The Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Set up your AWS account and learn to access EC2 virtual machines using PuTTY on Windows, preparing you for the rest of the course.

Create an AWS account using the free tier for a year, verify identity, provide payment details, choose a basic plan, and access the management console.

Prepare your Windows machine for this AWS course by installing Putty and Putty Gen to enable SSH access to AWS instances with converted private keys.

Explore how AWS operates, with global data centers, regions, availability zones, and edge locations, and survey its diverse computing services. Build a confident, general understanding of the AWS ecosystem.

Discover how AWS delivers a secure cloud platform with compute power, storage, and content delivery; explore how regions, availability zones, and edge locations shape its global architecture.

Explore how AWS designs custom hardware and routers, achieves high efficiency and private global connectivity across availability zones, and uses usage-based pricing for scalable cloud services.

Explore the AWS services landscape, from compute to storage, including EC2, Lambda, S3, Glacier, and Elastic Beanstalk. See how these services appear in categories and evolve over time.

Explore AWS databases, including RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB (NoSQL), Elasticache, and Redshift, and learn migration hub, database migration service, Snowball, and Snowmobile for data transfer.

Discover how AWS developer tools form a unified development lifecycle, from CodeStar to CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeCommit. Learn to leverage X-Ray, Cloud9, and media and analytics services.

Explore AWS security, identity and compliance services, such as IAM, Cognito, GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, single sign-on, Certificate Manager, CloudHSM, Directory Service, WAF, and Artifact.

Explore AWS services overview, including Step Functions as a visual designer for microservices and distributed debugging; learn SQS, SNS, SES, and other higher level services.

Explore AWS object storage in section four, including S3 basics, buckets and objects, access controls, and hands-on lessons on versioning, cross-region replication, and lifecycle management.

Discover Amazon S3, the object storage service with 11 nines durability, stored in buckets with a flat namespace. Learn about objects as key-value and read-after-write and eventual consistency for overwrites.

Learn how Amazon S3 achieves 99.99% availability and 11 nines durability, with tiered storage, object versioning, encryption, access controls, lifecycle management, and Glacier archiving.

Explore S3 storage classes and tiers, including standard, infrequent access, and Glacier, noting durability, availability, retrieval times, and minimum storage durations. Learn pricing by storage, requests, and data transfer.

Learn how to create an S3 bucket, choose a DNS-compliant, globally unique name, set tags and permissions, and navigate bucket regions before preparing to upload and manage objects.

Upload objects to an S3 bucket, configure permissions and storage classes, enable encryption, and attach metadata and tags, then verify public access and review object properties.

Enable versioning, logging, static web hosting, and event notifications to manage bucket activity. Configure fine-grained policies, access controls, tagging, and lifecycle rules to transition objects to infrequent access or glacier.

Explore how S3 versioning tracks changes to objects by enabling versioning and using delete markers, with MFA delete providing extra protection.

Enable cross-region replication in S3 to copy new objects to a different region bucket, with versioning and an IAM role; existing objects aren’t replicated, and delete markers propagate.

Learn how S3 object lifecycle management automates moving objects from standard to infrequent access and glacier, optimizing costs across current and previous versions, with expiration rules.

Create an s3 bucket in a chosen region, upload a browser-viewable object, and set public read permissions to verify access; then delete the object and bucket.

Explore advanced AWS S3 topics, including CloudFront content delivery, S3 security and encryption with access controls and bucket policies, four encryption types, object transfer acceleration, and exam tips.

Discover how CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations to deliver content from origins with low latency, caching objects with a time-to-live and enabling cache purges when needed.

Discover how CloudFront distributes content via edge locations from origins such as S3 buckets, with web distributions, caching TTLs, and signed URLs for access control.

Master S3 security by defaulting to private buckets, using ACLs and bucket policies, with logging, event notifications, and in transit and at rest protection via SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C, and client-side encryption.

Learn how S3 transfer acceleration moves object transfers to AWS edge locations to speed up downloads and uploads, with a management console toggle, CLI and API access, and higher pricing.

Create a CloudFront distribution for an S3 bucket, enable it, test image delivery from remote locations via VPN, observe first load versus cached delivery, then disable and delete the distribution.

Explore aws s3 exam tips by mastering buckets and objects, durability of 11 nines with 99.999% availability, read-after-write and eventual consistency, and lifecycle management across storage classes.

Learn how S3 cross-region replication with versioning propagates objects and delete markers; leverage CloudFront edge locations and distributions for latency, and compare encryption, transfer acceleration, and static website hosting options.

Discover how the AWS storage gateway connects on-site storage with S3 and how snowball and snowmobile transfer petabytes of data.

Connect on-premise apps to cloud storage with a gateway appliance, enabling backup, archiving, and disaster recovery; explore gateway flavors and their NFS and iSCSI interfaces to S3 Glacier and EBS.

Explore how AWS storage gateway enables on-premise stored volumes with asynchronous backups to S3 via EBS snapshots, supporting cache volumes and tape library for disaster recovery and archival to Glacier.

Explore how Snowball and Snowmobile provide secure, large-scale data transfer between on-premises and AWS, enabling import and export of petabytes with physical devices and managed transport.

Learn AWS IAM identity and access management fundamentals, including users, groups, roles, and permissions. Implement an operational role so EC2 instances can access S3 buckets, via a hands-on exercise.

Explore AWS IAM identity and access management, including users, groups, roles, policies, and temporary access, with multi-factor authentication and secure access keys for API, CLI, and SDK.

Master identities with IAM by creating groups and users, assigning permissions, and applying a password policy while mapping roles and policies for EC2 and S3 access, with MFA as needed.

Learn how the security token service issues temporary, limited privileged credentials to federated and external users, enabling controlled AWS access without embedding long-term keys.

Create and configure an IAM group named developer, add user Alice, and establish an EC2-to-DynamoDB role with full privileges; attach the role and review the policy.

Understand the core IAM concepts—users, groups, roles, and policies—and how root and administrative access, multifactor authentication, and access keys secure AWS accounts; explore federation and cross-account access.

Explore EC2 in section eight, including launching instances, configuring access, using security groups, and EBS to mount volumes, with a hands-on activity to log in and launch a web page.

Learn how Amazon EC2 provides secure, resizable computing capacity in the cloud via a simple web service interface, enabling pay-only-for-what-you-use pricing and rapid scaling through virtual instances.

Explore AWS EC2 pricing models—on-demand, spot, reserved, and dedicated hosts—highlighting per-second billing, bid-based availability, and capacity guarantees for flexible, cost-conscious workloads.

Master reserved instances with one-year or three-year commitments to gain price discounts and guaranteed capacity. Balance base traffic with on-demand, spot, and dedicated host options to optimize costs.

Explore EC2 instance families and types, from memory-optimized R4 to burstable T2, and learn to match workloads using scenario guidance and tools like CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor.

Explore elastic block storage in EC2 with EBS, providing persistent, in-az replicated volumes that attach to running instances, and learn about general purpose SSD, provisioned IOPS, and HDD options.

Launch and configure EC2 instances using Amazon Linux, selecting t2 micro for the free tier, setting storage, security groups, VPC, key pairs, and basic monitoring with CloudWatch.

Launch and configure an EC2 instance, update the system, install Apache, and create index.html to serve a web page; review elastic IPs and status checks.

Explore how EC2 security groups function as per-instance software firewalls with stateful inbound and outbound rules, enabling immediate traffic control between instances and from specific IPs or other security groups.

Explore how elastic block storage offers independent volumes attached to EC2 instances as separate disks. Learn to create, attach, format (ext4), mount, and snapshot volumes, and review five volume types.

Explore elastic block storage operations, including creating and attaching snapshots, restoring volumes, and resizing EBS, with insights on lazy loading and encryption transitions.

Launch an AWS Linux AMI EC2 instance with a new security group, SSH in, install Apache, create an index page, verify via HTTP, and use elastic IP for DNS stability.

Discover EC2 instance exam tips covering the launch process, AMIs, VPCs, IP address persistence, termination protection, bootstrap data, CloudWatch, EBS volumes, security groups, and basic access testing.

Explore EBS volumes, including root and data volumes, and five types for performance and cost. Learn how snapshots work, encryption options, and best practices such as detaching before termination.

Dive into EC2 fundamentals with Windows instances, AMIs, and load balancers. Leverage CloudWatch, AWS CLI, IAM roles, and bootstrap scripts to configure instances and run a web server hands-on.

Launch a Windows Server 2016 t2 micro EC2 instance, retrieve the administrator password via the key pair, and connect using remote desktop with port 3389.

Create and manage AMIs by generating images from running instances or snapshots, including encrypted root volumes, tagging, sharing, and launching new instances.

Explore elastic load balancers in EC2, including classic, application, and network types; learn how health checks, targets, and DNS names route and drain traffic across instances.

Learn how elastic load balancers use health checks with index.html as the ping target to keep traffic on healthy instances, and set up application load balancer across two subnets.

Discover the network load balancer, offering ultra high performance and static IP addresses at the connection level with low latency. Learn its setup, health checks, and round-robin traffic across subnets.

Explore CloudWatch, AWS’s metrics monitoring service, and learn to use dashboards, alarms, events, and logs to monitor EC2 and other services, with standard five-minute metrics, including custom application metrics.

Explore the AWS command line interface (CLI) to configure credentials, access S3 buckets, copy files, manage EC2 instances, and automate tasks with scripts and cron jobs.

Explore how EC2 IAM roles enhance security by avoiding on‑instance credentials, demonstrating role-based access to S3 via EC2, and showcasing CLI usage and best practices.

Learn how ec2 bootstrap scripts drive automatic setup on launch, from placing commands in user data to building amis, and compare with configuration management tools for scalable instance initialization.

Learn to create an ami from a configured ec2 instance to bypass bootstrap scripts, update the instance, and launch from the new image with the correct security and keys.

Learn how to access EC2 instance metadata from within an instance using 169.254.169.254, retrieve the latest metadata with curl, and log or monitor via the instance ID and AMI information.

Launch an ec2 instance with a bootstrap script and configure startup tasks and security groups. Install the apache web server, update software, and verify web access by viewing an index.html.

Explore advanced EC2 features, including auto scaling, placement groups, and the Elastic File System (EFS), plus Lambda for serverless execution, completing the EC2 module with exam tips.

Learn how autoscaling groups in EC2 automatically adjust the instance pool using a launch configuration, health checks, and dynamic policies to maintain four healthy instances across two availability zones.

Understand EC2 placement groups, a single-availability-zone clustering for low latency and ten gigabits per second throughput, with unique account-wide names and a single instance family and size.

Explore elastic file system (EFS), a scalable, shared file system for EC2 using NFS with read after write consistency, manageable through the AWS management console.

Explore how the EC2 container service runs Docker containers on a managed cluster, leveraging security groups, elastic load balancing, EBS volumes, IAM roles, and Docker images for fast, microservice deployments.

Explore aws ecr as a secure, scalable private registry to reduce latency, while ecs and eks orchestrate clusters, tasks, and container topology with detailed networking and iam controls.

Learn how ECS uses services to maintain a desired task count behind a load balancer, and schedules tasks across availability zones with the ECS agent, IAM roles, and VPC.

Learn how AWS lambda lets you run code without provisioning servers, triggered by events from S3, DynamoDB, or API gateway, with automatic scaling and pay-per-use pricing.

Discover EC2 exam tips covering EC2, elastic container service, and Lambda, along with instance purchase models, instance types, security groups, IAM roles, and EBS volumes and snapshots.

Master EC2 exam concepts from EBS volume types and IOPS to AMI scopes, CloudWatch metrics, EFS, and Elastic Load Balancers, plus ECS and Lambda architectures.