Learning Path

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Developer - Associate Certification
~ jayendrapatil

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Exam Learning Path

  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 exam is the latest AWS exam released on 27th February 2023 and has replaced the previous AWS Developer – Associate DVA-C01 certification exam.
  • DVA-C02 validates a candidate’s ability to demonstrate proficiency in developing, testing, deploying, and debugging AWS cloud-based applications.
  • DVA-C02 also validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks:
    • Develop and optimize applications on AWS
    • Package and deploy by using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows
    • Secure application code and data
    • Identify and resolve application issues

Refer AWS Certified Developer – Associate Exam Blue Print

AWS Certified Developer - Associate Domains

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Summary

  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 exam is similar to DVA-C01 with more focus on the hands-on development and deployment concepts rather than just the architectural concepts.
  • DVA-C02 exam consists of 65 questions in 170 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well prepared.
  • AWS DVA-C02 exam concepts cover solutions that fall within AWS Well-Architected framework to cover scalable, highly available, cost-effective, performant, and resilient pillars.
  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 exam covers a lot of the latest AWS services like Amplify, X-Ray while focusing majorly on other services like Lambda, DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, EC2
  • If you had been preparing for the DVA-C01, DVA-C02 is pretty much similar except for the addition of some new services covering Amplify, X-Ray, etc.
  • You can get an additional 30 minutes if English is your second language by requesting Exam Accommodations. It might not be needed for Associate exams, but is helpful for Professional and Specialty ones.
  • AWS exams are available online, and I took the online one. Just make sure you have a proper place to take the exam with no disturbance and nothing around you.
  • Also, if you are taking the AWS Online exam for the first time try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Exam Resources

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Exam Topics

Compute

  • Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2
  • Auto Scaling and ELB
    • Auto Scaling provides the ability to ensure a correct number of EC2 instances are always running to handle the load of the application
    • Elastic Load Balancer allows the incoming traffic to be distributed automatically across multiple healthy EC2 instances
  • Autoscaling & ELB
    • work together to provide High Availability and Scalability.
    • Span both ELB and Auto Scaling across Multi-AZs to provide High Availability
    • Do not span across regions. Use Route 53 or Global Accelerator to route traffic across regions.
  • Lambda and serverless architecture, its features, and use cases.
    • Lambda integrated with API Gateway to provide a serverless, highly scalable, cost-effective architecture.
    • Lambda execution role needs the required permissions to integrate with other AWS services.
    • Environment variables to keep functions configurable.
    • Lambda Layers provide a convenient way to package libraries and other dependencies that you can use with your Lambda functions.
    • Function versions can be used to manage the deployment of the functions.
    • Function Alias supports creating aliases, which are mutable, for each function version.
    • provides /tmp ephemeral scratch storage.
    • Integrates with X-Ray for distributed tracing.
    • Use RDS proxy for connection pooling.
  • Elastic Container Service – ECS with its ability to deploy containers and microservices architecture.
    • ECS role for tasks can be provided through taskRoleArn
    • ALB provides dynamic port mapping to allow multiple same tasks on the same node.
  • Elastic Kubernetes Service – EKS
    • managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises data centers
    • ideal for migration of an existing workload on Kubernetes
  • Elastic Beanstalk
    • at a high level, what it provides, and its ability to get an application running quickly.
    • Deployment types with their advantages and disadvantages

Databases

Storage

  • Simple Storage Service – S3
    • S3 storage classes with lifecycle policies
      • Understand the difference between SA Standard vs SA IA vs SA IA One Zone in terms of cost and durability
    • S3 Data Protection
      • S3 Client-side encryption encrypts data before storing it in S3
      • S3 encryption in transit can be enforced with S3 bucket policies using secureTransport attributes.
      • S3 encryption at rest can be enforced with S3 bucket policies using x-amz-server-side-encryption attribute.
    • S3 features including
      • S3 provides cost-effective static website hosting. However, it does not support HTTPS endpoint. Can be integrated with CloudFront for HTTPS, caching, performance, and low-latency access.
      • S3 versioning provides protection against accidental overwrites and deletions. Used with MFA Delete feature.
      • S3 Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download provide access without needing AWS credentials.
      • S3 CORS allows cross-domain calls
      • S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between your client and an S3 bucket.
      • S3 Event Notifications to trigger events on various S3 events like objects added or deleted. Supports SQS, SNS, and Lambda functions.
      • Integrates with Amazon Macie to detect PII data
      • Replication that supports the same and cross-region replication required versioning to be enabled.
      • Integrates with Athena to analyze data in S3 using standard SQL.
  • Instance Store
    •  is physically attached  to the EC2 instance and provides the lowest latency and highest IOPS
  • Elastic Block Storage – EBS
    • EBS volume types and their use cases in terms of IOPS and throughput. SSD for IOPS and HDD for throughput
  • Elastic File System – EFS
    • simple, fully managed, scalable, serverless, and cost-optimized file storage for use with AWS Cloud and on-premises resources.
    • provides shared volume across multiple EC2 instances, while EBS can be attached to a single instance within the same AZ or EBS Multi-Attach can be attached to multiple instances within the same AZ
    • can be mounted with Lambda functions
    • supports the NFS protocol, and is compatible with Linux-based AMIs
    • supports cross-region replication and storage classes for cost management.
  • Difference between EBS vs S3 vs EFS
  • Difference between EBS vs Instance Store
  • Would recommend referring Storage Options whitepaper, although a bit dated 90% still holds right

Security & Identity

  • Identity Access Management – IAM
    • IAM role
      • provides permissions that are not associated with a particular user, group, or service and are intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it.
      • can be used for EC2 application access and Cross-account access
    • IAM Best Practices
  • Cognito
    • provides authentication, authorization, and user management for the web and mobile apps.
    • User pools are user directories that provide sign-up and sign-in options for the app users.
    • Identity pools enable you to grant the users access to other AWS services.
  • Key Management Services – KMS encryption service
    • for key management and envelope encryption
    • provides encryption at rest and does not handle encryption in transit.
  • Amazon Certificate Manager – ACM
    • helps easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates for use with AWS services and internally connected resources.
  • AWS Secrets Manager
    • helps protect secrets needed to access applications, services, and IT resources.
    • supports automatic rotations of secrets
  • Secrets Manager vs Systems Manager Parameter Store for secrets management
    • Secrets Manager supports automatic credentials rotation and is integrated with Lambda and other services like RDS, and DynamoDB.
    • Systems Manager Parameter Store provides free standard parameters and is cost-effective as compared to Secrets Manager.

Front-end Web and Mobile

  • API Gateway
    • is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.
    • Powerful, flexible authentication mechanisms, such as AWS IAM policies, Lambda authorizer functions, and Amazon Cognito user pools.
    • supports Canary release deployments for safely rolling out changes.
    • define usage plans to meter, restrict third-party developer access, configure throttling, and quota limits on a per API key basis
    • integrates with AWS X-Ray for understanding and triaging performance latencies.
    • API Gateway CORS allows cross-domain calls
  • Amplify
    • is a complete solution that lets frontend web and mobile developers easily build, ship, and host full-stack applications on AWS, with the flexibility to leverage the breadth of AWS services as use cases evolve.

Management Tools

  • CloudWatch
    • monitoring to provide operational transparency
    • is extendable with custom metrics
    • does not capture memory metrics, by default, and can be done using the CloudWatch agent.
  • EventBridge
    • is a serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect applications with data from a variety of sources.
    • enables building loosely coupled and distributed event-driven architectures.
  • CloudTrail
    • helps enable governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of the AWS account.
    • helps to get a history of AWS API calls and related events for the AWS account.
  • CloudFormation
    • easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, and provision and update them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
    • Supports Serverless Application Model – SAM for the deployment of serverless applications including Lambda.
    • CloudFormation StackSets extends the functionality of stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and Regions with a single operation.

Integration Tools

  • Simple Queue Service
    • as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
    • as a decoupling service and provide resiliency
    • SQS features like visibility, and long poll vs short poll
    • provide scaling for the Auto Scaling group based on the SQS size.
    • SQS Standard vs SQS FIFO difference
      • FIFO provides exactly-once delivery but with low throughput
  • Simple Notification Service – SNS
    • is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients
    • Fanout pattern can be used to push messages to multiple subscribers.
  • Understand SQS as a message queuing service and SNS as a pub/sub notification service.
  • Know AWS Developer tools
    • CodeCommit is a secure, scalable, fully-managed source control service that helps to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories.
    • CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.
    • CodeDeploy helps automate code deployments to any instance, including EC2 instances and instances running on-premises.
    • CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps automate the release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
    • CodeArtifact is a fully managed artifact repository service that makes it easy for organizations of any size to securely store, publish, and share software packages used in their software development process.
  • X-Ray
    • helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications for e.g. built using a microservices lambda architecture

Analytics

  • Redshift as a business intelligence tool
  • Kinesis
    • for real-time data capture and analytics.
    • Integrates with Lambda functions to perform transformations
  • AWS Glue
    • fully-managed, ETL service that automates the time-consuming steps of data preparation for analytics

Networking

  • Does not cover much networking or designing networks, but be sure you understand VPC, Subnets, Routes, Security Groups, etc.

AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers

AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Security - Specialty SCS-C01 Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 55 Comments

AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) Exam Learning Path

I recently re-certified AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) after first clearing the same in 2019 and the format, and domains are pretty much the same however has been enhanced to cover all the latest services.

The AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) exam focuses on the AWS Security and Compliance concepts. It basically validates

  • An understanding of specialized data classifications and AWS data protection mechanisms.
  • An understanding of data-encryption methods and AWS mechanisms to implement them.
  • An understanding of secure Internet protocols and AWS mechanisms to implement them.
  • A working knowledge of AWS security services and features of services to provide a secure production environment.
  • Competency gained from two or more years of production deployment experience using AWS security services and features.
  • The ability to make tradeoff decisions with regard to cost, security, and deployment complexity given a set of application requirements. An understanding of security operations and risks

Refer to AWS Certified Security – Speciality Exam Guide

AWS Certified Security – Speciality (SCS-C01) Exam Resources

AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) Exam Summary

  • AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) exam has 65 questions to be solved in 170 minutes and I made sure I utilized the complete time.
  • AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) exam focuses a lot on Security & Compliance concepts involving Data Encryption at rest or in transit, Data protection, Auditing, Compliance and regulatory requirements, and automated remediation.
  • Each question usually touches multiple AWS services.
  • Most of the questions and answers options have a lot of prose and a lot of reading that needs to be done, so be sure you are prepared and manage your time well.
  • As always, mark the questions for review and move on and come back to them after you are done with all.
  • As always, having a rough architecture or mental picture of the setup helps focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able to eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach the right answer or at least have a 50% chance of getting it right.

AWS Certified Security – Speciality (SCS-C01) Exam Summary

Security, Identity & Compliance

  • Identity and Access Management (IAM)
    • IAM Roles to grant the service, users temporary access to AWS services.
      • IAM Role can be used to give cross-account access and usually  involves creating a role within the trusting account with a trust and permission policy and granting the user in the trusted account permissions to assume the trusting account role.
    • Identity Providers & Federation to grant external user identity (SAML or Open ID compatible IdPs) permissions to AWS resources without having to be created within the AWS account.
    • IAM Policies help define who has access & what actions can they perform.
  • Deep dive into Key Management Service (KMS). There would be quite a few questions on this.
    • is a managed encryption service that allows the creation and control of encryption keys to enable data encryption. 
    • uses Envelope Encryption which uses a master key to encrypt the data key, which is then used to encrypt the data.
    • Understand how KMS works
    • Understand IAM Policies, Key Policies, Grants to grant access.
      • Key policies are the primary way to control access to KMS keys. Unless the key policy explicitly allows it, you cannot use IAM policies to allow access to a KMS key.
    • are regional, however, supports multi-region keys, which are KMS keys in different AWS Regions that can be used interchangeably – as though you had the same key in multiple Regions.
    • KMS Multi-region keys
      • are AWS KMS keys in different AWS Regions that can be used interchangeably – as though having the same key in multiple Regions.
      • are not global and each multi-region key needs to be replicated and managed independently.
    • Understand the difference between CMK with generated and imported key material esp. in rotating keys
    • KMS usage with VPC Endpoint which ensures the communication between the VPC and KMS is conducted entirely within the AWS network.
    • KMS ViaService condition
  • AWS GuardDuty
    • is a threat detection service that continuously monitors the AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.
    • supports CloudTrail S3 data events and management event logs, DNS logs, EKS audit logs, and VPC flow logs.
  • AWS Inspector
    • is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS.
  • Amazon Macie
    • is a security service that uses machine learning to automatically discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in S3.
  • AWS Artifact is a central resource for compliance-related information that provides on-demand access to AWS’ security and compliance reports and select online agreements
  • AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
    • helps provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates for use with AWS services
    • to use an ACM Certificate with CloudFront, the certificate must be imported into the US East (N. Virginia) region.
    • is regional and you need to request certificates in all regions and associate individually in all regions.
    • does not support EC2 instances and private keys cannot be exported.
  • Cloud HSM
    • is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud
  • AWS Secrets Manager
    • protects secrets needed to access applications, services, etc.
    • enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle
    • supports automatic rotation of credentials for RDS, DocumentDB, etc.
  • Secrets Manager vs Systems Manager Parameter Store
    • Secrets Manager supports automatic rotation while SSM Parameter Store does not
    • Parameter Store is cost-effective as compared to Secrets Manager.
  • AWS Shield & Shield Advanced
    • for DDoS protection and integrates with Route 53, CloudFront, ALB, and Global Accelerator.
  • AWS WAF
    • protects from common attack techniques like SQL injection and XSS, Conditions based include IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, and URI strings.
    • integrates with CloudFront, ALB, and API Gateway.
    • supports Web ACLs and can block traffic based on IPs, Rate limits, and specific countries as well
    • allows IP match set rule to allow/deny specific IP addresses and rate-based rule to limit the number of requests.
    • logs can be sent to the CloudWatch Logs log group, an S3 bucket, or Kinesis Data Firehose.
  • AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation.
  • AWS Network Firewall is a stateful, fully managed, network firewall and intrusion detection and prevention service (IDS/IPS) for VPCs.
  • AWS Resource Access Manager helps you securely share your resources across AWS accounts, within your organization or organizational units (OUs), and with IAM roles and users for supported resource types.
  • AWS Signer is a fully managed code-signing service to ensure the trust and integrity of your code.
  • AWS Audit Manager to map your compliance requirements to AWS usage data with prebuilt and custom frameworks and automated evidence collection.
  • AWS Cognito esp. User Pools

Networking & Content Delivery

  • Virtual Private Connect – VPC
    • Security Groups, NACLs
      • NACLs are stateless, Security groups are stateful
      • NACLs at subnet level, Security groups at the instance level
      • NACLs need to open ephemeral ports for response traffic.
    • VPC Gateway Endpoints to provide access to S3 and DynamoDB
    • VPC Interface Endpoints or PrivateLink provide access to a variety of services like SQS, Kinesis, or Private APIs exposed through NLB.
    • VPC Peering
      • to enable communication between VPCs within the same or different regions.
      • Route tables need to be configured on either VPC for them to be able to communicate.
      • does not allow cross-region security group reference.
    • VPC Flow Logs help capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in the VPC
    • NAT Gateway provides managed NAT service that provides better availability, higher bandwidth, and requires less administrative effort.
  • Virtual Private Network – VPN & Direct Connect to establish connectivity a secured, low latency access between an on-premises data center and VPC.
    • IPSec VPN over Direct Connect to provide secure connectivity.
  • CloudFront 
    • integrates with S3 to improve latency, and performance.
    • provides multiple security features
    • supports encryption at rest and end-to-end encryption
      • Viewer Protocol Policy and Origin Protocol Policy to enforce HTTPS – can be configured to require that viewers use HTTPS to request the files so that connections are encrypted when CloudFront communicates with viewers.
      • Integrates with ACM and requires certs to be in the us-east-1 region
      • Underlying origin can be applied certs from ACM or issued by the third party.
    • CloudFront Origin Shield
      • helps improve the cache hit ratio and reduce the load on the origin.
      • requests from other regional caches would hit the Origin shield rather than the Origin.
      • should be placed at the regional cache and not in the edge cache
      • should be deployed to the region closer to the origin server
    • CloudFront provides Encryption at Rest
      • uses SSDs which are encrypted for edge location points of presence (POPs), and encrypted EBS volumes for Regional Edge Caches (RECs).
      • Function code and configuration are always stored in an encrypted format on the encrypted SSDs on the edge location POPs, and in other storage locations used by CloudFront.
    • Restricting access to content
  • Route 53
    • is a highly available and scalable DNS web service.
    • Resolver Query logging
      • logs the queries that originate in specified VPCs, on-premises resources that use inbound resolver or ones using outbound resolver as well as the responses to those DNS queries.
      • can be logged to CloudWatch logs, S3, and Kinesis Data Firehose
    • Route 53 DNSSEC secures DNS traffic, and helps protect a domain from DNS spoofing man-in-the-middle attacks. 
  • Elastic Load Balancer
    • End to End encryption
      • can be done NLB with TCP listener as pass through and terminating SSL on the EC2 instances
      • can be done with ALB with SSL termination and using HTTPS between ALB and EC2 instances
  • Gateway Load Balancer – GWLB
    • helps deploy, scale, and manage virtual appliances, such as firewalls, IDS/IPS systems, and deep packet inspection systems.

Management & Governance Tools

  • CloudWatch
  • CloudTrail for audit and governance
    • CloudTrail can be enabled for all regions at one go and supports log file integrity validation
    • With Organizations, the trail can be configured to log CloudTrail from all accounts to a central account.
  • AWS Config
    • AWS Config rules can be used to alert for any changes and Config can be used to check the history of changes. AWS Config can also help check approved AMIs compliance
    • allows you to remediate noncompliant resources using AWS Systems Manager Automation documents.
    • AWS Config -> EventBridge -> Lambda/SNS
  • CloudTrail vs Config
    • CloudTrail provides the WHO and Config provides the WHAT.
  • Systems Manager
    • Parameter Store provides secure, scalable, centralized, hierarchical storage for configuration data and secret management. Does not support secrets rotation. Use Secrets Manager instead
    • Systems Manager Patch Manager helps select and deploy the operating system and software patches automatically across large groups of EC2 or on-premises instances
    • Systems Manager Run Command provides safe, secure remote management of your instances at scale without logging into the servers, replacing the need for bastion hosts, SSH, or remote PowerShell
    • Session Manager provides secure and auditable instance management without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys.
  • AWS Organizations
    • is an account management service that enables consolidating multiple AWS accounts into an organization that can be managed centrally.
    • can configure Organization Trail to centrally log all CloudTrail logs.
    • Service Control Policies 
      • acts as guardrails and specify the services and actions that users and roles can use in the accounts that the SCP affects.
      • are similar to IAM permission policies except that they don’t grant any permissions.
  • AWS Trusted Advisor
    • inspects the AWS environment to make recommendations for system performance, saving money, availability, and closing security gaps
  • CloudFormation
    • Deletion Policy to prevent, retain, or backup RDS, EBS Volumes
    • Stack policy can prevent stack resources from being unintentionally updated or deleted during a stack update. Stack Policy only applies for Stack updates and not stack deletion.
  • Control Tower
    • to setup, govern, and secure a multi-account environment
    • strongly recommended guardrails cover EBS encryption

Storage & Databases

  • Simple Storage Service – S3
    • Undertstand S3 Security in detail
    • S3 Encryption supports both data at rest and data in transit encryption.
      • Data in transit encryption can be provided by enabling communication via SSL or using client-side encryption
      • Data at rest encryption can be provided using Server Side or Client Side encryption
      • Enforce S3 Encryption at Rest using default encryption of bucket policies
      • Enforce S3 encryption in transit using secureTransport in the S3 bucket policy
    • S3 permissions can be handled using
    • S3 Object Lock helps to store objects using a WORM model and can help prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely.
    • S3 Block Public Access provides controls across an entire AWS Account or at the individual S3 bucket level to ensure that objects never have public access, now and in the future.
    • S3 Access Points simplify data access for any AWS service or customer application that stores data in S3.
    • S3 Versioning with MFA Delete can be enabled on a bucket to ensure that data in the bucket cannot be accidentally overwritten or deleted.
    • S3 Access Analyzer monitors the access policies, ensuring that the policies provide only the intended access to your S3 resources.
  • EBS Encryption
  • Glacier Vault Lock
  • Relational Database Services – RDS
    • is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
    • supports the same encryption at rest methods as EBS
    • does not support enabling encryption after creation. Need to create a snapshot, copy the snapshot to an encrypted snapshot and restore it as an encrypted DB.

Compute

Integration Tools

  • Know how CloudWatch integration with SNS and Lambda can help in notification (Topics are not required to be in detail)

Whitepapers and articles

All the Best…

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Exam Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) Exam Learning Path

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam is the upgraded pattern of the previous Solution Architect – Professional SAP-C01 exam and was released in Nov. 2022.
  • SAP-C02 is quite similar to SAP-C01 but has included some new services.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam basically validates the ability to complete tasks within the scope of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

  • Design for organizational complexity
  • Design for new solutions
  • Continuously improve existing solutions
  • Accelerate workload migration and modernization

Refer to AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Exam Guide

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Exam Domains

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) Exam Resources

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) Exam Summary

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam has 75 questions to be solved in 170 minutes.
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) focuses a lot on concepts and services related to Architecture & Design, Scalability, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Migration, Security, and Cost Control.
  • Each question mainly touches multiple AWS services.
  • Questions and answers options have a lot of prose and a lot of reading that needs to be done, so be sure you are prepared and manage your time well.
  • As always, mark the questions for review and move on and come back to them after you are done with all.
  • As always, having a rough architecture or mental picture of the setup helps focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able to eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach the right answer or at least have a 50% chance of getting it right.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) Exam Topics

Storage

  • Simple Storage Service – S3
    • S3 Permissions & S3 Data Protection
      • S3 bucket policies to control access to VPC Endpoints and provide cross-account access.
    • S3 Storage Classes & Lifecycle policies
      • covers S3 Standard, Infrequent access, intelligent tier, and Glacier for archival and object transitions & deletions for cost management.
    • S3 Performance
    • S3 Security
      • S3 supports encryption using KMS
      • S3 supports Object Lock and Glacier supports Vault lock to prevent the deletion of objects, especially required for compliance requirements.
      • CORS allows client web applications loaded in one domain access to the restricted resources to be requested from another domain.
    • S3 supports the same and cross-region replication for disaster recovery.
    • supports S3 Select feature to query selective data from a single object.
    • S3 Event Notification enables notifications to be triggered when certain events happen in the bucket and support SNS, SQS, and Lambda as the destination.
  • Elastic Block Store
    • EBS Backup using snapshots for HA and Disaster recovery
    • Data Lifecycle Manager can be used to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of snapshots taken to back up the EBS volumes.
  • Storage Gateway
    • supports File Gateways and Volume Gateways
    • File Gateways provides a file interface into S3 and allows storing and retrieving of objects in S3 using industry-standard file protocols such as NFS and SMB.
  • Elastic File System – EFS
    • provides fully managed, scalable, serverless, shared, and cost-optimized file storage for use with AWS and on-premises resources.
    • supports cross-region replication for disaster recovery
    • supports storage classes like S3
    • supports only Linux-based AMIs
  • AWS Transfer Family
    • provides a secure transfer service (FTP, SFTP, FTPs) that helps transfer files into and out of AWS storage services.
    • supports transferring data from or to S3 and EFS.
  • FSx for Lustre
    • managed, cost-effective service to launch and run the HPC high-performance Lustre file system.
  • Understand different use cases for S3 vs EBS vs EFS

Database

  • DynamoDB
    • provides a fully managed NoSQL database service with fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.
    • supports following capacity modes
      • Provisioned – the maximum amount of capacity in terms of reads/writes per second that an application can consume from a table or index
      • On-demand – serves thousands of requests per second without capacity planning.
    • DynamoDB Auto Scaling can be used to handle peaks or bursts.
    • DynamoDB Streams for tracking changes
    • TTL to expire objects automatically and cost-effectively.
    • Global tables for multi-master, active-active inter-region storage needs.
    • Global tables do not support strong global consistency
    • DynamoDB Accelerator – DAX for seamless caching to reduce the load on DynamoDB for read-heavy requirements.
  • RDS
    • supports cross-region read replicas ideal for disaster recovery with low RTO and RPO.
    • provides RDS proxy for effective database connection polling
    • RDS Multi-AZ vs Read Replicas
  • Aurora
    • fully managed, MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, relational database engine
    • Aurora Serverless provides on-demand, autoscaling configuration.
    • Aurora Global Database consists of one primary AWS Region where the data is mastered, and up to five read-only, secondary AWS Regions.
  • Understand DynamoDB Global Tables vs Aurora Global Databases
  • DocumentDB as a replacement for MongoDB
  • Keyspaces as a replacement for Cassandra

Data Migration & Transfer

  • Cloud Migration Services
    • Cloud Migration (hint: make sure you understand the difference between rehost, replatform, and rearchitect)
    • Server Migration Service helps to migrate servers and applications.
    • Database Migration Service
      • enables quick and secure data migration with minimal to zero downtime
      • supports Full and Change Data Capture – CDC migration to support continuous replication for zero downtime migration.
      • homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations (using SCT) between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Aurora.
    • Snow Family
      • Ideal for one-time huge data transfers usually for use cases with limited bandwidth from on-premises to AWS.
    • Understand use cases for data transfer using VPN (quick, slow, uses the Internet), Direct Connect (time to set up, private, recurring transfers), Snow Family (moderate time, private, one-time huge data transfers)
  • Application Discovery Service
    • Agent ones can be used for hyper-v and physical services
    • Agentless can be used for VMware but does not track processes
  • AWS Migration Hub provides a central location to collect server and application inventory data for the assessment, planning, and tracking of migrations to AWS and also helps accelerate application modernization following migration.

Networking & Content Delivery

  • VPC – Virtual Private Cloud
    • Security Groups, NACLs
      • NACLs are stateless and need to open ephemeral ports for response traffic.
    • VPC Gateway Endpoints to provide access to S3 and DynamoDB
    • VPC Interface Endpoints or PrivateLink provide access to a variety of services like SQS, Kinesis, or Private APIs exposed through NLB.
    • VPC Peering to enable communication between VPCs within the same or different regions.
    • VPC Peering does not support overlapping CIDRs while PrivateLink does as only the endpoint is exposed.
    • VPC Flow Logs to track network traffic
    • NAT Gateway provides managed NAT service that provides better availability, higher bandwidth, and requires less administrative effort.
  • Route 53
    • Routing Policies
      • focus on Weighted, Latency, and failover routing policies
      • failover routing provides active-passive configuration for disaster recovery while the others are active-active configurations.
    • Route 53 Resolver
      • Outbound endpoint for AWS -> On-premises DNS query resolution
      • Inbound endpoint for On-premises DNS query resolution
  • CloudFront
    • fully managed, fast CDN service that speeds up the distribution of static, dynamic web or streaming content to end-users.
    • supports Origin Groups for multiple origins providing failover capability with primary and secondary origins.
    • does not support Auto Scaling as an origin
    • supports Geo-restriction
    • supports Lambda@Edge and Cloud Functions to execute code closer to the user.
    • Lambda@Edge can be used for quick auth checks, and redirect users based on request data.
    • Security can be enhanced by whitelisting CloudFront IPs or adding a custom header in CloudFront and verifying it in ALB.
  • API Gateway
    • supports throttling, caching and helps define usage plans with API keys to identify clients
    • provides regional and edge-optimized endpoint types
    • supports CORS for cross-domain calls.
    • supports authentication mechanisms, such as AWS IAM policies, Lambda authorizer functions, and Amazon Cognito user pools.
    • provide serverless architecture with Lambda.
  • Load Balancer – ELB, ALB and NLB
  • Global Accelerator
    • optimizes the path to applications to keep packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low.
    • helps improve the performance of the applications by lowering first-byte latency
    • provides 2 static IP addresses
    • does not preserve the client’s IP address with NLB
  • Transit Gateway or Transit VPC
    • is a network transit hub that can be used to interconnect VPCs and on-premises networks via Direct Connect or VPN.
    • Transit Gateway is regional and Transit Gateway Peering needs to be configured to peer regional Transit gateways.
  • Placement Groups
    • Cluster placement group with Enhanced Networking for HPC
    • Spread placement group for fault tolerance and high availability.
  • Direct Connect & VPN
    • provide on-premises to AWS connectivity
    • Understand Direct Connect vs VPN
    • VPN can provide a cost-effective, quick failover for Direct Connect.
    • VPN over Direct Connect provides a secure dedicated connection and requires a public virtual interface.
    • Direct Connect Gateway is a global network device that helps establish connectivity that spans VPCs spread across multiple AWS Regions with a single Direct Connect connection.

Security, Identity & Compliance

  • AWS Identity and Access Management
  • AWS Shield & Shield Advanced
    • for DDoS protection and integrates with Route 53, CloudFront, ALB, and Global Accelerator.
  • AWS WAF
    • protects from common attack techniques like SQL injection and XSS, Conditions based include IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, and URI strings.
    • integrates with CloudFront, ALB, and API Gateway.
    • supports Web ACLs and can block traffic based on IPs, Rate limits, and specific countries as well.
  • ACM – AWS Certificate Manager
    • helps easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates
    • is regional and you need to request certificates in all regions and associate individually in all regions.
    • does not provide certificates for EC2 instances.
  • AWS KMS – Key Management Service
    • managed encryption service that allows the creation and control of encryption keys to enable data encryption.
    • KMS Multi-region keys
      • are AWS KMS keys in different AWS Regions that can be used interchangeably – as though having the same key in multiple Regions.
      • are not global and each multi-region key needs to be replicated and managed independently.
  • Secrets Manager
    • helps protect secrets needed to access applications, services, and IT resources.
    • Secrets Manager vs SSM Parameter Store.
      • Secrets Manager supports random generation and automatic rotation of secrets, which is not provided by SSM Parameter Store.
      • Costs more than SSM Parameter Store.
  • Amazon Macie is a data security and data privacy service that uses ML and pattern matching to discover and protect sensitive data in S3.
  • AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation.

Compute

  • EC2
  • Auto Scaling provides the ability to ensure a correct number of EC2 instances are always running to handle the load of the application
  • Lambda
    • offers Serverless computing 
    • Lambda running in VPC requires NAT Gateway to communicate with external public services
    • Lambda CPU can be increased by increasing memory only.
    • helps define reserved concurrency limits to reduce the impact
    • Lambda Alias now supports canary deployments
    • Lambda supports docker containers
    • Reserved Concurrency guarantees the maximum number of concurrent instances for the function
    • Provisioned Concurrency provides greater control over the performance of serverless applications and helps keep functions initialized and hyper-ready to respond in double-digit milliseconds.
    • Lambda Best Practices esp. handling the database connection code.
  • ECS – Elastic Container Service
    • container management service that supports Docker containers
    • supports two launch types
      • EC2 and
      • Fargate which provides the serverless capability
    • For least privilege, the role should be assigned to the Task.
    • awsvpc network mode gives ECS tasks the same networking properties as EC2 instances.

Disaster Recovery

  • Disaster Recovery whitepaper, although outdated, make sure you understand the differences and implementation for each type esp. pilot light, warm standby w.r.t RTO, and RPO.
  • Compute
    • Make components available in an alternate region,
    • Backup and Restore using either snapshots or AMIs that can be restored.
    • Use minimal low-scale capacity running which can be scaled once the failover happens
    • Use fully running compute in active-active confirmation with health checks.
    • CloudFormation to create, and scale infra as needed
  • Storage
    • S3 and EFS support cross-region replication
    • DynamoDB supports Global tables for multi-master, active-active inter-region storage needs.
    • Aurora Global Database provides cross-region read replicas and failover capabilities.
    • RDS supports cross-region read replicas which can be promoted to master in case of a disaster. This can be done using Route 53, CloudWatch, and lambda functions.
  • Network
    • Route 53 failover routing with health checks to failover across regions.
    • CloudFront Origin Groups support primary and secondary endpoints with failover.

Management & Governance tools

  • AWS Organizations
  • Systems Manager
    • AWS Systems Manager and its various services like parameter store, patch manager
    • Parameter Store provides secure, scalable, centralized, hierarchical storage for configuration data and secret management. Does not support secrets rotation. Use Secrets Manager instead
    • Session Manager provides secure and auditable instance management without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys.
    • Patch Manager helps automate the process of patching managed instances with both security-related and other types of updates.
  • CloudWatch
  • CloudTrail
    • for audit and governance
    • With Organizations, the trail can be configured to log CloudTrail from all accounts to a central account.
  • CloudFormation
    • Handle disaster Recovery by automating the infra to replicate the environment across regions.
    • Deletion Policy to prevent, retain, or backup RDS, EBS Volumes
    • Stack policy can prevent stack resources from being unintentionally updated or deleted during a stack update. Stack Policy only applies for Stack updates and not stack deletion.
    • StackSets helps to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and Regions with a single operation.
  • Control Tower
    • to setup, govern, and secure a multi-account environment
    • strongly recommended guardrails cover EBS encryption
  • Service Catalog
    • allows organizations to create and manage catalogues of IT services that are approved for use on AWS with minimal permissions.
  • Trusted Advisor
    • helps with cost optimization and service limits in addition to security, performance and fault tolerance.
  • Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS resources for the workloads to reduce costs and improve performance by using machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics.
  • AWS Budgets to see usage-to-date and current estimated charges from AWS, set limits and provide alerts or notifications.
  • Cost Allocation Tags can be used to organize AWS resources, and cost allocation tags to track the AWS costs on a detailed level.
  • Cost Explorer helps visualize, understand, manage and forecast the AWS costs and usage over time.
  • Amazon WorkSpaces provides a virtual workspace for varied worker types, especially hybrid and remote workers.

Integration Tools

  • SQS in terms of loose coupling and scaling.
    • Difference between SQS Standard and FIFO esp. with throughput and order
    • SQS supports dead letter queues
  • CloudWatch integration with SNS and Lambda for notifications.

Analytics

  • Kinesis
  • OpenSearch (Elasticsearch) provides a managed search solution.
  • Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, and serverless time-series database service that makes it easier to store and analyze trillions of events per day.
  • Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center.
  • Amazon Pinpoint is a flexible, scalable marketing communications service that helps connects customers over email, SMS, push notifications or voice
  • Amazon Rekognition offers pre-trained and customizable computer vision capabilities to extract information and insights from images and videos
  • Amazon Transcribe to Voice to Text conversion

Architecture & Design Flows

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Learning Path

AWS Solutions Architect - Associate Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Learning Path

  • AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 exam is the latest AWS exam released on 30th August 2022 and has replaced the previous AWS Solutions Architect – SAA-C02 certification exam.
  • It basically validates the ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to design, architect, and deploy secure, cost-effective, and robust applications on AWS technologies
  • The exam also validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks:
    • Design solutions that incorporate AWS services to meet current business requirements and future projected needs
    • Design architectures that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized
    • Review existing solutions and determine improvements

Refer AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Guide 

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Summary

  • SAA-C03 exam consists of 65 questions in 170 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well prepared.
  • You can get an additional 30 minutes if English is your second language by requesting Exam Accommodations. It might not be needed for Associate exams, but is helpful for Professional and Specialty ones.
  • SAA-C03 Exam covers the design and architecture aspects in deep, so you must be able to visualize the architecture, even draw them out or prepare a mental picture just to understand how it would work and how different services relate.
  • AWS SAA-C03 exam concepts cover solutions that fall within AWS Well-Architected framework to cover scalable, highly available, cost-effective, performant, and resilient pillars.
  • If you had been preparing for the SAA-C02, SAA-C03 is pretty much similar to SAA-C02 except for the addition of some new services Aurora Serverless, AWS Global Accelerator, FSx for Windows, and FSx for Lustre.
  • AWS exams are available online, and I took the online one. Just make sure you have a proper place to take the exam with no disturbance and nothing around you.
  • Also, if you are taking the AWS Online exam for the first time try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Resources

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Topics

Networking

  • Virtual Private Network – VPC
    • Create a VPC from scratch with public, private, and dedicated subnets with proper route tables, security groups, and NACLs.
    • Understand what a CIDR is and address patterns.
    • Subnets are public or private depending on whether they can route traffic directly through an Internet gateway
    • Understand how communication happens between the Internet, Public subnets, Private subnets, NAT, Bastion, etc.
    • Bastion (also referred to as a Jump server) can be used to securely access instances in the private subnets.
    • Create two-tier architecture with application in public and database in private subnets
    • Create three-tier architecture with web servers in public, application, and database servers in private. (hint: focus on security group configuration with least privilege)
  • Security Groups and NACLs
    • Security Groups are Stateful vs NACLs are stateless.
    • Also, only NACLs provide the ability to deny or block IPs
  • NAT Gateway or Instances
    • help enables instances in a private subnet to connect to the Internet.
    • Understand the difference between NAT Gateway & NAT Instance. 
    • NAT Gateway is AWS-managed and is scalable and highly available.
  • VPC endpoints
    • enable the creation of a private connection between VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink using its private IP address without needing an Internet or NAT Gateway.
    • VPC Gateway Endpoints supports S3 and DynamoDB.
    • VPC Interface Endpoints OR Private Links supports others
  • VPN and Direct Connect for on-premises to AWS connectivity
    • VPN provides a quick, cost-effective, secure channel, however, routes through the internet and does not provide consistent throughput
    • Direct Connect provides consistent, dedicated throughput without Internet, however, requires time to set up and is not cost-effective.
  • Understand Data Migration techniques at a high level
    • VPN and Direct Connect for continuous, frequent data transfers.
    • Snow Family is ideal for one-time, cost-effective huge data transfer.
    • Choose a technique depending on the available bandwidth, data transfer needed, time available, encryption, one-time or continuous.
  • CloudFront
    • fully managed, fast CDN service that speeds up the distribution of static, dynamic web, or streaming content to end-users
    • S3 frontend by CloudFront provides low latency, performant experience for global users.
    • provides static and dynamic caching for both AWS and on-premises origin.
  • Global Accelerator
    • optimizes the path to applications to keep packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low.
    • helps improve the performance by lowering first-byte latency
    • provides 2 static IP address
  • Know CloudFront vs Global Accelerator
  • Route 53
    • highly available and scalable DNS web service.
    • Health checks and failover routing helps provide resilient and active-passive solutions
    • Route 53 Routing Policies and their use cases (hint: focus on weighted, latency, geolocation, failover routing)
  • Elastic Load Balancer
    • Focus on ALB and NLB
    • Differences between ALB vs NLB
      • ALB is layer 7 vs NLB is layer 4
      • ALB provides content-based, host-based, path-based routing
      • ALB provides dynamic port mapping which allows the same tasks to be hosted on the ECS node
      • NLB provides low latency, the ability to scale rapidly, and a static IP address
      • ALB works with WAF while NLB does not.
    • Gateway Load Balancer – GWLB
      • helps deploy, scale, and manage virtual appliances, such as firewalls, IDS/IPS, and deep packet inspection systems.

Security

  • Identity Access Management – IAM
    • IAM role
      • provides permissions that are not associated with a particular user, group, or service and are intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it.
      • can be used for EC2 application access and Cross-account access
    • IAM identity providers and federation and use cases – Although did not see much in SAA-C03
  • Key Management Services – KMS encryption service
  • AWS WAF
    • integrates with CloudFront, and ALB to provide protection against Cross-site scripting (XSS), and SQL injection attacks.
    • provides IP blocking and geo-protection, rate limiting, etc.
  • AWS Shield
    • managed DDoS protection service
    • integrates with CloudFront, ALB, and Route 53
    • Advanced provides additional detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, near real-time visibility into attacks
  • AWS GuardDuty
    • managed threat detection service and provides Malware protection
  • AWS Inspector
    • is a vulnerability management service that continuously scans the AWS workloads for vulnerabilities
  • AWS Secrets Manager
    • helps protect secrets needed to access applications, services, and IT resources.
    • supports rotations of secrets, which Systems Manager Parameter Stores does not support.
  • Disaster Recovery whitepaper
    • Be sure you know the different recovery types with impact on RTO/RPO.

Storage

  • Understand various storage options S3, EBS, Instance store, EFS, Glacier, FSx, and what are the use cases and anti-patterns for each
  • Instance Store
    •  is physically attached  to the EC2 instance and provides the lowest latency and highest IOPS
  • Elastic Block Storage – EBS
    • EBS volume types and their use cases in terms of IOPS and throughput. SSD for IOPS and HDD for throughput
    • EBS Snapshots
      • Backups are automated, snapshots are manual
      • Can be used to encrypt an unencrypted EBS volume
    • Multi-Attach EBS feature allows attaching an EBS volume to multiple instances within the same AZ only.
    • EBS fast snapshot restore feature helps ensure that the EBS volumes created from a snapshot are fully-initialized at creation and instantly deliver all of their provisioned performance.
  • Simple Storage Service – S3
    • S3 storage classes with lifecycle policies
      • Understand the difference between SA Standard vs SA IA vs SA IA One Zone in terms of cost and durability
    • S3 Data Protection
      • S3 Client-side encryption encrypts data before storing it in S3
    • S3 features including
      • S3 provides cost-effective static website hosting. However, it does not support HTTPS endpoint. Can be integrated with CloudFront for HTTPS, caching, performance, and low-latency access.
      • S3 versioning provides protection against accidental overwrites and deletions. Used with MFA Delete feature.
      • S3 Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download provide access without needing AWS credentials.
      • S3 CORS allows cross-domain calls
      • S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between your client and an S3 bucket.
      • S3 Event Notifications to trigger events on various S3 events like objects added or deleted. Supports SQS, SNS, and Lambda functions.
      • Integrates with Amazon Macie to detect PII data
      • Replication that supports the same and cross-region replication required versioning to be enabled.
      • Integrates with Athena to analyze data in S3 using standard SQL.
  • Glacier
    • as archival storage with various retrieval patterns
    • Glacier Instant Retrieval allows retrieval in milliseconds. 
    • Glacier Expedited retrieval allows object retrieval within mins.
  • Storage gateway and its different types.
    • Cached Volume Gateway provides access to frequently accessed data while using AWS as the actual storage
    • Stored Volume gateway uses AWS as a backup, while the data is being stored on-premises as well
    • File Gateway supports SMB protocol
  • FSx is easy and cost-effective to launch and run popular file systems.
    • FSx provides two file systems to choose from:
    • Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
      • works with both Linux and Windows
      • provides Windows File System features including integration with Active Directory.
    • Amazon FSx for Lustre
      • for high-performance workloads
      • works with only Linux
  • Elastic File System – EFS
    • simple, fully managed, scalable, serverless, and cost-optimized file storage for use with AWS Cloud and on-premises resources.
    • provides shared volume across multiple EC2 instances, while EBS can be attached to a single instance within the same AZ or EBS Multi-Attach can be attached to multiple instances within the same AZ
    • supports the NFS protocol, and is compatible with Linux-based AMIs
    • supports cross-region replication, storage classes for cost.
  • AWS Transfer Family
    • secure transfer service that helps transfer files into and out of AWS storage services using FTP, SFTP and FTPS protocol.
  • Difference between EBS vs S3 vs EFS
  • Difference between EBS vs Instance Store
  • Would recommend referring Storage Options whitepaper, although a bit dated 90% still holds right

Compute

  • Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2
  • Auto Scaling and ELB
    • Auto Scaling provides the ability to ensure a correct number of EC2 instances are always running to handle the load of the application
    • Elastic Load Balancer allows the incoming traffic to be distributed automatically across multiple healthy EC2 instances
  • Autoscaling & ELB
    • work together to provide High Availability and Scalability.
    • Span both ELB and Auto Scaling across Multi-AZs to provide High Availability
    • Do not span across regions. Use Route 53 or Global Accelerator to route traffic across regions.
  • EC2 Instance Purchase Types – Reserved, Scheduled Reserved, On-demand, and Spot and their use cases
    • Reserved instances provide cost benefits for long terms requirements over On-demand instances for continuous persistent load
    • Scheduled Reserved Instances for load with fixed scheduled and time interval
    • Spot instances provide cost benefits for temporary, fault-tolerant, spiky load
  • EC2 Placement Groups
    • Cluster placement groups provide low latency and high throughput communication
    • Spread placement group provides high availability
  • Lambda and serverless architecture, its features, and use cases.
    • Lambda integrated with API Gateway to provide a serverless, highly scalable, cost-effective architecture
  • Elastic Container Service – ECS with its ability to deploy containers and microservices architecture.
    • ECS role for tasks can be provided through taskRoleArn
    • ALB provides dynamic port mapping to allow multiple same tasks on the same node.
  • Elastic Kubernetes Service – EKS
    • managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises data centers
    • ideal for migration of an existing workload on Kubernetes
  • Elastic Beanstalk at a high level, what it provides, and its ability to get an application running quickly.

Databases

  • Understand relational and NoSQL data storage options which include RDS, DynamoDB, and Aurora with their use cases
  • Relational Database Service – RDS
    • Read Replicas vs Multi-AZ
      • Read Replicas for scalability, Multi-AZ for High Availability
      • Multi-AZ are regional only
      • Read Replicas can span across regions and can be used for disaster recovery
    • Understand Automated Backups, underlying volume types (which are the same as EBS volume types)
  • Aurora
    • provides multiple read replicas and replicates 6 copies of data across AZs
    • Aurora Serverless
      • provides a highly scalable cost-effective database solution
      • automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on the application’s needs.
      • supports only MySQL and PostgreSQL
  • DynamoDB
    • provides low latency performance, a key-value store
    • is not a relational database
    • DynamoDB DAX provides caching for DynamoDB
    • DynamoDB TTL helps expire data in DynamoDB without any cost or consuming any write throughput.
  • ElastiCache use cases, mainly for caching performance

Integration Tools

  • Simple Queue Service
    • as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
    • as a decoupling service and provide resiliency
    • SQS features like visibility, and long poll vs short poll
    • provide scaling for the Auto Scaling group based on the SQS size.
    • SQS Standard vs SQS FIFO difference
      • FIFO provides exactly-once delivery but with low throughput
  • Simple Notification Service – SNS
    • is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients
    • Fanout pattern can be used to push messages to multiple subscribers

Analytics

  • Redshift as a business intelligence tool
  • Kinesis
    • for real-time data capture and analytics.
    • Integrates with Lambda functions to perform transformations
  • AWS Glue
    • fully-managed, ETL service that automates the time-consuming steps of data preparation for analytics

Management Tools

  • CloudWatch
    • monitoring to provide operational transparency
    • is extendable with custom metrics
    • CloudWatch -> (Subscription filter) -> Kinesis Data Firehose -> S3
  • CloudTrail
    • helps enable governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of the AWS account.
    • helps to get a history of AWS API calls and related events for the AWS account.
  • CloudFormation
    • easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, and provision and update them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
  • AWS Config
    • fully managed service that provides AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security, compliance, and governance.

AWS Whitepapers & Cheat sheets

Finally, All the Best 🙂

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Learning Path

I recently certified/recertified for the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01). Frankly, Networking is something that I am still diving deep into and I just about managed to get through. So a word of caution, this exam is inline or tougher than the professional exams, especially for the reason that some of the Networking concepts covered are not something you can get your hands dirty with easily.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam focuses on the AWS Networking concepts. It basically validates

  • Design and develop hybrid and cloud-based networking solutions by using AWS
  • Implement core AWS networking services according to AWS best practices
  • Operate and maintain hybrid and cloud-based network architecture for all AWS services
  • Use tools to deploy and automate hybrid and cloud-based AWS networking tasks
  • Implement secure AWS networks using AWS native networking constructs and services

Refer to AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty Exam Guide AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Domains

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) Exam Resources

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) Exam Summary

  • AWS Certified Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam has 65 questions to be solved in 170 minutes and I made sure I utilized the complete time.
  • AWS Certified Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam focuses a lot on Networking concepts involving Hybrid Connectivity with Direct Connect, VPN, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect Gateway, and a bit of VPC, Route 53, ALB, NLB & CloudFront.
  • Each question mainly touches multiple AWS services.
  • Questions and answers options have a lot of prose and a lot of reading that needs to be done, so be sure you are prepared and manage your time well.
  • As always, mark the questions for review and move on and come back to them after you are done with all.
  • As always, having a rough architecture or mental picture of the setup helps focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able to eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach the right answer or at least have a 50% chance of getting it right.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) Exam Topics

Networking & Content Delivery

  • Virtual Private Cloud – VPC
    • Understand VPC, Subnets
    • AWS allows extending the VPC by adding a secondary VPC
    • Understand Security Groups, NACLs
    • VPC Flow Logs
      • help capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in the VPC and can help in monitoring the traffic or troubleshooting any connectivity issues
      • NACLs are stateless and how it is reflected in VPC Flow Logs
        • If ACCEPT followed by REJECT, inbound was accepted by Security Groups and ACLs. However, rejected by NACLs outbound
        • If REJECT, inbound was either rejected by Security Groups OR NACLs.
      • Use pkt-dstaddr instead of dstaddr to track the destination address as dstaddr refers to the primary ENI address always and not the secondary addresses.
      • Pattern: VPC Flow Logs -> CloudWatch Logs -> (Subscription) -> Kinesis Data Firehose -> S3/Open Search.
    • DHCP Option Sets esp. how to resolve DNS from both on-premises data center and AWS.
    • VPC Peering
      • helps point-to-point connectivity between 2 VPCs which can be in the same or different regions and accounts.
      • know VPC Peering Limitations esp. it does not allow overlapping CIDRs and transitive routing.
    • Placement Groups determine how the instances are placed on the underlying hardware
    • VRF – Virtual Routing & Forwarding can be used to route traffic to the same customer gateway from multiple VPCs, that can be overlapping.
  • VPC Endpoints
    • VPC Gateway Endpoints for connectivity with S3 & DynamoDB i.e. VPC -> VPC Gateway Endpoints -> S3/DynamoDB.
    • VPC Interface Endpoints or Private Links for other AWS services and custom hosted services i.e. VPC -> VPC Interface Endpoint OR Private Link -> S3/Kinesis/SQS/CloudWatch/Any custom endpoint.
    • S3 gateway endpoints cannot be accessed through VPC Peering, VPN, or Direct Connect. Need HTTP proxy to route traffic.
    • S3 Private Link can be accessed through VPC Peering, VPN, or Direct Connect. Need to use an endpoint-specific DNS name.
    • VPC endpoint policy can be configured to control which S3 buckets can be accessed and the S3 Bucket policy can be used to control which VPC (includes all VPC Endpoints) or VPC Endpoint can access it.
    • Private Link Patterns
  • VPC Network Access Analyzer
    • helps identify unintended network access to the resources on AWS.
  • Transit Gateway
    • helps consolidate the AWS VPC routing configuration for a region with a hub-and-spoke architecture.
    • Appliance Mode ensures that network flows are symmetrically routed to the same AZ and network appliance
    • Transit Gateway Connect attachment can be used to connect SD-WAN to AWS Cloud. This supports GRE.
    • Transit Gateways are regional and Peering can connect Transit Gateways across regions.
    • Transit Gateway Network Manager includes events and metrics to monitor the quality of the global network, both in AWS and on-premises.
  • VPC Routing Priority
  • NAT Gateways
    • for HA, Scalable, Outgoing traffic. Does not support Security Groups or ICMP pings.
    • times out the connection if it is idle for 350 seconds or more. To prevent the connection from being dropped, initiate more traffic over the connection or enable TCP keepalive on the instance with a value of less than 350 seconds.
    • supports Private NAT Gateways for internal communication.
  • Virtual Private Network
    • to establish connectivity between the on-premises data center and AWS VPC
  • Direct Connect
    • to establish connectivity between the on-premises data center and AWS VPC and Public Services
    • Direct Connect connections – Dedicated and Hosted connections
    • Understand how to create a Direct Connect connection
      • LOA-CFA provides the details for partners to connect to the AWS Direct Connect location
    • Virtual interfaces options – Private Virtual Interface for VPC resources and Public Virtual Interface for Public Resources
      • Private VIF is for resources within a VPC
      • Public VIF is for AWS public resources
      • Private VIF has a limit of 100 routes and Public VIF of 1000 routes. Summarize the routes if you need to configure more.
    • Understand setup Private and Public VIF
    • Understand High Availability options based on cost and time i.e. Second Direct Connect connection OR VPN connection
    • Direct Connect Gateway
      • it provides a way to connect to multiple VPCs from an on-premises data center using the same Direct Connect connection.
      • can connect to VGW or TGW.
    • Understand Active/Passive Direct Connect 
    • supports MACsec which delivers native, near line-rate, point-to-point encryption ensuring that data communications between AWS and the data center, office, or colocation facility remain protected.
    • Understand Route Propagation, propagation priority, BGP connectivity
      • BGP prefers the shortest AS PATH to get to the destination. Traffic from the VPC to on-premises uses the primary router. This is because the secondary router advertises a longer AS-PATH.
      • AS PATH prepending doesn’t work when the Direct Connect connections are in different AWS Regions than the VPC.
      • AS PATH works from AWS to on-premises and Local Pref from on-premises to AWS
      • Use Local Preference BGP community tags to configure Active/Passive when the connections are from different regions. The higher tag has a higher preference for 7224:7300 > 7224:7100
      • NO_EXPORT works only for Public VIFs
      • 7224:9100, 7224:9200, and 7224:9300 apply only to public prefixes. Usually used to restrict traffic to regions. Can help control if routes should propagate to the local Region only, all Regions within a continent, or all public Regions.
        • 7224:9100 — Local AWS Region
        • 7224:9200 — All AWS Regions for a continent, North America–wide, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa
        • 7224:9300 — Global (all public AWS Regions)
      • 7224:8100 — Routes that originate from the same AWS Region in which the AWS Direct Connect point of presence is associated.
      • 7224:8200 — Routes that originate from the same continent with which the AWS Direct Connect point of presence is associated.
      • No-tag — Global (all public AWS Regions).
  • Route 53
    • provides a highly available and scalable DNS web service.
    • Routing Policies and their use cases Focus on Weighted,  Latency, and Failover routing policies.
    • supports Alias resource record sets, which enables routing of queries to a CloudFront distribution, Elastic Beanstalk, ELB, an S3 bucket configured as a static website, or another Route 53 resource record set.
    • CNAME does not support zone apex or root records. 
    • Route 53 DNSSEC
      • secures DNS traffic, and helps protect a domain from DNS spoofing man-in-the-middle attacks. 
      • Requirements
        • Asymmetric Customer Managed Keys
        • us-east-1 with ECC_NIST_P256 spec
    • Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall
      • protection for outbound DNS requests from the VPCs and can monitor and control the domains that the applications can query.
      • allows you to define allow and deny list.
      • can be used for DNS exfiltration.
      • supports FirewallFailOpen configuration which determines how Route 53 Resolver handles queries during failures.
        • disabled, favors security over availability and blocks queries that it is unable to evaluate properly.
        • enabled, favors availability over security and allows queries to proceed if it is unable to properly evaluate them.
    • Route 53 Resolver (Hybrid DNS)
      • Inbound Endpoint for On-premises -> AWS
      • Outbound Endpoint for AWS -> On-premises
    • Route 53 DNS Query Logging
      • Can be logged to CloudWatch logs, S3, and Kinesis Data Firehose
    • Route 53 Resolver rules take precedence over privately hosted zones.
    • Route 53 Split View DNS helps to have the same DNS to access a site externally and internally
    • Know the Domain Migration process
  • CloudFront
    • provides a fully managed, fast CDN service that speeds up the distribution of static, dynamic web, or streaming content to end-users.
    • supports geo-restriction, WAF & AWS Shield for protection.
    • provides Cloud Functions (Edge location) & Lambda@Edge (Regional location) to execute scripts closer to the user.
    • supports encryption at rest and end-to-end encryption
    • CloudFront Origin Shield
      • helps improve the cache hit ratio and reduce the load on the origin.
      • requests from other regional caches would hit the Origin shield rather than the Origin.
      • should be placed at the regional cache and not in the edge cache
      • should be deployed to the region closer to the origin server
  • Global Accelerator
    • provides 2 static IPs
    • does not support client IP address preservation for NLB and Elastic IP address endpoints.
    • does not support IPv6 address
    • know CloudFront vs Global Accelerator
  • Understand ELB, ALB and NLB
    • Differences between ALB and NLB
    • ALB provides Content, Host, and Path-based Routing while NLB provides the ability to have a static IP address
    • Maintain original Client IP to the backend instances using X-Forwarded-for and Proxy Protocol
    • ALB/NLB do not support TLS renegotiation or mutual TLS authentication (mTLS). For implementing mTLS, use NLB with TCP listener on port 443 and terminate on the instances.
    • NLB
      • also provides local zonal endpoints to keep the traffic within AZ
      • can front Private Link endpoints and provide static IPs.
    • ALB supports Forward Secrecy, through Security Policies, that provide additional safeguards against the eavesdropping of encrypted data, through the use of a unique random session key.
    • Supports sticky session feature (session affinity) to enable the LB to bind a user’s session to a specific target. This ensures that all requests from the user during the session are sent to the same target. Sticky Sessions is configured on the target groups.
  • Gateway Load Balancer – GWLB
    • helps deploy, scale, and manage virtual appliances, such as firewalls, IDS/IPS systems, and deep packet inspection systems.
  • Athena integrates with S3 only and not with CloudWatch logs.
  • Transit VPC
    • helps connect multiple, geographically disperse VPCs and remote networks in order to create a global network transit center.
    • Use Transit Gateway instead now.
  • Know CloudHub and its use case

Security

  • AWS GuardDuty
    • managed threat detection service
    • provides Malware protection
  • AWS Shield
    • managed DDoS protection service
    • AWS Shield Advanced provides 24×7 access to the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT), protection against DDoS-related spike, and DDoS cost protection to safeguard against scaling charges.
  • WAF as Web Traffic Firewall
    • helps protect web applications from attacks by allowing rules configuration that allow, block, or monitor (count) web requests based on defined conditions.
    • integrates with CloudFront, ALB, API Gateway to dynamically detect and prevent attacks
  • Network Firewall
  • AWS Inspector
    • is a vulnerability management service that continuously scans the AWS workloads for vulnerabilities

Monitoring & Management Tools

  • Understand AWS CloudFormation esp. in terms of Network creation.
    • Custom resources can be used to handle activities not supported by AWS
    • While configuring VPN connections use depends_on on route tables to define a dependency on other resources as the VPN gateway route propagation depends on a VPC-gateway attachment when you have a VPN gateway.
  • AWS Config
    • fully managed service that provides AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security, compliance, and governance.
    • can be used to monitor resource changes e.g. Security Groups and invoke Systems Manager Automation scripts for remediation.
  • CloudTrail for audit and governance

Integration Tools

Networking Architecture Patterns

Finally, All the Best 🙂

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 154 Comments

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Learning Path

NOTE – Refer to SAP-C02 Learning Path

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) exam is the upgraded pattern of the previous Solution Architect – Professional exam which was released in the year (2018) and would be upgraded this year (Nov. 2022).
  • I recently recertified the existing pattern and the difference is quite a lot between the previous pattern and the latest pattern. The amount of overlap between the associates and professional exams and even the Solutions Architect and DevOps has drastically reduced.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) exam basically validates

  • Design and deploy dynamically scalable, highly available, fault-tolerant, and reliable applications on AWS
  • Select appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements
  • Migrate complex, multi-tier applications on AWS
  • Design and deploy enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS
  • Implement cost-control strategies

Refer to AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Exam Guide

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Exam Domains

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Resources

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Summary

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) exam was for a total of 170 minutes and it had 75 questions.
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) focuses a lot on concepts and services related to Architecture & Design, Scalability, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Migration, Security and Cost Control.
  • Each question mainly touches multiple AWS services.
  • Questions and answers options have a lot of prose and a lot of reading that needs to be done, so be sure you are prepared and manage your time well.
  • As always, mark the questions for review and move on and come back to them after you are done with all.
  • As always, having a rough architecture or mental picture of the setup helps focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able to eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach the right answer or at least have a 50% chance of getting it right.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C01) Exam Topics

Storage

  • S3
    • S3 Permissions & S3 Data Protection
      • S3 bucket policies to control access to VPC Endpoints
    • S3 Storage Classes & Lifecycle policies
      • covers S3 Standard, Infrequent access, intelligent tier and Glacier for archival and object transitions & deletions for cost management.
    • S3 Transfer Acceleration can be used for fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between the client and an S3 bucket.
    • supports the same and cross-region replication for disaster recovery.
    • integrates with CloudFront for caching to improve performance
    • S3 supports Object Lock and Glacier supports Vault lock to prevent the deletion of objects, especially required for compliance requirements.
    • supports S3 Select feature to query selective data from a single object.
  • Elastic Block Store
    • EBS Backup using snapshots for HA and Disaster recovery
    • Data Lifecycle Manager can be used to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of snapshots taken to back up the EBS volumes.
  • Storage Gateway
  • Elastic File System
    • provides a fully managed, scalable, serverless, shared and cost-optimized file storage for use with AWS and on-premises resources.
    • supports cross-region replication for disaster recovery
    • supports storage classes like S3
  • AWS Transfer Family
    • provides a secure transfer service (FTP, SFTP, FTPs) that helps transfer files into and out of AWS storage services.
    • supports transferring data from or to S3 and EFS.
  • FSx for Lustre
    • managed, cost-effective service to launch and run the HPC high-performance Lustre file system.

Database

  • DynamoDB
    • DynamoDB Auto Scaling
    • DynamoDB Streams for tracking changes
    • TTL to expire objects automatically and cost-effectively.
    • Global tables for multi-master, active-active inter-region storage needs.
    • Global tables do not support strong global consistency
    • DynamoDB Accelerator – DAX for seamlessly caching to reduce the load on DynamoDB for read-heavy requirements.
  • RDS
    • supports cross-region read replicas ideal for disaster recovery with low RTO and RPO.
    • provides RDS proxy for effective database connection polling
    • RDS Multi-AZ vs Read Replicas
  • Aurora
    • fully managed, MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, relational database engine
    • supports Aurora Serverless to on-demand, autoscaling configuration
    • Aurora Global Database consists of one primary AWS Region where the data is mastered, and up to five read-only, secondary AWS Regions. It is a multi-master setup but can be used for disaster recovery.
  • DocumentDB as a replacement for MongoDB

Data Migration & Transfer

  • Cloud Migration Services
    • Cloud Migration (hint: make sure you understand the difference between rehost, replatform, and rearchitect) 
    • Server Migration Service helps to migrate servers and applications.
    • Database Migration Service
      • enables quick and secure data migration with minimal to zero downtime
      • supports Full and Change Data Capture – CDC migration to support continuous replication for zero downtime migration.
      • homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations (using SCT) between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Aurora.
      • Hint: Elasticsearch is not supported as a target by DMS
    • Snow Family
      • Ideal for one-time big data transfers usually for use cases with limited bandwidth from on-premises to AWS.
  • Application Discovery Service
    • Agent ones can be used for hyper-v and physical services
    • Agentless can be used for VMware but does not track processes.
  • Disaster Recovery
    • Disaster Recovery whitepaper, although outdated, make sure you understand the difference between each type esp. pilot light, warm standby w.r.t RTO and RPO.
    • Compute
      • Make components available in an alternate region,
      • either as AMIs that can be restored
      • CloudFormation to create infra as needed
      • partial which can be scaled once the failover happens
      • or fully running compute in active-active confirmation with health checks.
    • Storage
      • S3 and EFS support cross-region replication
      • DynamoDB supports Global tables for multi-master, active-active inter-region storage needs.
      • Aurora Global Database provides a multi-master setup but can be used for disaster recovery.
      • RDS supports cross-region read replicas which can be promoted to master in case of a disaster. This can be done using Route 53, CloudWatch and lambda functions.
    • Network
      • Route 53 failover routing with health checks to failover across regions.

Networking & Content Delivery

  • VPC – Virtual Private Cloud
    • Understand Security Groups, NACLs (Hint: know NACLs are stateless and need to open ephemeral ports for response traffic )
    • Understand VPC Gateway Endpoints to provide access to S3 and DynamoDB (hint: know how to restrict access on S3 to specific VPC Endpoint)
    • Understand VPC Interface Endpoints or PrivateLink to provide access to a variety of services like SQS, Kinesis or Private APIs exposed through NLB.
    • Understand VPC Flow Logs
    • Understand VPC Peering to enable communication between VPCs within the same or different regions. (hint: VPC peering does not support transitive routing)
  • Route 53
    • Routing Policies
      • focus on Weighted, Latency and failover routing policies
      • failover routing provides active-passive configuration for disaster recovery while the others are active-active configuration.
    • Route 53 Resolver
      • Outbound endpoint for AWS -> On-premises DNS query resolution
      • Inbound endpoint for On-premises DNS query resolution
  • CloudFront
    • fully managed, fast CDN service that speeds up the distribution of static, dynamic web or streaming content to end-users.
    • supports multiple origins including S3, ALB etc.
    • does not support Auto Scaling as an origin
    • supports Geo-restriction
    • supports Lambda@Edge and Cloud Functions to execute code closer to the user.
    • Lambda@Edge can be used for quick auth checks, and redirect users based on request data.
    • Security can be enhanced by whitlisting CloudFront IPs or adding custom header in CloudFront and verifiing it in ALB.
  • API Gateway
    • supports throttling, caching and helps define usage plans with API keys to identify clients
    • provides regional and edge-optimized endpoint types
    • supports authentication mechanisms, such as AWS IAM policies, Lambda authorizer functions, and Amazon Cognito user pools.
  • Load Balancer – ELB, ALB and NLB 
  • Global Accelerator
    • optimizes the path to applications to keep packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low.
    • helps improve the performance of the applications by lowering first-byte latency
    • provides 2 static IP address
    • does not preserve the client’s IP address with NLB
  • Transit Gateway or Transit VPC
    • is a network transit hub that can be used to interconnect VPCs and on-premises networks via Direct Connect or VPN.
    • Transit Gateway is regional and Transit Gateway Peering needs to be configured to peer regional Transit gateways.
  • Placement Groups
    • Cluster placement group with Enhanced Networking for HPC
    • Spread placement group for fault tolerance and high availability.
  • Direct Connect & VPN
    • provide on-premises to AWS connectivity
    • know Direct Connect vs VPN
    • VPN can provide a cost-effective, quick failover for Direct Connect.
    • VPN over Direct Connect provides a secure dedicated connection and requires a public virtual interface.
    • Direct Connect Gateway is a global network device that helps establish connectivity that spans VPCs spread across multiple AWS Regions with a single Direct Connect connection.

Security, Identity & Compliance

  • AWS Identity and Access Management
  • AWS Shield & Shield Advanced
    • for DDoS protection and integrates with Route 53, CloudFront, ALB and Global Accelerator.
  • AWS WAF
    • protects from common attack techniques like SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Conditions based include IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, and URI strings.
    • integrates with CloudFront, ALB, and API Gateway.
    • supports Web ACLs and can block traffic based on IPs, Rate limits, and specific countries as well.
  • ACM – AWS Certificate Manager
    • helps easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates
    • is regional and you need to request certificates in all regions and associate individually in all regions.
    • does not provide certificates for EC2 instances.
  • AWS KMS – Key Management Service
    • managed encryption service that allows the creation and control of encryption keys to enable data encryption.
    • KMS Multi-region keys
      • are AWS KMS keys in different AWS Regions that can be used interchangeably – as though having the same key in multiple Regions.
      • are not global and each multi-region key needs to be replicated and managed independently.
  • Secrets Manager
    • helps protect secrets needed to access applications, services, and IT resources.
    • Secrets Manager vs SSM Parameter Store.
      • Supports automatic rotation of secrets, which is not provided by SSM Parameter Store.
      • Costs more than SSM Parameter Store.

Compute

  • EC2
  • Auto Scaling
  • Elastic Beanstalk supports Blue/Green deployment using swap URLs.
  • Lambda
    • Lambda running in VPC requires NAT Gateway to communicate with external public services
    • Lambda CPU can be increased by increasing memory only.
    • helps define reserved concurrency limit to reduce the impact
    • Lambda Alias now supports canary deployments
  • ECS – Elastic Container Service
    • container management service that supports Docker containers
    • supports two launch types – EC2 and Fargate which provides the serverless capability
    • For least privilege, the role should be assigned to the Task.
    • awsvpc network mode gives ECS tasks the same networking properties as EC2 instances.

Management & Governance tools

  • AWS Organizations
  • Systems Manager
    • AWS Systems Manager and its various services like parameter store, patch manager
    • Parameter Store provides secure, scalable, centralized, hierarchical storage for configuration data and secret management. Does not support secrets rotation. Use Secrets Manager.
    • Session Manager helps manage EC2 instances through an interactive one-click browser-based shell or through the AWS CLI without opening ports or creating bastion hosts.
    • Patch Manager helps automate the process of patching managed instances with both security-related and other types of updates.
  • CloudWatch
  • CloudTrail
    • for audit and governance
    • With Organizations, the trail can be configured to log CloudTrail from all accounts to a central account.
  • CloudFormation
    • Handle disaster Recovery by automating the infra to replicate the environment across regions.
    • Deletion Policy to prevent, retain or backup RDS, EBS Volumes
    • Stack policy can prevent stack resources from being unintentionally updated or deleted during a stack update. Stack Policy only applies for Stack updates and not stack deletion.
    • StackSets helps to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and Regions with a single operation.
  • Control Tower
    • to setup, govern, and secure a multi-account environment
    • strongly recommended guardrails cover EBS encryption
  • Service Catalog
    • allows organizations to create and manage catalogues of IT services that are approved for use on AWS with minimal permissions.
  • Trusted Advisor
    • helps with cost optimization and service limits in addition to security, performance and fault tolerance.
  • Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS resources for the workloads to reduce costs and improve performance by using machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics.
  • AWS Budgets to see usage-to-date and current estimated charges from AWS, set limits and provide alerts or notifications.
  • Cost Allocation Tags can be used to organize AWS resources, and cost allocation tags to track the AWS costs on a detailed level.
  • Cost Explorer helps visualize, understand, manage and forecast the AWS costs and usage over time.

Analytics

Integration Tools

  • SQS in terms of loose coupling and scaling.
    • Difference between SQS Standard and FIFO esp. with throughput and order
    • SQS supports dead letter queues
  • CloudWatch integration with SNS and Lambda for notifications.

Architecture & Design Flows

Google Cloud – Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Certification learning path

Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Certification
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

Google Cloud – Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Certification learning path

Continuing on the Google Cloud Journey, glad to have passed the 8th certification with the Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification. Google Cloud – Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification exam focuses on almost all of the Google Cloud DevOps services with Cloud Developer tools, Operations Suite, and SRE concepts.

Google Cloud -Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Certification Summary

  • Had 50 questions to be answered in 2 hours.
  • Covers a wide range of Google Cloud services mainly focusing on DevOps toolset including Cloud Developer tools, Operations Suite with a focus on monitoring and logging, and SRE concepts.
  • The exam has been updated to use
    • Cloud Operations, Cloud Monitoring & Logging and does not refer to Stackdriver in any of the questions.
    • Artifact Registry instead of Container Registry.
  • There are no case studies for the exam.
  • As mentioned for all the exams, Hands-on is a MUST, if you have not worked on GCP before make sure you do lots of labs else you would be absolutely clueless about some of the questions and commands
  • I did Coursera and ACloud Guru which is really vast, but hands-on or practical knowledge is MUST.

Google Cloud – Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Certification Resources

Google Cloud – Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Certification Topics

Developer Tools

  • Google Cloud Build
    • Cloud Build integrates with Cloud Source Repository, Github, and Gitlab and can be used for Continous Integration and Deployments.
    • Cloud Build can import source code, execute build to the specifications, and produce artifacts such as Docker containers or Java archives
    • Cloud Build can trigger builds on source commits in Cloud Source Repositories or other git repositories.
    • Cloud Build build config file specifies the instructions to perform, with steps defined to each task like the test, build and deploy.
    • Cloud Build step specifies an action to be performed and is run in a Docker container.
    • Cloud Build supports custom images as well for the steps
    • Cloud Build integrates with Pub/Sub to publish messages on build’s state changes.
    • Cloud Build can trigger the Spinnaker pipeline through Cloud Pub/Sub notifications.
    • Cloud Build should use a Service Account with a Container Developer role to perform deployments on GKE
    • Cloud Build uses a directory named /workspace as a working directory and the assets produced by one step can be passed to the next one via the persistence of the /workspace directory.
  • Binary Authorization and Vulnerability Scanning
    • Binary Authorization provides software supply-chain security for container-based applications. It enables you to configure a policy that the service enforces when an attempt is made to deploy a container image on one of the supported container-based platforms.
    • Binary Authorization uses attestations to verify that an image was built by a specific build system or continuous integration (CI) pipeline.
    • Vulnerability scanning helps scan images for vulnerabilities by Container Analysis.
    • Hint: For Security and compliance reasons if the image deployed needs to be trusted, use Binary Authorization
  • Google Source Repositories
    • Cloud Source Repositories are fully-featured, private Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud.
    • Cloud Source Repositories can be used for collaborative, version-controlled development of any app or service
    • Hint: If the code needs to be versioned controlled and needs collaboration with multiple members, choose Git related options
  • Google Container Registry/Artifact Registry
    • Google Artifact Registry supports all types of artifacts as compared to Container Registry which was limited to container images
    • Container Registry is not referred to in the exam
    • Artifact Registry supports both regional and multi-regional repositories
  • Google Cloud Code
    • Cloud Code helps write, debug, and deploy the cloud-based applications for IntelliJ, VS Code, or in the browser.
  • Google Cloud Client Libraries
    • Google Cloud Client Libraries provide client libraries and SDKs in various languages for calling Google Cloud APIs.
    • If the language is not supported, Cloud Rest APIs can be used.
  • Deployment Techniques
    • Recreate deployment – fully scale down the existing application version before you scale up the new application version.
    • Rolling update – update a subset of running application instances instead of simultaneously updating every application instance
    • Blue/Green deployment – (also known as a red/black deployment), you perform two identical deployments of your application
    • GKE supports Rolling and Recreate deployments.
      • Rolling deployments support maxSurge (new pods would be created) and maxUnavailable (existing pods would be deleted)
    • Managed Instance groups support Rolling deployments using the
    • maxSurge (new pods would be created) and maxUnavailable (existing pods would be deleted) configurations
  • Testing Strategies
    • Canary testing – partially roll out a change and then evaluate its performance against a baseline deployment
    • A/B testing – test a hypothesis by using variant implementations. A/B testing is used to make business decisions (not only predictions) based on the results derived from data.
  • Spinnaker
    • Spinnaker supports Blue/Green rollouts by dynamically enabling and disabling traffic to a particular Kubernetes resource.
    • Spinnaker recommends comparing canary against an equivalent baseline, deployed at the same time instead of production deployment.

Cloud Operations Suite

  • Cloud Operations Suite provides everything from monitoring, alert, error reporting, metrics, diagnostics, debugging, trace.
  • Google Cloud Monitoring or Stackdriver Monitoring
    • Cloud Monitoring helps gain visibility into the performance, availability, and health of your applications and infrastructure.
    • Cloud Monitoring Agent/Ops Agent helps capture additional metrics like Memory utilization, Disk IOPS, etc.
    • Cloud Monitoring supports log exports where the logs can be sunk to Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, or an external destination like Splunk.
    • Cloud Monitoring API supports push or export custom metrics
    • Uptime checks help check if the resource responds. It can check the availability of any public service on VM, App Engine, URL, GKE, or AWS Load Balancer.
    • Process health checks can be used to check if any process is healthy
  • Google Cloud Logging or Stackdriver logging
    • Cloud Logging provides real-time log management and analysis
    • Cloud Logging allows ingestion of custom log data from any source
    • Logs can be exported by configuring log sinks to BigQuery, Cloud Storage, or Pub/Sub.
    • Cloud Logging Agent can be installed for logging and capturing application logs.
    • Cloud Logging Agent uses fluentd and fluentd filter can be applied to filter, modify logs before being pushed to Cloud Logging.
    • VPC Flow Logs helps record network flows sent from and received by VM instances.
    • Cloud Logging Log-based metrics can be used to create alerts on logs.
    • Hint: If the logs from VM do not appear on Cloud Logging, check if the agent is installed and running and it has proper permissions to write the logs to Cloud Logging.
  • Cloud Error Reporting
    • counts, analyzes and aggregates the crashes in the running cloud services
  • Cloud Profiler
    • Cloud Profiler allows for monitoring of system resources like CPU and memory on both GCP and on-premises resources.
  • Cloud Trace
    • is a distributed tracing system that collects latency data from the applications and displays it in the Google Cloud Console.
  • Cloud Debugger
    • is a feature of Google Cloud that lets you inspect the state of a running application in real-time, without stopping or slowing it down
    • Debug Logpoints allow logging injection into running services without restarting or interfering with the normal function of the service
    • Debug Snapshots help capture local variables and the call stack at a specific line location in your app’s source code

Compute Services

  • Compute services like Google Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine are lightly covered more from the security aspects
  • Google Compute Engine
    • Google Compute Engine is the best IaaS option for computing and provides fine-grained control
    • Preemptible VMs and their use cases. HINT – use for short term needs
    • Committed Usage Discounts – CUD help provide cost benefits for long-term stable and predictable usage.
    • Managed Instance Group can help scale VMs as per the demand. It also helps provide auto-healing and high availability with health checks, in case an application fails.
  • Google Kubernetes Engine
    • GKE can be scaled using
      • Cluster AutoScaler to scale the cluster
      • Vertical Pod Scaler to scale the pods with increasing resource needs
      • Horizontal Pod Autoscaler helps scale Kubernetes workload by automatically increasing or decreasing the number of Pods in response to the workload’s CPU or memory consumption, or in response to custom metrics reported from within Kubernetes or external metrics from sources outside of your cluster.
    • Kubernetes Secrets can be used to store secrets (although they are just base64 encoded values)
    • Kubernetes supports rolling and recreate deployment strategies.

Security

  • Cloud Key Management Service – KMS
    • Cloud KMS can be used to store keys to encrypt data in Cloud Storage and other integrated storage
  • Cloud Secret Manager
    • Cloud Secret Manager can be used to store secrets as well

Site Reliability Engineering – SRE

  • SRE is a DevOps implementation and focuses on increasing reliability and observability, collaboration, and reducing toil using automation.
  • SLOs help specify a target level for the reliability of your service using SLIs which provide actual measurements.
  •  SLI Types
    • Availability
    • Freshness
    • Latency
    • Quality
  • SLOs – Choosing the measurement method
    • Synthetic clients to measure user experience
    • Client-side instrumentation
    • Application and Infrastructure metrics
    • Logs processing
  • SLOs help defines Error Budget and Error Budget Policy which need to be aligned with all the stakeholders and help plan releases to focus on features vs reliability.
  • SRE focuses on Reducing Toil – Identifying repetitive tasks and automating them.
  • Production Readiness Review – PRR
    • Applications should be performance tested for volumes before being deployed to production
    • SLOs should not be modified/adjusted to facilitate production deployments. Teams should work to make the applications SLO compliant before they are deployed to production.
  • SRE Practices include
    • Incident Management and Response
      • Priority should be to mitigate the issue, and then investigate and find the root cause. Mitigating would include
        • Rollbacking the release causes issues
        • Routing traffic to working site to restore user experience
      • Incident Live State Document helps track the events and decision making which can be useful for postmortem.
      • involves the following roles
        • Incident Commander/Manager
          • Setup a communication channel for all to collaborate
          • Assign and delegate roles. IC would assume any role, if not delegated.
          • Responsible for Incident Live State Document
        • Communications Lead
          • Provide periodic updates to all the stakeholders and customers
        • Operations Lead
          • Responds to the incident and should be the only group modifying the system during an incident.
    • Postmortem
      • should contain the root cause
      • should be Blameless
      • should be shared with all for collaboration and feedback
      • should be shared with all the shareholders
      • should have proper action items to prevent recurrence with an owner and collaborators, if required.

All the Best !!

Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist CKS Learning Path

Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 2 Comments

Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist CKS Learning Path

With Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist CKS certification, I have completed the triad of Kubernetes certification. After knowing how to use and administer Kubernetes, the last piece was to understand the security intricacies and CKS preparation does provide you a deep dive into it.

  • CKS focuses on securing container-based applications and Kubernetes platforms during build, deployment, and runtime
  • CKS focuses more on hands-on experience and is an open book test, where you have access to the official Kubernetes documentation as well as some of the products documentation.
  • Unlike AWS and GCP certifications, you are required to provision, solve, debug actual problems, and provision resources on a Kubernetes cluster
  • Even though it is an open book test, you need to know where the information is and what to use.

CKS Exam Pattern

  • CKS exam curriculum includes these general domains and their weights on the exam:
    • Cluster Setup – 10%
    • Cluster Hardening – 15%
    • System Hardening – 15%
    • Minimize Microservice Vulnerabilities – 20%
    • Supply Chain Security – 20%
    • Monitoring, Logging and Runtime Security – 20%
  • CKS requires you to solve 15 questions in 2 hours.
  • CKS was already upgraded to use the k8s 1.22 version.
  • You are allowed to open another browser tab which can be from kubernetes.io or other products documentation like Falco. Do not open any other windows.
  • Exam questions can be attempted in any order and don’t have to be sequential. So be sure to move ahead and come back later.

CKS Exam Preparation and Tips

  • I used the courses from KodeKloud for practicing and it would good enough to cover what is required for the exam.
  • When you book your exam, there are 2 exam simulator sessions provided by killer.sh. These mock exams are VERY tough as compared to the actual exams, as they mention, but do provide a great learning experience. Do not get demotivated if you flunk badly on time on this one :).
  • Time was surely a constraint on the actual exam and I was able to complete the 15 questions only with 15 mins left. There was not much time to review and could only get through half of them.
  • Each exam question carries weight so be sure you attempt the exams with higher weights before focusing on the lower ones. So target the ones with higher weights and quicker solutions like debugging ones.
  • The exam is provided by killer.sh with 6-8 different preconfigured K8s clusters. Each question refers to a different Kubernetes cluster, and the context needs to be switched. Be sure to execute the kubectl use context command, which is available with every question and you just need to copy-paste it.
  • Check for the namespace mentioned in the question, to find resources and create resources. Use the -n <namespace>
  • You would be performing most of the interaction from the client node. However, pay attention to the node (master or worker) you need to execute the exams and make sure you return back to the base node.
  • With CKS is important to move to the master node for any changes to the cluster kube-apiserver .
  • SSH to nodes and gaining root access is allowed if needed.
  • Read carefully the Information provided within the questions with the i mark. They would provide very useful hints in addressing the question and save time. for e.g. namespaces to look into. for a failed pod, what has already been created like configmap, secrets, network policies so that you do not create the same.
  • Make sure you know the imperative commands to create resources, as you won’t have much time to create and edit YAML files.
  • If you need to edit further use --dry-run -o yaml to get a headstart with the YAML spec file and edit the same.
  • I personally use alias kk=kubectl to avoid typing kubectl

CKS Resources


CKS Key Topics

Cluster Setup – 10%

Cluster Hardening – 15%

System Hardening – 15%

  • Practice CKS Exercises – System Harding
  • Minimize host OS footprint (reduce attack surface)
    • Control access using SSH, disable root and password-based logins
    • Remove unwanted packages and ports
  • Minimize IAM roles
    • IAM roles are usually with Cloud providers and relate to the least privilege access principle.
  • Minimize external access to the network
    • External access can be controlled using Network Policies through egress policies.
  • Appropriately use kernel hardening tools such as AppArmor, seccomp
    • Runtime classes provided by gvisor and kata containers can help provide further isolation of the containers
    • Secure Computing – Seccomp tool helps control syscalls made by containers
    • AppArmor can be configured for any application to reduce its potential host attack surface and provide a greater in-depth defense.
    • PodSecurityPolicies – PSP enables fine-grained authorization of pod creation and updates.
      • Apply host updates
      • Install minimal required OS fingerprint
      • Identify and address open ports
      • Remove unnecessary packages
      • Protect access to data with permissions
    • Exam tip: Know how to load AppArmor profiles, and enable them for the pods. AppArmor is in beta and needs to be enabled using container.apparmor.security.beta.kubernetes.io/<container_name>: <profile_ref>

Minimize Microservice Vulnerabilities – 20%

  • Practice CKS Exercises – Minimize Microservice Vulnerabilities
  • Setup appropriate OS-level security domains e.g. using PSP, OPA, security contexts.
    • Pod Security Contexts help define security for pods and containers at the pod or at the container level. Capabilities can be added at the container level only.
    • Pod Security Policies enable fine-grained authorization of pod creation and updates and is implemented as an optional admission controller.
    • Open Policy Agent helps enforce custom policies on Kubernetes objects without recompiling or reconfiguring the Kubernetes API server.
    • Admission controllers
      • can be used for validating configurations as well as mutating the configurations.
      • Mutating controllers are triggered before validating controllers.
      • Allows extension by adding custom controllers using MutatingAdmissionWebhook and ValidatingAdmissionWebhook.
    • Exam tip: Know how to configure Pod Security Context, Pod Security Policies
  • Manage Kubernetes secrets
    • Exam Tip: Know how to read secret values, create secrets and mount the same on the pods.
  • Use container runtime sandboxes in multi-tenant environments (e.g. gvisor, kata containers)
    • Exam tip: Know how to create a Runtime and associate it with a pod using runtimeClassName
  • Implement pod to pod encryption by use of mTLS
    • Practice manage TLS certificates in a Cluster
    • Service Mesh Istio can be used to establish MTLS for Intra pod communication.
    • Istio automatically configures workload sidecars to use mutual TLS when calling other workloads. By default, Istio configures the destination workloads using PERMISSIVE mode. When PERMISSIVE mode is enabled, a service can accept both plain text and mutual TLS traffic. In order to only allow mutual TLS traffic, the configuration needs to be changed to STRICT mode.
    • Exam tip: No questions related to mTLS appeared in the exam

Supply Chain Security – 20%

  • Practice CKS Exercises – Supply Chain Security
  • Minimize base image footprint
    • Remove unnecessary tools. Remove shells, package manager & vi tools.
    • Use slim/minimal images with required packages only. Do not include unnecessary software like build tools and utilities, troubleshooting, and debug binaries.
    • Build the smallest image possible – To reduce the size of the image, install only what is strictly needed
    • Use distroless, Alpine, or relevant base images for the app.
    • Use official images from verified sources only.
  • Secure your supply chain: whitelist allowed registries, sign and validate images
  • Use static analysis of user workloads (e.g.Kubernetes resources, Docker files)
    • Tools like Kubesec can be used to perform a static security risk analysis of the configurations files.
  • Scan images for known vulnerabilities
    • Aqua Security Trivy & Anchore can be used for scanning vulnerabilities in the container images.
    • Exam Tip: Know how to use the Trivy tool to scan images for vulnerabilities. Also, remember to use the --severity for e.g. --severity=CRITICAL flag for filtering a specific category.

Monitoring, Logging and Runtime Security – 20%

  • Practice CKS Exercises – Monitoring, Logging, and Runtime Security
  • Perform behavioral analytics of syscall process and file activities at the host and container level to detect malicious activities
  • Detect threats within a physical infrastructure, apps, networks, data, users, and workloads
  • Detect all phases of attack regardless of where it occurs and how it spreads
  • Perform deep analytical investigation and identification of bad actors within the environment
    • Tools like strace and Aqua Security Tracee can be used to check the syscalls. However, with a number of processes, it would be tough to track and monitor all and they do not provide alerting.
    • Tools like Falco & Sysdig provide deep, process-level visibility into dynamic, distributed production environments and can be used to define rules to track, monitor, and alert on activities when a certain rule is violated.
    • Exam Tip: Know how to use Falco, define new rules, enable logging. Make use of the falco_rules.local.yaml file for overrides. (I did not get questions for Falco in my exam).
  • Ensure immutability of containers at runtime
    • Immutability prevents any changes from being made to the container or to the underlying host through the container.
    • It is recommended to create new images and perform a rolling deployment instead of modifying the existing running containers.
    • Launch the container in read-only mode using the --read-only flag from the docker run or by using the readOnlyRootFilesystem option in Kubernetes.
    • PodSecurityContext and PodSecurityPolicy can be used to define and enforce container immutability
      • ReadOnlyRootFilesystem – Requires that containers must run with a read-only root filesystem (i.e. no writable layer).
      • Privileged – determines if any container in a pod can enable privileged mode. This allows the container nearly all the same access as processes running on the host.
    • Task @ Configure Pod Container Security Context
    • Exam Tip: Know how to define a PodSecurityPolicy to enforce rules. Remember, Cluster Roles and Role Binding needs to be configured to provide access to the PSP to make it work.
  • Use Audit Logs to monitor access
    • Kubernetes auditing is handled by the kube-apiserver which requires defining an audit policy file.
    • Auditing captures the stages as RequestReceived -> (Authn and Authz) -> ResponseStarted (-w) -> ResponseComplete (for success) OR Panic (for failures)
    • Exam Tip: Know how to configure audit policies and enable audit on the kube-apiserver. Make sure the kube-apiserver is up and running.
    • Task @ Kubernetes Auditing

CKS Articles

CKS General information and practices

  • The exam can be taken online from anywhere.
  • Make sure you have prepared your workspace well before the exams.
  • Make sure you have a valid government-issued ID card as it would be checked.
  • You are not allowed to have anything around you and no one should enter the room.
  • The exam proctor will be watching you always, so refrain from doing any other activities. Your screen is also always shared.
  • Copy + Paste works fine.
  • You will have an online notepad on the right corner to note down. I hardly used it, but it can be useful to type and modify text instead of using VI editor.

All the Best …

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Learning Path

AWS SysOps Administor - Associate SOA-C02 Certification
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Learning Path

I recently recertified for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) exam. SOA-C02 is the updated version of the SOA-C01 AWS exam with hands-on labs included, which is the first with AWS.

SOA-C02 basically validates

  • Deploy, manage, and operate workloads on AWS
  • Support and maintain AWS workloads according to the AWS Well-Architected Framework
  • Perform operations by using the AWS Management Console and the AWS CLI
  • Implement security controls to meet compliance requirements
  • Monitor, log, and troubleshoot systems
  • Apply networking concepts (for example, DNS, TCP/IP, firewalls)
  • Implement architectural requirements (for example, high availability, performance, capacity)
  • Perform business continuity and disaster recovery procedures
  • Identify, classify, and remediate incidents

Refer AWS Certified SysOps – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Guide Sep 18

SOA-C02 Exam Domains

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Summary

  • SOA-C02 is the first AWS exam that includes 2 sections
    • Objective questions
    • Hands-on labs
  • SOA-C02 Exam is for 190 minutes with 51 (somewhat odd !!) objective-type questions and 3 Hands-on labs.
  • Labs are performed in a separate instance. Copy-paste works, so make sure you copy the exact names on resource creation.
  • Labs are pretty easy if you have worked on AWS.
  • NOTE: Once you complete a section and click next you cannot go back to the section. The same is for the labs. Once a lab is completed, you cannot return back to the lab.
  • Practice the Sample Lab provided when you book the exam, which would give you a feel of how the hands-on exam would actually be.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Resources

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Topics

Practice Labs

  • Create IAM users, IAM roles with specific limited policies.
  • Create a private S3 bucket
    • enable versioning
    • enable default encryption
    • enable lifecycle policies to transition and expire the objects
    • enable same region replication
  • Create a public S3 bucket with static website hosting
  • Set up a VPC with public and private subnets with Routes, SGs, NACLs.
  • Set up a VPC with public and private subnets and enable communication from private subnets to the Internet using NAT gateway
  • Create EC2 instance, create a Snapshot and restore it as a new instance.
  • Set up Security Groups for ALB and Target Groups, and create ALB, Launch Template, Auto Scaling Group, and target groups with sample applications. Test the flow.
  • Create Multi-AZ RDS instance and instance force failover.
  • Set up SNS topic. Use Cloud Watch Metrics to create a CloudWatch alarm on specific thresholds and send notifications to the SNS topic
  • Set up SNS topic. Use Cloud Watch Logs to create a CloudWatch alarm on log patterns and send notifications to the SNS topic.
  • Update a CloudFormation template and re-run the stack and check the impact.
  • Use AWS Data Lifecycle Manager to define snapshot lifecycle.
  • Use AWS Backup to define EFS backup with hourly and daily backup rules.

Management & Governance Tools

  • CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, and visualizes it.
    • EC2 metrics can track (disk, network, CPU, status checks) but do not capture metrics like memory, disk swap, disk storage, etc.
    • CloudWatch unified agent can be used to gather custom metrics like memory, disk swap, disk storage, etc.
    • CloudWatch Alarm actions can be configured to perform actions based on various metrics for e.g. CPU below 5%
    • CloudWatch alarm can monitor StatusCheckFailed_System status on an EC2 instance and automatically recover the instance if it becomes impaired due to an underlying hardware failure or a problem that requires AWS involvement to repair
    • Know ELB monitoring
      • Load Balancer metrics SurgeQueueLength and SpilloverCount
      • HealthyHostCount, UnHealthyHostCount determines the number of healthy and unhealthy instances registered with the load balancer.
      • Reasons for 4XX and 5XX errors
  • Understand CloudTrail for audit and governance
    • CloudTrail log file integrity validation can be used to check whether a log file was modified, deleted, or unchanged after being delivered.
  • Understand AWS CloudFormation as an Infrastructure as a Code service
    • Know templates, stacks, nested stacks.
    • DependsOn attribute can specify the resource creation order and control the creation of a specific resource follows another.
    • Deletion Policies help control deletion behavior (delete, retain, snapshot) for the resources.
    • Nested stacks can separate out reusable, common components and create dedicated templates to mix and match different templates but use nested stacks to create a single, unified stack
    • Change Sets presents a summary or preview of the proposed changes that CloudFormation will make when a stack is updated
    • Drift detection enables you to detect whether a stack’s actual configuration differs, or has drifted, from its expected configuration.
    • Termination protection helps prevent a stack from being accidentally deleted.
    • Stack policy can prevent stack resources from being unintentionally updated or deleted during a stack update.
    • StackSets extends the functionality of stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and Regions with a single operation.
    • Know how to wait for resources set up to be completed before proceeding esp. cfn-signal
  • AWS Config helps to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of the AWS resources
    • AWS Config can monitor and detect deviations from desired configurations, and it can also be used together with other services, such as AWS Systems Manager, to automatically remediate such deviations when they are detected
  • AWS Systems Manager is the operations hub
    • Patch Manager automates the process of patching managed instances with both security-related and other types of updates.
    • Session Manager helps manage EC2 instances, on-premises instances, and VMs through a browser-based shell or through the AWS CLI without requiring ssh keys, ports to be opened, or bastion hosts.
  • AWS Trusted Advisor provides recommendations that help follow AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor evaluates your account by using checks.
  • AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.
  • Personal Health Dashboard provides alerts and guidance for AWS events that might affect your environment & the Service Health Dashboard shows the general status of AWS services.
  • Data Lifecycle Manager to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs. 
  • AWS DataSync automates moving data between on-premises storage and S3 or Elastic File System (EFS).
  • AWS Control Tower provides the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment, called a landing zone

Networking & Content Delivery

  • VPC – Virtual Private Cloud is a virtual network in AWS
    • Understand Public Subnet (has access to the Internet) vs Private Subnet (no access to the Internet)
    • Route table defines rules, termed as routes, which determine where network traffic from the subnet would be routed
    • Internet Gateway enables access to the internet
    • Bastion host – allow access to instances in the private subnet without directly exposing them to the internet.
    • NAT helps route traffic from private subnets to the internet
    • NAT instance vs NAT Gateway
    • Virtual Private Gateway – Connectivity between on-premises and VPC
    • Egress-Only Internet Gateway – relevant to IPv6 only to allow egress traffic from private subnet to internet, without allowing ingress traffic
    • VPC Flow Logs enables you to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in the VPC and can help in monitoring the traffic or troubleshooting any connectivity issues
    • Security Groups vs NACLs esp. Security Groups are stateful and NACLs are stateless.
    • VPC Peering provides a connection between two VPCs that enables routing of traffic between them using private IP addresses.
    • VPC Endpoints enables the creation of a private connection between VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink using its private IP address
    • Ability to debug networking issues like EC2 not accessible, EC2 not reachable, or not able to communicate with others or Internet.
  • Route 53 provides a scalable DNS system
    • supports ALIAS record type helps map zone apex records to ELB, CloudFront, and S3 endpoints.
    • Understand Routing Policies and their use cases
      • Failover routing policy helps to configure active-passive failover.
      • Geolocation routing policy helps route traffic based on the location of the users.
      • Geoproximity routing policy helps route traffic based on the location of the resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.
      • Latency routing policy use with resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the Region that provides the best latency with less round-trip time.
      • Weighted routing policy helps route traffic to multiple resources in specified proportions.
    • Focus on Weighted, Latency routing policies
  • Understand ELB, ALB, and NLB and what features they provide like
    • Understand keys differences ELB vs ALB vs NLB
    • ALB provides content and path routing
    • NLB provides the ability to give static IPs to the load balancer esp. if there is a requirement to whitelist IPs.
    • LB access logs provide the source IP address
    • supports Sticky sessions to enable the load balancer to bind a user’s session to a specific target.
  • Understand CloudFront and use cases
    • CloudFront can be used with S3 to expose static data and website
  • Know VPN and Direct Connect to provide AWS to on-premises connectivity. Not covered in detail.

Compute

  • Understand EC2 in depth
    • Understand EC2 instance types and use cases.
    • Understand EC2 purchase options esp. spot instances and improved reserved instances options.
    • Understand EC2 Metadata & Userdata.
    • Understand EC2 Security. 
      • Use IAM Role work with EC2 instances to access services
      • IAM Role can now be attached to stopped and runnings instances
    • AMIs provide the information required to launch an instance, which is a virtual server in the cloud.
      • AMIs are regional and can be shared publicly or with other accounts
      • Only AMIs with unencrypted volumes or encrypted with a CMK (customer-managed keys) can be shared.
      • The best practice is to use prebaked or golden images to reduce startup time for the applications. Leverage EC2 Image Builder.
    • Troubleshooting EC2 issues
      • RequestLimitExceeded
      • InstanceLimitExceeded – Concurrent running instance limit, default is 20, has been reached in a region. Request increase in limits.
      • InsufficientInstanceCapacity – AWS does not currently have enough available capacity to service the request. Change AZ or Instance Type.
    • Monitoring EC2 instances
      • System status checks failure – Stop and Start
      • Instance status checks failure – Reboot
    • EC2 supports Instance Recovery where the recovered instance is identical to the original instance, including the instance ID, private IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata.
    • EC2 Image Builder can be used to pre-baked images with software to speed up booting and launching time.
  • Understand Placement groups
    • Cluster Placement Group provide low latency, High-Performance Computing by the logical grouping of instances within a Single AZ
    • Spread Placement Groups is a group of instances that are each placed on distinct underlying hardware i.e. each instance on a distinct rack across AZ
    • Partition Placement Groups is a group of instances spread across partitions i.e. group of instances spread across racks across AZs
  • Understand Auto Scaling
    • Auto Scaling can be configured with multiple AZs for high availability to launch instances across multiple AZs
    • Auto Scaling attempts to distribute instances evenly between the AZs that are enabled for the Auto Scaling group
    • Auto Scaling supports
      • Dynamic scaling, which allows you to scale automatically in response to the changing demand
      • Schedule scaling, which allows you to scale the application in response to predictable load changes
      • Manual scaling can be performed by changing the desired capacity or adding and removing instances
    • Auto Scaling life cycle hooks can be used to perform activities before instance termination.
  • Understand Lambda and its use cases
    • Lambda functions can be hosted in VPC with internet access controlled by a NAT instance.
    • RDS Proxy acts as an intermediary between the application and an RDS database. RDS Proxy establishes and manages the necessary connection pools to the database so that the application creates fewer database connections.

Storage

  • S3 provides object storage service
    • Understand storage classes with lifecycle policies
    • S3 data protection provides encryption at rest and encryption in transit
      • S3 default encryption can be used to encrypt the data with S3 bucket policies to prevent or reject unencrypted object uploads.
    • Multi-part handling for fault-tolerant and performant large file uploads
    • static website hosting, CORS
    • S3 Versioning can help recover from accidental deletes and overwrites.
    • Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download
    • S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between the client and an S3 bucket using globally distributed edge locations in CloudFront.
  • Understand Glacier as archival storage. Glacier does not provide immediate access to the data even with expediated retrievals.
  • Understand EBS storage option
  • Storage Gateway allows storage of data in the AWS cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage while maintaining data security.
    •  Gateway-cached volumes stores data is stored in S3 and retains a copy of recently read data locally for low latency access to the frequently accessed data
    • Gateway-stored volumes maintain the entire data set locally to provide low latency access
  • EFS is a cost-optimized, serverless, scalable, and fully managed file storage for use with AWS Cloud and on-premises resources.
    • supports data at rest encryption only during the creation. After creation, the file system cannot be encrypted and must be copied over to a new encrypted disk.
    • supports General purpose and Max I/O performance mode.
    • If hitting PercentIOLimit issue move to Max I/O performance mode.
  • FSx makes it easy and cost-effective to launch, run, and scale feature-rich, high-performance file systems in the cloud
  • FSx for Windows supports SMB protocol and a Multi-AZ file system to provide high availability across multiple AZs.
  • AWS Backup can be used to automate backup for EC2 instances and EFS file systems

Databases

  • RDS provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.
    • Understand RDS Multi-AZ vs Read Replicas and use cases
    • Multi-AZ deployment provides high availability, durability, and failover support
    • Read replicas enable increased scalability and database availability in the case of an AZ failure.
    • Automated backups and database change logs enable point-in-time recovery of the database during the backup retention period, up to the last five minutes of database usage.
  • Aurora is a fully managed, MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, relational database engine
    • Backtracking “rewinds” the DB cluster to the specified time and performs in-place restore and does not create a new instance.
    • Automated Backups that help restore the DB as a new instance
  • Know ElastiCache use cases, mainly for caching performance
    • Understand ElastiCache Redis vs Memcached
    • Redis provides Multi-AZ support helps provide high availability across AZs and Online resharding to dynamically scale.
    • ElastiCache can be used as a caching layer for RDS.
  • Know DynamoDB. Not covered in detail

Security

  • IAM provides Identity and Access Management services.
  • S3 Encryption supports data at rest and in transit encryption
    • Understand S3 with SSE, SSE-C, SSE-KMS
    • S3 default encryption can help encrypt objects, however, it does not encrypt existing objects before the setting was enabled. You can use S3 Inventory to list the objects and S3 Batch to encrypt them.
  • Understand KMS for key management and envelope encryption
    • KMS with imported customer key material does not support rotation and has to be done manually.
  • AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall helps protect the applications against common web exploits like XSS or SQL Injection and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources
  • AWS GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors the AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.
  • AWS Secrets Manager can help securely expose credentials as well as rotate them.
    • Secrets Manager integrates with Lambda and supports credentials rotation
  • AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS
  • Amazon Inspector
    • is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS.
    • automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices.
  • AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) handles the complexity of creating, storing, and renewing public and private SSL/TLS X.509 certificates and keys that protect the AWS websites and applications.
  • Know AWS Artifact as on-demand access to compliance reports

Analytics

  • Amazon Athena can be used to query S3 data without duplicating the data and using SQL queries
  • Elasticsearch service is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene.
    • Elasticsearch production setup would be 3 AZs, 3 dedicated master nodes, 6 nodes with two replicas in each AZ.

Integration Tools

  • Understand SQS as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
    • Focus on SQS as a decoupling service
    • Understand SQS FIFO, make sure you know the differences between standard and FIFO
  • Understand CloudWatch integration with SNS for notification

Financial Management

  • Know AWS Organizations
    • Service control policies (SCPs) are a type of organization policy that you can use to manage permissions in your organization centrally.
  • Consolidated billing enables consolidating payments from multiple AWS accounts and includes combined usage and volume discounts including sharing of Reserved Instances across accounts.
  • Understand how to setup Billing Alerts using CloudWatch
  • Cost allocation tags can be used to differentiate resource costs and analyzed using Cost Explorer or on a Cost Allocation report.

All the Best

Google Cloud Certified – Cloud Digital Leader Learning Path

Google Cloud Certified - Cloud Digital Leader Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

Google Cloud – Cloud Digital Leader Certification Learning Path

Continuing on the Google Cloud Journey, glad to have passed the seventh certification with the Professional Cloud Digital Leader certification. Google Cloud was missing the initial entry-level certification similar to AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, which was introduced as the Cloud Digital Leader certification. Cloud Digital Leader focuses on general Cloud knowledge,  Google Cloud knowledge with its products and services.

Google Cloud – Cloud Digital Leader Certification Summary

  • Had 59 questions (somewhat odd !!) to be answered in 90 minutes.
  • Covers a wide range of General Cloud and Google Cloud services and products knowledge.
  • This exam does not require much Hands-on and theoretical knowledge is good enough to clear the exam.

Google Cloud – Cloud Digital Leader Certification Resources

Google Cloud – Cloud Digital Leader Certification Topics

General cloud knowledge

  1. Define basic cloud technologies. Considerations include:
    1. Differentiate between traditional infrastructure, public cloud, and private cloud
      1. Traditional infrastructure includes on-premises data centers
      2. Public cloud include Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure
      3. Private Cloud includes services like AWS Outpost
    2. Define cloud infrastructure ownership
    3. Shared Responsibility Model
      1. Security of the Cloud is Google Cloud’s responsibility
      2. Security on the Cloud depends on the services used and is shared between Google Cloud and the Customer
    4. Essential characteristics of cloud computing
      1. On-demand computing
      2. Pay-as-you-use
      3. Scalability and Elasticity
      4. High Availability and Resiliency
      5. Security
  2. Differentiate cloud service models. Considerations include:
    1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS)
      1. IaaS – everything is done by you – more flexibility more management
      2. PaaS – most of the things are done by Cloud with few things done by you – moderate flexibility and management
      3. SaaS – everything is taken care of by the Cloud, you would just it – no flexibility and management
    2. Describe the trade-offs between level of management versus flexibility when comparing cloud services
    3. Define the trade-offs between costs versus responsibility
    4. Appropriate implementation and alignment with given budget and resources
  3. Identify common cloud procurement financial concepts. Considerations include:
    1. Operating expenses (OpEx), capital expenditures (CapEx), and total cost of operations (TCO)
      1. On-premises has more of Capex and less OpEx
      2. Cloud has no to least Capex and more of OpEx
    2. Recognize the relationship between OpEx and CapEx related to networking and compute infrastructure
    3. Summarize the key cost differentiators between cloud and on-premises environments

General Google Cloud knowledge

  1. Recognize how Google Cloud meets common compliance requirements. Considerations include:
    1. Locating current Google Cloud compliance requirements
    2. Familiarity with Compliance Reports Manager
  2. Recognize the main elements of Google Cloud resource hierarchy. Considerations include:
    1. Describe the relationship between organization, folders, projects, and resources i.e. Organization -> Folder -> Folder or Projects -> Resources
  3. Describe controlling and optimizing Google Cloud costs. Considerations include:
    1. Google Cloud billing models and applicability to different service classes
    2. Define a consumption-based use model
    3. Application of discounts (e.g., flat-rate, committed-use discounts [CUD], sustained-use discounts [SUD])
      1. Sustained-use discounts [SUD] are automatic discounts for running specific resources for a significant portion of the billing month
      2. Committed use discounts [CUD] help with committed use contracts in return for deeply discounted prices for VM usage
  4. Describe Google Cloud’s geographical segmentation strategy. Considerations include:
    1. Regions are collections of zones. Zones have high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region. Regions help design fault-tolerant and highly available solutions.
    2. Zones are deployment areas within a region and provide the lowest latency usually less than 10ms
    3. Regional resources are accessible by any resources within the same region
    4. Zonal resources are hosted in a zone are called per-zone resources.
    5. Multiregional resources or Global resources are accessible by any resource in any zone within the same project.
  5. Define Google Cloud support options. Considerations include:
    1. Distinguish between billing support, technical support, role-based support, and enterprise support
      1. Role-Based Support provides more predictable rates and a flexible configuration. Although they are legacy, the exam does cover these.
      2. Enterprise Support provides the fastest case response times and a dedicated Technical Account Management (TAM) contact who helps you execute a Google Cloud strategy.
    2. Recognize a variety of Service Level Agreement (SLA) applications

Google Cloud products and services

  1. Describe the benefits of Google Cloud virtual machine (VM)-based compute options. Considerations include:
    1. Compute Engine provides virtual machines (VM) hosted on Google’s infrastructure.
    2. Google Cloud VMware Engine helps easy lift and shift VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without changes to the apps, tools, or processes
    3. Bare Metal lets businesses run specialized workloads such as Oracle databases close to Google Cloud while lowering overall costs and reducing risks associated with migration
    4. Custom versus standard sizing
    5. Free, premium, and custom service options
    6. Attached storage/disk options
    7. Preemptible VMs is an instance that can be created and run at a much lower price than normal instances.
  2. Identify and evaluate container-based compute options. Considerations include:
    1. Define the function of a container registry
      1. Container Registry is a single place to manage Docker images, perform vulnerability analysis, and decide who can access what with fine-grained access control.
    2. Distinguish between VMs, containers, and Google Kubernetes Engine
  3. Identify and evaluate serverless compute options. Considerations include:
    1. Define the function and use of App Engine, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run
    2. Define rationale for versioning with serverless compute options
    3. Cost and performance tradeoffs of scale to zero
      1. Scale to zero helps provides cost efficiency by scaling down to zero when there is no load but comes with an issue with cold starts
      2. Serverless technologies like Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, App Standard Engine provides these capabilities
  4. Identify and evaluate multiple data management offerings. Considerations include:
    1. Describe the differences and benefits of Google Cloud’s relational and non-relational database offerings
      1. Cloud SQL provides fully managed, relational SQL databases and offers MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL databases as a service
      2. Cloud Spanner provides fully managed, relational SQL databases with joins and secondary indexes
      3. Cloud Bigtable provides a scalable, fully managed, non-relational NoSQL wide-column analytical big data database service suitable for low-latency single-point lookups and precalculated analytics
      4. BigQuery provides fully managed, no-ops, OLAP, enterprise data warehouse (EDW) with SQL and fast ad-hoc queries.
    2. Describe Google Cloud’s database offerings and how they compare to commercial offerings
  5. Distinguish between ML/AI offerings. Considerations include:
    1. Describe the differences and benefits of Google Cloud’s hardware accelerators (e.g., Vision API, AI Platform, TPUs)
    2. Identify when to train your own model, use a Google Cloud pre-trained model, or build on an existing model
      1. Vision API provides out-of-the-box pre-trained models to extract data from images
      2. AutoML provides the ability to train models
      3. BigQuery Machine Learning provides support for limited models and SQL interface
  6. Differentiate between data movement and data pipelines. Considerations include:
    1. Describe Google Cloud’s data pipeline offerings
      1. Cloud Pub/Sub provides reliable, many-to-many, asynchronous messaging between applications. By decoupling senders and receivers, Google Cloud Pub/Sub allows developers to communicate between independently written applications.
      2. Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed service for strongly consistent, parallel data-processing pipelines
      3. Cloud Data Fusion is a fully managed, cloud-native, enterprise data integration service for quickly building & managing data pipelines
      4. BigQuery Service is a fully managed, highly scalable data analysis service that enables businesses to analyze Big Data.
      5. Looker provides an enterprise platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics.
    2. Define data ingestion options
  7. Apply use cases to a high-level Google Cloud architecture. Considerations include:
    1. Define Google Cloud’s offerings around the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
    2. Describe Google Cloud’s platform visibility and alerting offerings covers Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging
  8. Describe solutions for migrating workloads to Google Cloud. Considerations include:
    1. Identify data migration options
    2. Differentiate when to use Migrate for Compute Engine versus Migrate for Anthos
      1. Migrate for Compute Engine provides fast, flexible, and safe migration to Google Cloud
      2. Migrate for Anthos and GKE makes it fast and easy to modernize traditional applications away from virtual machines and into native containers. This significantly reduces the cost and labor that would be required for a manual application modernization project.
    3. Distinguish between lift and shift versus application modernization
      1. involves lift and shift migration with zero to minimal changes and is usually performed with time constraints
      2. Application modernization requires a redesign of infra and applications and takes time. It can include moving legacy monolithic architecture to microservices architecture, building CI/CD pipelines for automated builds and deployments, frequent releases with zero downtime, etc.
  9. Describe networking to on-premises locations. Considerations include:
    1. Define Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) – did not have any questions regarding the same.
    2. Determine the best connectivity option based on networking and security requirements – covers Cloud VPN, Interconnect, and Peering.
    3. Private Google Access provides access from VM instances to Google provides services like Cloud Storage or third-party provided services
  10. Define identity and access features. Considerations include:
    1. Cloud Identity & Access Management (Cloud IAM) provides administrators the ability to manage cloud resources centrally by controlling who can take what action on specific resources.
    2. Google Cloud Directory Sync enables administrators to synchronize users, groups, and other data from an Active Directory/LDAP service to their Google Cloud domain directory.