Solutions Architect

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refer to AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Exam Guide

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Exam Domains

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

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

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

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

Storage

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

Database

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

Data Migration & Transfer

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

Networking & Content Delivery

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

Security, Identity & Compliance

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

Compute

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

Disaster Recovery

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

Management & Governance tools

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

Integration Tools

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

Analytics

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

Architecture & Design Flows

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

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

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

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

Refer AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Guide 

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Summary

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

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Resources

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Topics

Networking

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

Security

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

Storage

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

Compute

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

Databases

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

Integration Tools

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

Analytics

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

Management Tools

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

AWS Whitepapers & Cheat sheets

Finally, All the Best 🙂

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

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

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

NOTE – Refer to SAP-C02 Learning Path

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

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

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

Refer to AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Exam Guide

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Exam Domains

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

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

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

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

Storage

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

Database

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

Data Migration & Transfer

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

Networking & Content Delivery

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

Security, Identity & Compliance

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

Compute

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

Management & Governance tools

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

Analytics

Integration Tools

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

Architecture & Design Flows

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C02 Exam Learning Path

SAA-C02 Certification
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 37 Comments

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C02 Exam Learning Path

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C02 exam is the latest AWS exam that has replaced the previous SAA-C01 certification exam. It basically validates the ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies

  • Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
  • Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the life cycle of the project.

Refer AWS_Solution_Architect_-_Associate_SAA-C02_Exam_Blue_Print

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C02 Exam Summary

  • SAA-C02 exam consists of 65 questions in 130 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well prepared.
  • SAA-C02 Exam covers the architecture aspects in deep, so you must be able to visualize the architecture, even draw them out in the exam just to understand how it would work and how different services relate.
  • AWS has updated the exam concepts from the focus being on individual services to more building of scalable, highly available, cost-effective, performant, resilient.
  • If you had been preparing for the SAA-C01 –
    • SAA-C02 is pretty much similar to SAA-C01 except the operational effective architecture domain has been dropped
    • Although, most of the services and concepts covered by the SAA-C01 are the same. There are few new additions like Aurora Serverless, AWS Global Accelerator, FSx for Windows, FSx for Lustre
  • AWS exams are available online, and I took the online one. Just make sure you have a proper place to take the exam with no disturbance and nothing around you.
  • Also, if you are taking the AWS Online exam for the first time try to join atleast 30 minutes before the actual time.

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C02 Exam Resources

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C02 Exam Topics

Make sure you go through all the topics and focus on hints in italics

Networking

  • Be sure to create VPC from scratch. This is mandatory.
    • Create VPC and understand whats an CIDR and addressing patterns
    • Create public and private subnets, configure proper routes, security groups, NACLs. (hint: Subnets are public or private depending on whether they can route traffic directly through Internet gateway)
    • Create Bastion for communication with instances
    • Create NAT Gateway or Instances for instances in private subnets to interact with internet
    • 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)
    • Make sure to understand how the communication happens between Internet, Public subnets, Private subnets, NAT, Bastion etc.
  • Understand difference between Security Groups and NACLs (hint: Security Groups are Stateful vs NACLs are stateless. Also only NACLs provide an ability to deny or block IPs)
  • Understand VPC endpoints and what services it can help interact (hint: VPC Endpoints routes traffic internally without Internet)
    • VPC Gateway Endpoints supports S3 and DynamoDB.
    • VPC Interface Endpoints OR Private Links supports others
  • Understand difference between NAT Gateway and NAT Instance (hint: NAT Gateway is AWS managed and is scalable and highly available)
  • Understand how NAT high availability can be achieved (hint: provision NAT in each AZ and route traffic from subnets within that AZ through that NAT Gateway)
  • Understand VPN and Direct Connect for on-premises to AWS connectivity
    • VPN provides quick connectivity, cost-effective, secure channel, however routes through internet and does not provide consistent throughput
    • Direct Connect provides consistent dedicated throughput without Internet, however requires time to setup and is not cost-effective
  • Understand Data Migration techniques
    • Choose Snowball vs Snowmobile vs Direct Connect vs VPN depending on the bandwidth available, data transfer needed, time available, encryption requirement, one-time or continuous requirement
    • Snowball, SnowMobile are for one-time data, cost-effective, quick and ideal for huge data transfer
    • Direct Connect, VPN are ideal for continuous or frequent data transfers
  • Understand CloudFront as CDN and the static and dynamic caching it provides, what can be its origin (hint: CloudFront can point to on-premises sources and its usecases with S3 to reduce load and cost)
  • Understand Route 53 for routing
    • Understand Route 53 health checks and failover routing
    • Understand  Route 53 Routing Policies it provides and their use cases mainly for high availability (hint: focus on weighted, latency, geolocation, failover routing)
  • Be sure to cover ELB concepts in deep.
    • SAA-C02 focuses on ALB and NLB and does not cover CLB
    • Understand differences between  CLB vs ALB vs NLB
      • ALB is layer 7 while NLB is layer 4
      • ALB provides content based, host based, path based routing
      • ALB provides dynamic port mapping which allows same tasks to be hosted on ECS node
      • NLB provides low latency and ability to scale
      • NLB provides static IP address

Security

  • Understand IAM as a whole
    • Focus on IAM role (hint: can be used for EC2 application access and Cross-account access)
    • Understand IAM identity providers and federation and use cases
    • Understand MFA and how would implement two factor authentication for an application
    • Understand IAM Policies (hint: expect couple of questions with policies defined and you need to select correct statements)
  • Understand encryption services
  • AWS WAF integrates with CloudFront to provide protection against Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. It also provide IP blocking and geo-protection.
  • AWS Shield integrates with CloudFront to provide protection against DDoS.
  • Refer 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
    • Understand Instance Store (hint: it is physically attached  to the EC2 instance and provides the lowest latency and highest IOPS)
  • Elastic Block Storage – EBS
    • Understand various EBS volume types and their use cases in terms of IOPS and throughput. SSD for IOPS and HDD for throughput
    • Understand Burst performance and I/O credits to handle occasional peaks
    • Understand EBS Snapshots (hint: backups are automated, snapshots are manual) 
  • Simple Storage Service – S3
    • Cover S3 in depth
    • Understand 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
    • Understand S3 Data Protection (hint: S3 Client side encryption encrypts data before storing it in S3)
    • Understand S3 features including
      • S3 provides a cost effective static website hosting
      • S3 versioning provides protection against accidental overwrites and deletions
      • S3 Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download provides 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.
    • Understand Glacier as an archival storage with various retrieval patterns
    • Glacier Expedited retrieval now allows object retrieval within mins
  • Understand 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
  • Understand FSx easy and cost effective to launch and run popular file systems.
  • Understand the difference between EBS vs S3 vs EFS
    • EFS provides shared volume across multiple EC2 instances, while EBS can be attached to a single volume within the same AZ.
  • Understand the difference between EBS vs Instance Store
  • Would recommend referring Storage Options whitepaper, although a bit dated 90% still holds right

Compute

  • Understand Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2
  • Understand Auto Scaling and ELB, how they work together to provide High Available and Scalable solution. (hint: Span both ELB and Auto Scaling across Multi-AZs to provide High Availability)
  • Understand EC2 Instance Purchase Types – Reserved, Scheduled Reserved, On-demand and Spot and their use cases
    • Choose Reserved Instances for continuous persistent load
    • Choose Scheduled Reserved Instances for load with fixed scheduled and time interval
    • Choose Spot instances for fault tolerant and Spiky loads
    • Reserved instances provides cost benefits for long terms requirements over On-demand instances
    • Spot instances provides cost benefits for temporary fault tolerant spiky load
  • Understand EC2 Placement Groups (hint: Cluster placement groups provide low latency and high throughput communication, while Spread placement group provides high availability)
  • Understand Lambda and serverless architecture, its features and use cases. (hint: Lambda integrated with API Gateway to provide a serverless, highly scalable, cost-effective architecture)
  • Understand ECS with its ability to deploy containers and micro services architecture.
    • ECS role for tasks can be provided through taskRoleArn
    • ALB provides dynamic port mapping to allow multiple same tasks on the same node
  • Know Elastic Beanstalk at a high level, what it provides and its ability to get an application running quickly.

Databases

  • Understand relational and NoSQLs data storage options which include RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora and their use cases
  • RDS
    • Understand RDS features – 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
  • Aurora
    • Understand Aurora
      • provides multiple read replicas and replicates 6 copies of data across AZs
    • Understand Aurora Serverless provides a highly scalable cost-effective database solution
  • DynamoDB
    • Understand DynamoDB with its low latency performance, key-value store (hint: DynamoDB is not a relational database)
    • DynamoDB DAX provides caching for DynamoDB
    • Understand DynamoDB provisioned throughput for Read/Writes (It is more cover in Developer exam though.)
  • Know ElastiCache use cases, mainly for caching performance

Integration Tools

  • Understand SQS as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
  • Understand SQS features like visibility, long poll vs short poll
  • Focus on SQS as a decoupling service
  • Understand SQS Standard vs SQS FIFO difference (hint: FIFO provides exactly once delivery both low throughput)

Analytics

  • Know Redshift as a business intelligence tool
  • Know Kinesis for real time data capture and analytics
  • Atleast know what AWS Glue does, so you can eliminate the answer

Management Tools

  • Understand CloudWatch monitoring to provide operational transparency
  • Know which EC2 metrics it can track. Remember, it cannot track memory and disk space/swap utilization
  • Understand CloudWatch is extendable with custom metrics
  • Understand CloudTrail for Audit
  • Have a basic understanding of CloudFormation, OpsWorks

AWS Whitepapers & Cheat sheets

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate Exam Domains

Domain 1: Design Resilient Architectures

  1. Design a multi-tier architecture solution
  2. Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures
  3. Design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services
  4. Choose appropriate resilient storage

Domain 2: Define High-Performing Architectures

  1. Identify elastic and scalable compute solutions for a workload
  2. Select high-performing and scalable storage solutions for a workload
  3. Select high-performing networking solutions for a workload
  4. Choose high-performing database solutions for a workload

Domain 3: Specify Secure Applications and Architectures

  1. Design secure access to AWS resources
  2. Design secure application tiers
  3. Select appropriate data security options

Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

  1. Determine how to design cost-optimized storage.
  2. Determine how to design cost-optimized compute.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 Exam Learning Path (Obsolete)

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 261 Comments

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 Exam Learning Path (Obsolete)

SAA-C01 is Obsolete now, Please refer SAA-C02 Learning Path

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 exam is the latest AWS exam and would replace the old CSA-Associate exam. It basically validates the ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies

  • Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
  • Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the life cycle of the project.

Refer AWS_Solution_Architect_-_Associate_SAA-C01_Exam_Blue_Print

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate February 2018

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 Exam Summary

  • AWS has updated the exam concepts from the focus being on individual services to more building of scalable, highly available, cost-effective, performant, resilient and operational effective architecture
  • Although, most of the services covered by the the old exam are the same. There are few new additions like API Gateway, Lambda, ECS, Aurora
  • Exam surely covers the architecture aspects in deep, so you must be able to visualize the architecture, even draw them out in the exam just to understand how it would work and how different services relate.
  • Be sure to cover the following topics
    • Networking
      • Be sure to create VPC from scratch. This is mandatory.
        • Create VPC and understand whats an CIDR.
        • Create public and private subnets, configure proper routes, security groups, NACLs.
        • Create Bastion for communication with instances
        • Create NAT Gateway or Instances for instances in private subnets to interact with internet
        • 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.
        • Make sure to understand how the communication happens between Internet, Public subnets, Private subnets, NAT, Bastion etc.
      • Understand VPC endpoints and what services it can help interact
      • Understand difference between NAT Gateway and NAT Instance
      • Understand how NAT high availability can be achieved
      • Understand CloudFront as CDN and the static and dynamic caching it provides, what can be its origin (it can point to on-premises sources)
      • Understand Route 53 for routing, health checks and various routing policies it provides and their use cases mainly for high availability
      • Be sure to cover ELB in deep. AWS has introduced ALB and NLB and there are lot of questions on ALB
      • Understand ALB features with its ability for content based and URL based routing with support for dynamic port mapping with ECS
    • Storage
      • Understand various storage options S3, EBS, Instance store, EFS, Glacier and what are the use cases and anti patterns for each
      • Would recommend referring Storage Options whitepaper, although a bit dated 90% still holds right
      • Understand various EBS volume types and their use cases in terms of IOPS and throughput. SSD for IOPS and HDD for throughput
      • Understand Burst performance and I/O credits to handle occasional peaks
      • Understand S3 features like different storage classes with lifecycle policies, static website hosting, versioning, Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download, CORS
      • Understand Glacier as an archival storage with various retrieval patterns
      • Glacier Expedited retrieval now allows object retrieval within mins
      • Understand Storage gateway and its different types
    • Compute
      • Understand EC2 as a whole
      • Understand Auto Scaling and ELB, how they work together to provide High Available and Scalable solution
      • Understand EC2 various purchase types – Reserved, On-demand and Spot and their use cases
      • Understand Reserved purchase types with the introduction of Scheduled and Convertible types
      • Understand Lambda and serverless architecture, its features and use cases. How do you benefit from Lambda?
      • Understand ECS with its ability to deploy containers and micro services architecture
      • Know Elastic Beanstalk at a high level, what it provides and its ability to get an application running quickly
    • Databases
      • Understand relational and NoSQLs data storage options which include RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora and their use cases
      • Aurora has been added to the exam and most of time the questions refer to Aurora given its abilities for multiple read replicas and replication of data across AZs
      • Understand S3 is not a storage option for database
      • Understand RDS features – Read Replicas for scalability, Multi-AZ for High Availability, Automated Backups, underlying volume types
      • Understand DynamoDB with its low latency performance, DAX
      • Understand DynamoDB provisioned throughput for Read/Writes
      • Know ElastiCache use cases, mainly for caching performance
    • Analytics
      • Not much in deep, but understand what the services are and what they can do
      • Understand Redshift as a business intelligence tool
      • Know Kinesis for real time data capture and analytics
      • Atleast know what AWS Glue does, so you can eliminate the answer
    • Security
      • Understand IAM as a whole
      • Focus on IAM role and its use case especially with EC2 instance
      • Understand IAM identity providers and federation and use cases
      • Understand MFA and How would implement two factor authentication for your application
      • Understand encryption services
      • Refer Disaster Recovery whitepaper, be sure you know the different recovery types with impact on RTO/RPO.
    • Management Tools
      • Understand CloudWatch monitoring to provide operational transparency
      • Know which EC2 metrics it can track. Remember, it cannot track memory and disk space/swap utilization
      • Understand CloudWatch is extendable with custom metrics
      • Understand CloudTrail for Audit
      • Have a basic understanding of CloudFormation, OpsWorks
    • Integration Tools
      • Understand SQS as message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
      • Understand SQS features like visibility, long poll vs short poll
      • Focus on SQS as a decoupling service
      • AWS has released SQS FIFO, make sure you know the differences between standard and FIFO

NOTE: I have just marked the topics inline with the AWS Exam Blue Print. So be sure to check the same, as it is updated regularly and go through Whitepapers, FAQs and Re-Invent videos.

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C01 Exam Resources

AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate Exam Contents

Domain 1: Design Resilient Architectures

  1. Choose reliable/resilient storage.
  2. Determine how to design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services.
  3. Determine how to design a multi-tier architecture solution.
  4. Determine how to design high availability and/or fault tolerant architectures.

Domain 2: Define Performant Architectures

  1. Choose performant storage and databases.
  2. Apply caching to improve performance.
  3. Design solutions for elasticity and scalability.

Domain 3: Specify Secure Applications and Architectures

  1. Determine how to secure application tiers.
  2. Determine how to secure data.
  3. Define the networking infrastructure for a single VPC application.

Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

  1. Determine how to design cost-optimized storage.
  2. Determine how to design cost-optimized compute.

Domain 5: Define Operationally-Excellent Architectures

  1. Choose design features in solutions that enable operational excellence.