore Amazon FSx options for Windows File Server, Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, and OpenZFS, including S3 backups, private link, and performance modes from SSD to HPC workloads.

Discover the serverless concept in AWS, where you avoid server provisioning and services scale. Explore AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, Cognito, and other services in a pay-as-you-go architecture.

Explore Lambda concurrency and throttling, reserve concurrency, and provisioned concurrency to manage scalable AWS Lambda functions, including asynchronous retries for events like S3 notifications and cold-start considerations.

Explore AWS Lambda concurrency settings, including unreserved and reserve concurrency, test throttling with zero, and understand provisioned concurrency, cold starts, and versioning for cost-aware tuning.

Explore Amazon DynamoDB, a managed NoSQL database offered by AWS that uses tables with primary keys, scales to millions of requests with single-digit latency, and offers provisioned or on-demand capacity.

Explore how the aws api gateway exposes lambda-backed rest APIs with authentication, throttling, versioning, environments, and web socket support for secure access to aws services.

Define the domain name system and explain how it translates user friendly domain names into ip addresses, enabling browsers to reach web servers. Explore dns resolution and Route 53 basics.

Create and verify your first route 53 A record in a hosted zone, using nslookup or dig in cloud shell, mapping test two three to a mock IPv4 address.

Launch three EC2 instances across Frankfurt, Singapore, and Northern Virginia with Route 53 bootstrapping and http access, set up an application load balancer, and validate hello world responses.

Explore TTL (time to live) and DNS caching for an A record in Route 53, comparing high and low TTL with 24-hour versus 60-second examples.

Master weighted routing in Amazon Route 53 to direct traffic among three EC2 instances using weights 65, 20, and 15, translating to roughly 65%, 20%, and 15% shares.

Explore AWS Route 53 health checks to monitor public and private resources, enable automated DNS failover across multi-region architectures, and tailor checks using HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP with CloudWatch metrics.

Explore failover routing policies with Route 53 health checks, linking a primary and secondary EC2 instance for automatic DNS failover and disaster recovery.