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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.