School of AI Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)

Explore Amazon EC2 as the backbone of compute, mastering instances, AMIs, and pricing models to design scalable, cost-efficient workloads in the AWS ecosystem.

Leverage ELB and auto scaling groups to deliver elastic, highly available AWS architectures that automatically scale EC2 instances, monitor health across multiple availability zones, and ensure fault tolerance.

Discover how AWS Lambda enables serverless computing by running code on events while AWS provisions, scales, and manages infrastructure, enabling cost-efficient, event-driven architectures with AWS services.

Explore how containers on AWS enable portable, consistent, and efficient deployment through ECS, EKS, and Fargate, balancing control and abstraction for microservices across environments.

Compare EC2, Lambda, and containers to analyze workload patterns, cost, and scalability, then select the compute option that aligns with performance, resilience, and operations.

Master Amazon S3 by understanding buckets and objects, storage classes from Standard to Glacier, and lifecycle policies that automate class transitions to optimize cost and availability.

Explore a layered S3 security model that blends encryption, access control, and versioning with block public access, https enforcement, and monitoring tools like CloudTrail, Macie, and AWS Config.

Amazon EBS provides durable block storage for EC2 with GP3, Io2, ST1, and Sc1 volumes, plus snapshots for backups and cross-region recovery, with encryption for secure, resilient performance.

Explore Amazon Elastic File System, a fully managed, scalable shared file system using NFS. Supports concurrent access from multiple EC2 instances, auto scales, and provides secure, monitored storage.

Design cost-effective backup and archival solutions in AWS with AWS backup, S3 IA, and Glacier. Protect data across EBS, EFS, RDS, and DynamoDB with automated, compliant lifecycle policies.

Learn Amazon RDS to run fully managed relational databases in the cloud, with Multi-AZ high availability and automatic failover, plus read replicas for scalable reads.

Aurora delivers enterprise-grade performance with cloud native flexibility, compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, offering up to 15 read replicas, global database, and serverless on-demand scaling for pay-per-use workloads.

Explore how Amazon DynamoDB delivers internet scale performance with a flexible schemaless NoSQL design, automatic scaling, global tables, and multi-region replication for low-latency applications.

Explore how Amazon Redshift, a fully managed AWS data warehouse, enables fast, petabyte-scale analytics with columnar storage, MPP, and elasticity, integrated with S3 data lakes, QuickSight, and SageMaker.

Design secure, scalable AWS networking by mastering VPC fundamentals: subnets, route tables, NACLs, and security groups, balancing public and private segments with gateways and logging.

Evaluate connectivity options by comparing VPC peering, Transit Gateway, and PrivateLink to balance scalability, security, and cost across multi-VPC environments.

Understand elastic IPs as static, reassignable public addresses, NAT gateways for private subnet outbound access, and VPNs for secure on premises to VPC connectivity in hybrid architectures.

Explore AWS Direct Connect for dedicated private connectivity in hybrid cloud, enabling predictable performance, low latency, and secure data transfer between on-premises data centers and AWS.

Amazon Route 53 functions as a DNS and traffic management tool. Register domains, resolve DNS, perform health checks, and apply routing policies with alias records for global resilience.

Accelerate content delivery with Amazon CloudFront by caching at edge locations worldwide to reduce latency, while securing traffic with AWS Shield, WAF, SSL, TLS, and field-level encryption.

Define and manage identities with IAM using users, groups, roles, and policies to enforce least privilege, with MFA and temporary credentials for secure cross-account access across AWS.

Explore how AWS Organizations centralizes management of multiple accounts and enforces governance with service control policies, defining maximum permissions across accounts and applying guardrails through organizational units.

Discover how AWS KMS centralizes encryption key management with AWS and customer managed keys, enabling encryption at rest and in transit across S3, EBS, and Lambda, with auditing via CloudTrail.

Learn how AWS WAF and Shield provide layered application protection at the edge, filtering traffic and defending against DDoS, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting.

Leverage CloudTrail, Config, and GuardDuty to monitor AWS environments with visibility, compliance, and threat detection. Architect secure, compliant workloads that align with governance at scale.

Harness Amazon CloudWatch to monitor metrics, logs, and alarms for AWS resources, achieve observability, enable dashboards, custom metrics, and automated responses through alerts and scaling.

Track who did what, when, and from where with CloudTrail's audit trail for governance, compliance, and forensic analysis. Store logs in S3 for retention and connect to CloudWatch for alerts.

Centralize operations across AWS and on premises with automation, patch management, session manager, and runbooks to enforce baselines, improve compliance, and secure access.

Elastic Beanstalk, a platform as a service (PaaS), automates deployment from code repositories, provisions EC2 and load balancers, and handles auto scaling and monitoring.

Design resilient AWS architectures by leveraging multi-AZ and multi-region strategies, automated failover, health checks, and Route 53 routing to meet availability, latency, and compliance goals.

Explore disaster recovery strategies on AWS, from backup and restore to multi-site, pilot light, and warm standby, balancing cost with RTO and RPO objectives.

Design fault-tolerant AWS architectures with auto healing and health checks, using multi-az redundancy, elastic load balancing, and managed services like S3 and Route 53 to ensure continuous operation.

Balance resilience with cost efficiency in high availability designs. Right-size compute, use savings plans and spot instances, leverage auto scaling and tiered storage, and optimize data transfer and serverless options.

Explore case studies of real AWS architectures to learn high availability, disaster recovery, multi-az and multi-region designs, Route 53 latency routing, cross-region replication, and exam-focused pattern matching for business needs.

Explore how Amazon SQS decouples applications with standard and fifo queues, enabling asynchronous, scalable, fault-tolerant messaging for event-driven architectures.

Publish messages with Amazon SNS to fan out to multiple subscribers, including SQS queues, Lambda, HTTP endpoints, SMS, or email, enabling real-time alerts, serverless operation, and scalable workflows.

Discover how AWS Step Functions orchestrate serverless workflows by coordinating Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3 through visual state machines and JSON-based states, enabling robust error handling and modular, auditable pipelines.

See how Amazon EventBridge functions as a serverless event bus. It routes events from AWS and SaaS sources to targets like Lambda, Step Functions, or SQS, using rules and filters.

Explore loose coupling and microservices as the backbone of resilient cloud architectures, using AWS SQS, SNS, and EventBridge to decouple components, enable asynchronous processing, and support scalable services.

Review the AWS well-architected framework to align cloud designs with business goals, balancing security, reliability, performance, efficiency, cost, and sustainability through practical trade-offs.

Explore common exam scenarios and architectural patterns for compute, storage, databases, networking, and integration. Map keywords to AWS services like SQS, SNS, Lambda, and DynamoDB to design reliable, scalable solutions.