Certification

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.

NOTE: As of March 28, 2023, the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam will not include exam labs until further notice. This removal of exam labs is temporary while we evaluate the exam labs and make improvements to provide an optimal candidate experience.

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

  • AWS SysOps Administrator – Associate SOA-C02 is intended for system administrators in a cloud operations role.
  • SOA-C02 validates a candidate’s ability to deploy, manage, and operate workloads on AWS which includes
    • 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

SOA-C02 Exam Domains

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

  • SOA-C02 is the first AWS exam that included 2 sections
    • Objective questions
    • Hands-on labs
  • With Labs
    • SOA-C02 Exam consists of around 50 objective-type questions and 3 Hands-on labs to be answered in 190 minutes.
    • 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.
    • Plan to leave 20 minutes to complete each exam lab.
    • 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.
  • Without Labs
    • SOA-C02 exam consists of 65 questions in 130 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well-prepared.
  • SOA-C02 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
  • SOA-C02 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 720.
  • Associate exams currently cost $ 150 + tax.
  • 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 can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. 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 SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Resources

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

SOA-C02 mainly focuses on SysOps and DevOps tools in AWS and the ability to deploy, manage, operate, and automate workloads on AWS.

Management & Governance Tools

  • CloudFormation
    • provides an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provision and update them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
    • CloudFormation Concepts cover
      • Templates act as a blueprint for provisioning of AWS resources
      • Stacks are collection of resources as a single unit, that can be created, updated, and deleted by creating, updating, and deleting stacks.
      • Change Sets present a summary or preview of the proposed changes that CloudFormation will make when a stack is updated.
      • Nested stacks are stacks created as part of other stacks.
    • CloudFormation template anatomy consists of resources, parameters, outputs, and mappings.
    • CloudFormation supports multiple features
      • 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 help create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and Regions with a single operation.
      • Helper scripts with creation policies can help wait for the completion of events before provisioning or marking resources complete.
      • DependsOn attribute can specify the resource creation order and control the creation of a specific resource follows another.
      • Update policy supports rolling and replacing updates with AutoScaling.
      • Deletion policies to help retain or backup resources during stack deletion.
      • Custom resources can be configured for uses cases not supported for e.g. retrieve AMI IDs or interact with external services
    • Understand CloudFormation Best Practices esp. Nested Stacks and logical grouping
  • Elastic Beanstalk helps to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without having to worry about the infrastructure that runs those applications. 
  • OpsWorks is a configuration management service that helps to configure and operate applications in a cloud enterprise by using Chef.
  • Understand CloudFormation vs Elastic Beanstalk vs OpsWorks
  • AWS Organizations
    • Difference between Service Control Policies and IAM Policies
    • SCP provides the maximum permission that a user can have, however, the user still needs to be explicitly given IAM policy.
    • Consolidated billing enables consolidating payments from multiple AWS accounts and includes combined usage and volume discounts including sharing of Reserved Instances across accounts.
  • Systems Manager is the operations hub and provides 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
    • 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
    • CloudWatch logs can be used to monitor, store, and access log files from EC2 instances, CloudTrail, Route 53, and other sources. You can create metric filters over the logs.
    • CloudWatch Subscription Filters can be used to send logs to Kinesis Data Streams, Lambda, or Kinesis Data Firehose.
    • EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) is a serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect applications with data from a variety of sources.
    • EventBridge or CloudWatch events can be used as a trigger for periodically scheduled events.
    • CloudWatch unified agent helps collect metrics and logs from EC2 instances and on-premises servers and push them to CloudWatch.
  • CloudTrail for audit and governance
    • With Organizations, the trail can be configured to log CloudTrail from all accounts to a central account.
    • CloudTrail log file integrity validation can be used to check whether a log file was modified, deleted, or unchanged after being delivered.
  • AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security, compliance, and governance.
    • supports managed as well as custom rules that can be evaluated on periodic basis or as the event occurs for compliance and trigger automatic remediation
    • Conformance pack is a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be easily deployed as a single entity in an account and a Region or across an organization in AWS Organizations.
  • 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 provides recommendations that help follow AWS best practices covering security, performance, cost, fault tolerance & service limits.
  • AWS Health Dashboard is the single place to learn about the availability and operations of AWS services.
  • Cost allocation tags can be used to differentiate resource costs and analyzed using Cost Explorer or on a Cost Allocation report.
  • Understand how to setup Billing Alerts using CloudWatch

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 an 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
  • 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).

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
  • OpenSearch (Elasticsearch) service is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene.
    • Opensearch production setup would be 3 AZs, 3 dedicated master nodes, 6 nodes with two replicas in each AZ.

Integration Tools

  • Understand SQS as a 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

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.

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

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • 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.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

Finally, All the Best 🙂

 

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) Exam Learning Path

AWS DevOps - Professional DOP-C02 Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 1 Comment

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) Exam Learning Path

  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) exam is the upgraded pattern of the DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C01) exam which was released in March 2023.
  • I recently attempted the latest pattern and DOP-C02 is quite similar to DOP-C01 with the inclusion of new services and features.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) Exam Content

  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) exam is intended for individuals who perform a DevOps engineer role and focuses on provisioning, operating, and managing distributed systems and services on AWS.
  • DOP-C02 basically validates
    • Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
    • Implement and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
    • Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
    • Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform
    • Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Refer to AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional Exam Guide

AWS DevOps - Professional DOP-C02 Exam Domains

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) Exam Resources

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) Exam Summary

  • Professional exams are tough, lengthy, and tiresome. 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.
  • Each solution involves multiple AWS services.
  • DOP-C02 exam has 75 questions to be solved in 170 minutes. Only 65 affect your score, while 10 unscored questions are for evaluation for future use.
  • DOP-C02 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
  • DOP-C02 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 750.
  • Each question mainly touches multiple AWS services.
  • Professional exams currently cost $ 300 + tax.
  • 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.
  • 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 exams can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. 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 DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) Exam Topics

  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam covers a lot of concepts and services related to Automation, Deployments, Disaster Recovery, HA, Monitoring, Logging, and Troubleshooting. It also covers security and compliance related topics.

Management & Governance tools

  • CloudFormation
    • provides an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provision and update them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
    • Make sure you have gone through and executed a CloudFormation template to provision AWS resources.
    • CloudFormation Concepts cover
      • Templates act as a blueprint for provisioning of AWS resources
      • Stacks are collection of resources as a single unit, that can be created, updated, and deleted by creating, updating, and deleting stacks.
      • Change Sets present a summary or preview of the proposed changes that CloudFormation will make when a stack is updated.
      • Nested stacks are stacks created as part of other stacks.
    • CloudFormation template anatomy consists of resources, parameters, outputs, and mappings.
    • CloudFormation supports multiple features
      • 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 help create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and Regions with a single operation.
      • Helper scripts with creation policies can help wait for the completion of events before provisioning or marking resources complete.
      • Update policy supports rolling and replacing updates with AutoScaling.
      • Deletion policies to help retain or backup resources during stack deletion.
      • Custom resources can be configured for uses cases not supported for e.g. retrieve AMI IDs or interact with external services
    • Understand CloudFormation Best Practices esp. Nested Stacks and logical grouping
  • Elastic Beanstalk
    • helps to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without having to worry about the infrastructure that runs those applications. 
    • Understand Elastic Beanstalk overall – Applications, Versions, and Environments
    • Deployment strategies with their advantages and disadvantages
  • OpsWorks
    • is a configuration management service that helps to configure and operate applications in a cloud enterprise by using Chef.
    • Understand OpsWorks overall – stacks, layers, recipes
    • Understand OpsWorks Lifecycle events esp. the Configure event and how it can be used.
    • Understand OpsWorks Deployment Strategies
    • Know OpsWorks auto-healing and how to be notified for it.
  • Understand CloudFormation vs Elastic Beanstalk vs OpsWorks
  • 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
    • supports monitoring, logging, and alerting.
    • CloudWatch logs can be used to monitor, store, and access log files from EC2 instances, CloudTrail, Route 53, and other sources. You can create metric filters over the logs.
    • CloudWatch Subscription Filters can be used to send logs to Kinesis Data Streams, Lambda, or Kinesis Data Firehose.
    • EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) is a serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect applications with data from a variety of sources.
    • EventBridge or CloudWatch events can be used as a trigger for periodically scheduled events.
    • CloudWatch unified agent helps collect metrics and logs from EC2 instances and on-premises servers and push them to CloudWatch.
    • CloudWatch Synthetics helps create canaries, configurable scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs
  • CloudTrail
    • for audit and governance
    • With Organizations, the trail can be configured to log CloudTrail from all accounts to a central account.
  • Config is a fully managed service that provides AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security, compliance, and governance.
    • supports managed as well as custom rules that can be evaluated on periodic basis or as the event occurs for compliance and trigger automatic remediation
    • Conformance pack is a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be easily deployed as a single entity in an account and a Region or across an organization in AWS Organizations.
  • 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.
  • AWS Health Dashboard is the single place to learn about the availability and operations of AWS services.

Developer Tools

  • 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.
    • can help handle deployments of code to different environments using same repository and different branches.
  • 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, Lambda, and ECS.
  • CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps automate the release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
    • CodePipeline pipeline structure (Hint : run builds parallelly using runorder)
    • Understand how to configure notifications on events and failures
    • CodePipeline supports Manual Approval
  • 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.
  • CodeGuru provides intelligent recommendations to improve code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code. Reviewer helps improve code quality and Profiler helps optimize performance for applications
  • EC2 Image Builder helps to automate the creation, management, and deployment of customized, secure, and up-to-date server images that are pre-installed and pre-configured with software and settings to meet specific IT standards.

Disaster Recovery

  • Disaster recovery is mainly covered as a part of Re-silent cloud solutions.
  • 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.

Networking & Content Delivery

  • Networking is covered very lightly.
  • 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 and can be published to CloudWatch Logs, S3, or Kinesis Data Firehose.
    • 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.
  • CloudFront
    • fully managed, fast CDN service that speeds up the distribution of static, dynamic web or streaming content to end-users.
  • Load Balancer – ELB, ALB and NLB
    • ELB with Auto Scaling to provide scalable and highly available applications
    • Understand ALB vs NLB and their use cases.
    • Access logs needs to be enabled and logs only to S3.
  • 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.

Security, Identity & Compliance

  • AWS Identity and Access Management
  • 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.
  • AWS KMS – Key Management Service
    • managed encryption service that allows the creation and control of encryption keys to enable data encryption.
  • Secrets Manager
    • helps protect secrets needed to access applications, services, and IT 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 Security Hub is a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts and enables automated remediation.
  • Firewall Manager helps centrally configure and manage firewall rules across the accounts and applications in AWS Organizations which includes a variety of protections, including WAF, Shield Advanced, VPC security groups, Network Firewall, and Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall.

Storage

Database

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
    • Auto Scaling Lifecycle events enable performing custom actions by pausing instances as an ASG launches or terminates them.
    • Blue/green deployments with Auto Scaling – With new launch configurations, new auto-scaling groups, or CloudFormation update policies.
  • Lambda
    • offers Serverless computing 
    • helps define reserved concurrency limits to reduce the impact
    • Lambda Alias now supports canary deployments
    • 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.
      • supports Application Auto Scaling.
  • Step Functions helps developers use AWS services to build distributed applications, automate processes, orchestrate microservices, and create data and machine learning (ML) pipelines.
  • ECS – Elastic Container Service
    • container management service that supports Docker containers
    • supports two launch types
      • EC2 and
      • Fargate which provides the serverless capability
  • ECR provides a fully managed, secure, scalable, reliable container image registry service. It supports lifecycle policies for images.

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 and redrive policy which specifies the source queue, the dead-letter queue, and the conditions under which SQS moves messages from the former to the latter if the consumer of the source queue fails to process a message a specified number of times.
  • CloudWatch integration with SNS and Lambda for notifications.

Analytics

Whitepapers

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) Exam Day

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • 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.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

Finally, All the Best 🙂

  •  

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Developer - Associate Certification
~ Last updated on : ~ 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.
  • I passed the AWS Developer – Associate DVA-C02 exam with a score of 835/1000.

AWS Certified Developer – Associate DVA-C02 Exam Content

  • 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

  • DVA-C02 exam consists of 65 questions in 130 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well-prepared.
  • DVA-C02 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
  • DVA-C02 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 720.
  • Associate exams currently cost $ 150 + tax.
  • 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 can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. 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

  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.

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

On the Exam Day

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • 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.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

Finally, All the Best 🙂

AWS Database Services Cheat Sheet

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 9 Comments

AWS Database Services Cheat Sheet

AWS Database Services

Relational Database Service – RDS

  • provides Relational Database service
  • supports MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and the new, MySQL-compatible Amazon Aurora DB engine
  • as it is a managed service, shell (root ssh) access is not provided
  • manages backups, software patching, automatic failure detection, and recovery
  • supports use initiated manual backups and snapshots
  • daily automated backups with database transaction logs enables Point in Time recovery up to the last five minutes of database usage
  • snapshots are user-initiated storage volume snapshot of DB instance, backing up the entire DB instance and not just individual databases that can be restored as a independent RDS instance
  • RDS Security
    • support encryption at rest using KMS as well as encryption in transit using SSL endpoints
    • supports IAM database authentication, which prevents the need to store static user credentials in the database, because authentication is managed externally using IAM.
    • supports Encryption only during creation of an RDS DB instance
    • existing unencrypted DB cannot be encrypted and you need to create a  snapshot, created a encrypted copy of the snapshot and restore as encrypted DB
    • supports Secret Manager for storing and rotating secrets
    • for encrypted database
      • logs, snapshots, backups, read replicas are all encrypted as well
      • cross region replicas and snapshots does not work across region (Note – this is possible now with latest AWS enhancement)
  • Multi-AZ deployment
    • provides high availability and automatic failover support and is NOT a scaling solution
    • maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different AZ
    • transaction success is returned only if the commit is successful both on the primary and the standby DB
    • Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB DB instances use Amazon technology, while SQL Server DB instances use SQL Server Mirroring
    • snapshots and backups are taken from standby & eliminate I/O freezes
    • during automatic failover, its seamless and RDS switches to the standby instance and updates the DNS record to point to standby
    • failover can be forced with the Reboot with failover option
  • Read Replicas
    • uses the PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB DB engines’ built-in replication functionality to create a separate Read Only instance
    • updates are asynchronously copied to the Read Replica, and data might be stale
    • can help scale applications and reduce read only load
    • requires automatic backups enabled
    • replicates all databases in the source DB instance
    • for disaster recovery, can be promoted to a full fledged database
    • can be created in a different region for disaster recovery, migration and low latency across regions
    • can’t create encrypted read replicas from unencrypted DB or read replica
  • RDS does not support all the features of underlying databases, and if required the database instance can be launched on an EC2 instance
  • RDS Components
    • DB parameter groups contains engine configuration values that can be applied to one or more DB instances of the same instance type for e.g. SSL, max connections etc.
    • Default DB parameter group cannot be modified, create a custom one and attach to the DB
    • Supports static and dynamic parameters
      • changes to dynamic parameters are applied immediately (irrespective of apply immediately setting)
      • changes to static parameters are NOT applied immediately and require a manual reboot.
  • RDS Monitoring & Notification
    • integrates with CloudWatch and CloudTrail
    • CloudWatch provides metrics about CPU utilization from the hypervisor for a DB instance, and Enhanced Monitoring gathers its metrics from an agent on the instance
    • Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that helps illustrate the database’s performance and help analyze any issues that affect it
    • supports RDS Event Notification which uses the SNS to provide notification when an RDS event like creation, deletion or snapshot creation etc occurs

Aurora

  • is a relational database engine that combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases
  • is a managed services and handles time-consuming tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection and repair
  • is a proprietary technology from AWS (not open sourced)
  • provides PostgreSQL and MySQL compatibility
  • is “AWS cloud optimized” and claims 5x performance improvement
    over MySQL on RDS, over 3x the performance of PostgreSQL on RDS
  • scales storage automatically in increments of 10GB, up to 64 TB with no impact to database performance. Storage is striped across 100s of volumes.
  • no need to provision storage in advance.
  • provides self-healing storage. Data blocks and disks are continuously scanned for errors and repaired automatically.
  • provides instantaneous failover
  • replicates each chunk of my the database volume six ways across three Availability Zones i.e. 6 copies of the data across 3 AZ
    • requires 4 copies out of 6 needed for writes
    • requires 3 copies out of 6 need for reads
  • costs more than RDS (20% more) – but is more efficient
  • Read Replicas
    • can have 15 replicas while MySQL has 5, and the replication process is faster (sub 10 ms replica lag)
    • share the same data volume as the primary instance in the same AWS Region, there is virtually no replication lag
    • supports Automated failover for master in less than 30 seconds
    • supports Cross Region Replication using either physical or logical replication.
  • Security
    • supports Encryption at rest using KMS
    • supports Encryption in flight using SSL (same process as MySQL or Postgres)
    • Automated backups, snapshots and replicas are also encrypted
    • Possibility to authenticate using IAM token (same method as RDS)
    • supports protecting the instance with security groups
    • does not support SSH access to the underlying servers
  • Aurora Serverless
    • provides automated database Client  instantiation and on-demand  autoscaling based on actual usage
    • provides a relatively simple, cost-effective option for infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable workloads
    • automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on the application’s needs. No capacity planning needed
    • Pay per second, can be more cost-effective
  • Aurora Global Database
    • allows a single Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions.
    • provides Physical replication, which uses dedicated infrastructure that leaves the databases entirely available to serve the application
    • supports 1 Primary Region (read / write)
    • replicates across up to 5 secondary (read-only) regions, replication lag is less than 1 second
    • supports up to 16 Read Replicas per secondary region
    • recommended for low-latency global reads and disaster recovery with an RTO of < 1 minute
    • failover is not automated and if the primary region becomes unavailable, a secondary region can be manually removed from an Aurora Global Database and promote it to take full reads and writes. Application needs to be updated to point to the newly promoted region.
  • Aurora Backtrack
    • Backtracking “rewinds” the DB cluster to the specified time
    • Backtracking performs in place restore and does not create a new instance. There is a minimal downtime associated with it.
  • Aurora Clone feature allows quick and cost-effective creation of Aurora Cluster duplicates
  • supports parallel or distributed query using Aurora Parallel Query, which refers to the ability to push down and distribute the computational load of a single query across thousands of CPUs in Aurora’s storage layer.

DynamoDB

  • fully managed NoSQL database service
  • synchronously replicates data across three facilities in an AWS Region, giving high availability and data durability
  • runs exclusively on SSDs to provide high I/O performance
  • provides provisioned table reads and writes
  • automatically partitions, reallocates, and re-partitions the data and provisions additional server capacity as data or throughput changes
  • creates and maintains indexes for the primary key attributes for efficient access to data in the table
  • DynamoDB Table classes currently support
    • DynamoDB Standard table class is the default and is recommended for the vast majority of workloads.
    • DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access (DynamoDB Standard-IA) table class which is optimized for tables where storage is the dominant cost.
  • supports Secondary Indexes
    • allows querying attributes other than the primary key attributes without impacting performance.
    • are automatically maintained as sparse objects
  • Local secondary index vs Global secondary index
    • shares partition key + different sort key vs different partition + sort key
    • search limited to partition vs across all partition
    • unique attributes vs non-unique attributes
    • linked to the base table vs independent separate index
    • only created during the base table creation vs can be created later
    • cannot be deleted after creation vs can be deleted
    • consumes provisioned throughput capacity of the base table vs independent throughput
    • returns all attributes for item vs only projected attributes
    • Eventually or Strongly vs Only Eventually consistent reads
    • size limited to 10Gb per partition vs unlimited
  • DynamoDB Consistency
    • provides Eventually consistent (by default) or Strongly Consistent option to be specified during a read operation
    • supports Strongly consistent reads for a few operations like Query, GetItem, and BatchGetItem using the ConsistentRead parameter
  • DynamoDB Throughput Capacity
    • supports On-demand and Provisioned read/write capacity modes
    • Provisioned mode requires the number of reads and writes per second as required by the application to be specified
    • On-demand mode provides flexible billing option capable of serving thousands of requests per second without capacity planning
  • DynamoDB Auto Scaling helps dynamically adjust provisioned throughput capacity on your behalf, in response to actual traffic patterns.
  • DynamoDB Adaptive capacity is a feature that enables DynamoDB to run imbalanced workloads indefinitely.
  • DynamoDB Global Tables provide multi-master, cross-region replication capability of DynamoDB to support data access locality and regional fault tolerance for database workloads.
  • DynamoDB Streams provides a time-ordered sequence of item-level changes made to data in a table
  • DynamoDB Time to Live (TTL)
    • enables a per-item timestamp to determine when an item expiry
    • expired items are deleted from the table without consuming any write throughput.
  • DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement – from milliseconds to microseconds – even at millions of requests per second.
  • DynamoDB cross-region replication
    • allows identical copies (called replicas) of a DynamoDB table (called master table) to be maintained in one or more AWS regions.
    • using DynamoDB streams which leverages Kinesis and provides time-ordered sequence of item-level changes and can help for lower RPO, lower RTO disaster recovery
  • DynamoDB Triggers (just like database triggers) are a feature that allows the execution of custom actions based on item-level updates on a table.
  • VPC Gateway Endpoints provide private access to DynamoDB from within a VPC without the need for an internet gateway or NAT gateway.

ElastiCache

  • managed web service that provides in-memory caching to deploy and run Memcached or Redis protocol-compliant cache clusters
  • ElastiCache with Redis,
    • like RDS, supports Multi-AZ, Read Replicas and Snapshots
    • Read Replicas are created across AZ within same region using Redis’s asynchronous replication technology
    • Multi-AZ differs from RDS as there is no standby, but if the primary goes down a Read Replica is promoted as primary
    • Read Replicas cannot span across regions, as RDS supports
    • cannot be scaled out and if scaled up cannot be scaled down
    • allows snapshots for backup and restore
    • AOF can be enabled for recovery scenarios, to recover the data in case the node fails or service crashes. But it does not help in case the underlying hardware fails
    • Enabling Redis Multi-AZ as a Better Approach to Fault Tolerance
  • ElastiCache with Memcached
    • can be scaled up by increasing size and scaled out by adding nodes
    • nodes can span across multiple AZs within the same region
    • cached data is spread across the nodes, and a node failure will always result in some data loss from the cluster
    • supports auto discovery
    • every node should be homogenous and of same instance type
  • ElastiCache Redis vs Memcached
    • complex data objects vs simple key value storage
    • persistent vs non persistent, pure caching
    • automatic failover with Multi-AZ vs Multi-AZ not supported
    • scaling using Read Replicas vs using multiple nodes
    • backup & restore supported vs not supported
  • can be used state management to keep the web application stateless

Redshift

  • fully managed, fast and powerful, petabyte scale data warehouse service
  • uses replication and continuous backups to enhance availability and improve data durability and can automatically recover from node and component failures
  • provides Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) by distributing & parallelizing queries across multiple physical resources
  • columnar data storage improving query performance and allowing advance compression techniques
  • only supports Single-AZ deployments and the nodes are available within the same AZ, if the AZ supports Redshift clusters
  • spot instances are NOT an option

AWS EC2 Instance Metadata & Userdata

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 4 Comments

EC2 Instance Metadata & Userdata

  • Instance metadata and user data can be used for Self Configuration allowing EC2 instances answer the question Who am I? What should I do?
  • Instance metadata and user data can be accessed from within the instance itself
  • Data is not protected by authentication or cryptographic methods. Anyone who can access the instance can view its metadata and should not be used to any store sensitive data, such as passwords, as user data.
  • Both the metadata and user data are available from the IP address 169.254.169.254 and have the latest as well as previous versions available
  • Metadata and User data can be retrieved using simple curl or GET command and these requests are not billed

Instance Metadata

  • Instance metadata is data about the instance and allows you to get answers to the Who am I?
  • is divided into two categories
    • Instance metadata
      • includes metadata about the instance such as instance id, AMI id, hostname, IP address, role, etc
      • Can be accessed from http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
    • Dynamic data
      • is generated when the instances are launched such as instance identity documents, instance monitoring, etc
      • Can be accessed from http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/
  • can be used for managing and configuring running instances
  • allows access to user data that specified when launching the instance

Instance Metadata Access Methods

  • Instance metadata can be accessed from a running instance using one of the following methods:
    • Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) – a session-oriented method
    • Instance Metadata Service Version 1 (IMDSv1) – a request/response method
  • By default, either IMDSv1 or IMDSv2, or both can be used.
  • Instance metadata service distinguishes between IMDSv1 and IMDSv2 requests based on whether, for any given request, either the PUT or GET headers, which are unique to IMDSv2, are present in that request.
  • Instance metadata service can be configured on each instance so that local code or users must use IMDSv2. When IMDSv2 is enforced, IMDSv1 no longer works.

IMDSv2

  • IMDSv2 uses session-oriented requests.
  • With session-oriented requests, a session token that defines the session duration is created, which can be a minimum of one second and a maximum of six hours.
  • During the specified duration, the same session token can be used for subsequent requests.
  • After the specified duration expires, a new session token to use for future requests must be created.

User Data

  • User data can be used for bootstrapping (launching commands when the machine starts) EC2 instance and helps answer the What should I do?
  • is supplied when launching a EC2 instance and executed at boot time
  • can be in the form of parameters or user defined script executed when the instance is launched for e.g. perform software patch updates, load and update the application from an S3 bucket etc
  • can be used to build more generic AMIs, which can then be configured at launch time dynamically
  • can be retrieved from http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data
  • By default, user data scripts and cloud-init directives run only during the first boot cycle when an EC2 instance is launched.
  • If you stop an instance, modify the user data, and start the instance, the new user data is not executed automatically.
  • However, user data script and cloud-init directives can be configured with a mime multi-part file. A mime multi-part file allows the script to override how frequently user data is executed in the cloud-init package.
  • is treated as opaque data and returned as is.
  • is limited to 16 KB. This limit applies to the data in raw form, not base64-encoded form.
  • must be base64-encoded before being submitted to the API. EC2 command line tools perform the base64 encoding. The data is decoded before being presented to the instance.

Cloud-Init & EC2Config

  • Cloud-Init and EC2Config provides the ability to parse the user-data script on the instance and run the instructions
  • Cloud-Init
    • Amazon Linux AMI supports Cloud-Init, which is an open source application built by Canonical.
    • is installed on Amazon Linux, Ubuntu and RHEL AMIs
    • enables using the EC2 UserData parameter to specify actions to run on the instance at boot time
    • User data is executed on first boot using Cloud-Init, if the user data begins with #!
  • EC2Config
    • EC2Config is installed on Windows Server AMIs
    • User data is executed on first boot using Cloud-Init (technically EC2Config parses the instructions) if the user data begins with <script> or <powershell>
    • EC2Config service is started when the instance is booted. It performs tasks during initial instance startup (once) and each time you stop and start the instance.
    • It can also perform tasks on demand. Some of these tasks are enabled automatically, while others must be enabled manually.
    • uses settings files to control its operation
    • service runs Sysprep, a Microsoft tool that enables creation of customized Windows AMI that can be reused.
    • When EC2Config calls Sysprep, it uses the settings files in EC2ConfigService\Settings to determine which operations to perform.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. How can software determine the public and private IP addresses of the Amazon EC2 instance that it is running on?
    1. Query the local instance metadata
    2. Query the appropriate Amazon CloudWatch metric.
    3. Query the local instance userdata.
    4. Use ipconfig or ifconfig command.
  2. The base URI for all requests for instance metadata is ___________
    1. http://254.169.169.254/latest/
    2. http://169.169.254.254/latest/
    3. http://127.0.0.1/latest/
    4. http://169.254.169.254/latest/
  3. Which Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud feature can you query from within the instance to access instance properties?
    1. Instance user data
    2. Resource tags
    3. Instance metadata
    4. Amazon Machine Image
  4. You need to pass a custom script to new Amazon Linux instances created in your Auto Scaling group. Which feature allows you to accomplish this?
    1. User data
    2. EC2Config service
    3. IAM roles
    4. AWS Config
  5. By default, when an EBS volume is attached to a Windows instance, it may show up as any drive letter on the instance. You can change the settings of the _____ Service to set the drive letters of the EBS volumes per your specifications.
    1. EBSConfig Service
    2. AMIConfig Service
    3. EC2Config Service
    4. Ec2-AMIConfig Service
  6. How can software determine the public and private IP addresses of the Amazon EC2 instance that it is running on?
    1. Query the appropriate Amazon CloudWatch metric.
    2. Use ipconfig or ifconfig command.
    3. Query the local instance userdata.
    4. Query the local instance metadata.

References

AWS Documentation – EC2_Instance_Metadata_Userdata

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.

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

  • 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 – Specialty (SCS-C01) Exam Summary

  • Specialty exams are tough, lengthy, and tiresome. 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.
  • SCS-C01 exam has 65 questions to be solved in 170 minutes which gives you roughly 2 1/2 minutes to attempt each question.
  • SCS-C01 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
  • SCS-C01 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 750.
  • Associate exams currently cost $ 300 + tax.
  • 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.
  • 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 exams can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. 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 Security – Specialty (SCS-C01) Exam Resources

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

  • 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.

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
  • 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 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.
  • 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 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 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
  • Firewall Manager helps centrally configure and manage firewall rules across the accounts and applications in AWS Organizations which includes a variety of protections, including WAF, Shield Advanced, VPC security groups, Network Firewall, and Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall.

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.
  • Glacier Vault Lock
  • EBS Encryption
  • 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

On the Exam Day

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • 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.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

Finally, All the Best 🙂

AWS Simple Notification Service – SNS

SNS Delivery Protocols
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 8 Comments

Simple Notification Service – SNS

  • Simple Notification Service – SNS is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients.
  • SNS provides the ability to create a Topic which is a logical access point and communication channel.
  • Each topic has a unique name that identifies the SNS endpoint for publishers to post messages and subscribers to register for notifications.
  • Producers and Consumers communicate asynchronously with subscribers by producing and sending a message on a topic.
  • Producers push messages to the topic, they created or have access to, and SNS matches the topic to a list of subscribers who have subscribed to that topic and delivers the message to each of those subscribers.
  • Subscribers receive all messages published to the topics to which they subscribe, and all subscribers to a topic receive the same messages.
  • Subscribers (i.e., web servers, email addresses, SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions) consume or receive the message or notification over one of the supported protocols (i.e., SQS, HTTP/S, email, SMS, Lambda) when they are subscribed to the topic.

SNS Delivery Protocols

Accessing SNS

  • Amazon Management console
    • Amazon Management console is the web-based user interface that can be used to manage SNS
  • AWS Command-line Interface (CLI)
    • Provides commands for a broad set of AWS products, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
  • AWS Tools for Windows Powershell
    • Provides commands for a broad set of AWS products for those who script in the PowerShell environment
  • AWS SNS Query API
    • Query API allows for requests are HTTP or HTTPS requests that use the HTTP verbs GET or POST and a Query parameter named Action
  • AWS SDK libraries
    • AWS provides libraries in various languages which provide basic functions that automate tasks such as cryptographically signing your requests, retrying requests, and handling error responses

SNS Supported Transport Protocols

  • HTTP, HTTPS – Subscribers specify a URL as part of the subscription registration; notifications will be delivered through an HTTP POST to the specified URL.
  • Email, Email-JSON – Messages are sent to registered addresses as email. Email-JSON sends notifications as a JSON object, while Email sends text-based email.
  • SQS – Users can specify an SQS queue as the endpoint; SNS will enqueue a notification message to the specified queue (which subscribers can then process using SQS APIs such as ReceiveMessage, DeleteMessage, etc.)
  • SMS – Messages are sent to registered phone numbers as SMS text messages

SNS Supported Endpoints

  • Email Notifications
    • SNS provides the ability to send Email notifications
  • Mobile Push Notifications
    • SNS provides an ability to send push notification messages directly to apps on mobile devices. Push notification messages sent to a mobile endpoint can appear in the mobile app as message alerts, badge updates, or even sound alerts
    • Supported push notification services
      • Amazon Device Messaging (ADM)
      • Apple Push Notification Service (APNS)
      • Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)
      • Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) for Windows 8+ and Windows Phone 8.1+
      • Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS) for Windows Phone 7+
      • Baidu Cloud Push for Android devices in China
  • SQS Queues
    • SNS with SQS provides the ability for messages to be delivered to applications that require immediate notification of an event, and also persist in an SQS queue for other applications to process at a later time
    • SNS allows applications to send time-critical messages to multiple subscribers through a “push” mechanism, eliminating the need to periodically check or “poll” for updates.
    • SQS can be used by distributed applications to exchange messages through a polling model, and can be used to decouple sending and receiving components, without requiring each component to be concurrently available.
  • SMS Notifications
    • SNS provides the ability to send and receive Short Message Service (SMS) notifications to SMS-enabled mobile phones and smart phones
  • HTTP/HTTPS Endpoints
    • SNS provides the ability to send notification messages to one or more HTTP or HTTPS endpoints.When you subscribe an endpoint to a topic, you can publish a notification to the topic and Amazon SNS sends an HTTP POST request delivering the contents of the notification to the subscribed endpoint
  • Lambda
    • SNS and Lambda are integrated so Lambda functions can be invoked with SNS notifications.
    • When a message is published to an SNS topic that has a Lambda function subscribed to it, the Lambda function is invoked with the payload of the published message
  • Kinesis Data Firehose
    • Deliver events to delivery streams for archiving and analysis purposes.
    • Through delivery streams, events can be delivered to AWS destinations like S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch Service, or to third-party destinations such as Datadog, New Relic, MongoDB, and Splunk.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. Which of the following notification endpoints or clients does Amazon Simple Notification Service support? Choose 2 answers
    1. Email
    2. CloudFront distribution
    3. File Transfer Protocol
    4. Short Message Service
    5. Simple Network Management Protocol
  2. What happens when you create a topic on Amazon SNS?
    1. The topic is created, and it has the name you specified for it.
    2. An ARN (Amazon Resource Name) is created
    3. You can create a topic on Amazon SQS, not on Amazon SNS.
    4. This question doesn’t make sense.
  3. A user has deployed an application on his private cloud. The user is using his own monitoring tool. He wants to configure that whenever there is an error, the monitoring tool should notify him via SMS. Which of the below mentioned AWS services will help in this scenario?
    1. None because the user infrastructure is in the private cloud/
    2. AWS SNS
    3. AWS SES
    4. AWS SMS
  4. A user wants to make so that whenever the CPU utilization of the AWS EC2 instance is above 90%, the redlight of his bedroom turns on. Which of the below mentioned AWS services is helpful for this purpose?
    1. AWS CloudWatch + AWS SES
    2. AWS CloudWatch + AWS SNS
    3. It is not possible to configure the light with the AWS infrastructure services
    4. AWS CloudWatch and a dedicated software turning on the light
  5. A user is trying to understand AWS SNS. To which of the below mentioned end points is SNS unable to send a notification?
    1. Email JSON
    2. HTTP
    3. AWS SQS
    4. AWS SES
  6. A user is running a webserver on EC2. The user wants to receive the SMS when the EC2 instance utilization is above the threshold limit. Which AWS services should the user configure in this case?
    1. AWS CloudWatch + AWS SES
    2. AWS CloudWatch + AWS SNS
    3. AWS CloudWatch + AWS SQS
    4. AWS EC2 + AWS CloudWatch
  7. A user is planning to host a mobile game on EC2 which sends notifications to active users on either high score or the addition of new features. The user should get this notification when he is online on his mobile device. Which of the below mentioned AWS services can help achieve this functionality?
    1. AWS Simple Notification Service
    2. AWS Simple Queue Service
    3. AWS Mobile Communication Service
    4. AWS Simple Email Service
  8. You are providing AWS consulting service for a company developing a new mobile application that will be leveraging amazon SNS push for push notifications. In order to send direct notification messages to individual devices each device registration identifier or token needs to be registered with SNS, however the developers are not sure of the best way to do this. You advise them to: –
    1. Bulk upload the device tokens contained in a CSV file via the AWS Management Console
    2. Let the push notification service (e.g. Amazon Device messaging) handle the registration
    3. Implement a token vending service to handle the registration
    4. Call the CreatePlatformEndpoint API function to register multiple device tokens. (Refer documentation)
  9. A company is running a batch analysis every hour on their main transactional DB running on an RDS MySQL instance to populate their central Data Warehouse running on Redshift. During the execution of the batch their transactional applications are very slow. When the batch completes they need to update the top management dashboard with the new data. The dashboard is produced by another system running on-premises that is currently started when a manually-sent email notifies that an update is required The on-premises system cannot be modified because is managed by another team. How would you optimize this scenario to solve performance issues and automate the process as much as possible?
    1. Replace RDS with Redshift for the batch analysis and SNS to notify the on-premises system to update the dashboard
    2. Replace RDS with Redshift for the batch analysis and SQS to send a message to the on-premises system to update the dashboard
    3. Create an RDS Read Replica for the batch analysis and SNS to notify me on-premises system to update the dashboard
    4. Create an RDS Read Replica for the batch analysis and SQS to send a message to the on-premises system to update the dashboard.
  10. Which of the following are valid SNS delivery transports? Choose 2 answers.
    1. HTTP
    2. UDP
    3. SMS
    4. DynamoDB
    5. Named Pipes
  11. What is the format of structured notification messages sent by Amazon SNS?
    1. An XML object containing MessageId, UnsubscribeURL, Subject, Message and other values
    2. An JSON object containing MessageId, DuplicateFlag, Message and other values
    3. An XML object containing MessageId, DuplicateFlag, Message and other values
    4. An JSON object containing MessageId, unsubscribeURL, Subject, Message and other values
  12. Which of the following are valid arguments for an SNS Publish request? Choose 3 answers.
    1. TopicAm
    2. Subject
    3. Destination
    4. Format
    5. Message
    6. Language

References

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 Content

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam 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

  • Professional exams are tough, lengthy, and tiresome. 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.
  • Each solution involves multiple AWS services.
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) exam has 65 questions to be solved in 170 minutes.
  • SAP-C02 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
  • SAP-C02 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 750.
  • Each question mainly touches multiple AWS services.
  • Associate exams currently cost $ 300 + tax.
  • 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.
  • 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 exams can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. 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 Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) Exam Topics

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.

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.
    • S3 Access Logs enable tracking access requests to an S3 bucket.
    • 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.
  • Step Functions helps developers use AWS services to build distributed applications, automate processes, orchestrate microservices, and create data and machine learning (ML) pipelines.
  • 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

On the Exam Day

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • 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.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

Finally, All the Best 🙂

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

  • I just cleared the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 exam with a score of 914/1000.
  • 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.

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Content

  • 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 130 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well-prepared.
  • SAA-C03 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
  • SAA-C03 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 720.
  • Associate exams currently cost $ 150 + tax.
  • 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 can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. 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

  • 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.
  • 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.

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 like 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 & Cheatsheets

On the Exam Day

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • 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.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

Finally, All the Best 🙂

AWS Simple Email Service – SES

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Simple Email Service – SES

  • SES is a fully managed service that provides an email platform with an easy, cost-effective way to send and receive email using your own email addresses and domains.
  • can be used to send both transactional and promotional emails securely, and globally at scale.
  • acts as an outbound email server and eliminates the need to support its own software or applications to do the heavy lifting of email transport.
  • acts as an inbound email server to receive emails that can help develop software solutions such as email autoresponders, email unsubscribe systems, and applications that generate customer support tickets from incoming emails.
  • existing email server can also be configured to send outgoing emails through SES with no change in any settings in the email clients
  • Maximum message size including attachments is 10 MB per message (after base64 encoding).
  • integrated with CloudWatch and CloudTrail

SES Characteristics

  • Compatible with SMTP
  • Applications can send email using a single API call in many supported languages Java, .Net, PHP, Perl, Ruby, HTTPS, etc
  • Optimized for the highest levels of uptime, availability, and scales as per the demand
  • Provides sandbox environment for testing
  • provides Reputation dashboard, performance insights, anti-spam feedback
  • provides statistics on email deliveries, bounces, feedback loop results, emails opened, etc.
  • supports DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
  • supports flexible deployment: shared, dedicated, and customer-owned IPs
  • supports attachments with many popular content formats, including documents, images, audio, and video, and scans every attachment for viruses and malware.
  • integrates with KMS to provide the ability to encrypt the mail that it writes to the S3 bucket.
  • uses client-side encryption to encrypt the mail before it sends the email to  S3.

Sending Limits

  • Production SES has a set of sending limits which include
    • Sending Quota – max number of emails in a 24-hour period
    • Maximum Send Rate – max number of emails per second
  • SES automatically adjusts the limits upward as long as emails are of high quality and they are sent in a controlled manner, as any spike in the email sent might be considered to be spam.
  • Limits can also be raised by submitting a Quota increase request

SES Best Practices

  • Send high-quality and real production content that the recipients want
  • Only send to those who have signed up for the mail
  • Unsubscribe recipients who have not interacted with the business recently
  • Have low bounce and compliant rates and remove bounced or complained addresses, using SNS to monitor bounces and complaints, treating them as an opt-out
  • Monitor the sending activity

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. What does Amazon SES stand for?
    1. Simple Elastic Server
    2. Simple Email Service
    3. Software Email Solution
    4. Software Enabled Server
  2. Your startup wants to implement an order fulfillment process for selling a personalized gadget that needs an average of 3-4 days to produce with some orders taking up to 6 months you expect 10 orders per day on your first day. 1000 orders per day after 6 months and 10,000 orders after 12 months. Orders coming in are checked for consistency men dispatched to your manufacturing plant for production quality control packaging shipment and payment processing If the product does not meet the quality standards at any stage of the process employees may force the process to repeat a step Customers are notified via email about order status and any critical issues with their orders such as payment failure. Your case architecture includes AWS Elastic Beanstalk for your website with an RDS MySQL instance for customer data and orders. How can you implement the order fulfillment process while making sure that the emails are delivered reliably? [PROFESSIONAL]
    1. Add a business process management application to your Elastic Beanstalk app servers and re-use the ROS database for tracking order status use one of the Elastic Beanstalk instances to send emails to customers.
    2. Use SWF with an Auto Scaling group of activity workers and a decider instance in another Auto Scaling group with min/max=1 Use the decider instance to send emails to customers.
    3. Use SWF with an Auto Scaling group of activity workers and a decider instance in another Auto Scaling group with min/max=1 use SES to send emails to customers.
    4. Use an SQS queue to manage all process tasks Use an Auto Scaling group of EC2 Instances that poll the tasks and execute them. Use SES to send emails to customers.

References