AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Hours: 40 / Access Length: 12 Months / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced
Retail Price: $614.00

Course Overview:

Studying for any certification always involves deciding how much of your studying should be practical hands-on experience and how much should be simply memorizing facts and figures. Between the two of us, we've taken dozens of IT certification exams, so we know how important it is to use your study time wisely. We've designed this course to help you discover your strengths and weaknesses on the AWS platform so that you can focus your efforts properly. Whether you've been working with AWS for a long time or whether you're relatively new to it, we encourage you to do this course.

Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam requires understanding the components and operation of the core AWS services as well as how those services interact with each other. Read through the official documentation for the various AWS services. Amazon offers HTML, PDF, and Kindle documentation for many of them. Use this course as a guide to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can focus your study efforts properly

This course prepares a student to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate national certification exam.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: Introduction to Cloud Computing and AWS

The cloud is where much of the serious technology innovation and growth happens these days, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), more than any other, is the platform of choice for business and institutional workloads. If you want to be successful as an AWS solutions architect, you'll first need to understand what the cloud really is and how Amazon's end of it works.

Lesson 2: Compute Services

The ultimate focus of a traditional datacenter/server room is its precious servers. But, to make those servers useful, you'll need to add racks, power supplies, cabling, switches, firewalls, and cooling.

AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is designed to replicate the datacenter/server room experience as closely as possible. At the center of it all is the EC2 virtual server, known as an instance. But, like the local server room I just described, AWS provides a range of services meant to support and enhance your workloads’ operations. Those include tools for resource monitoring and administration, and platforms built for container orchestration.

Lesson 3: AWS Storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is where individuals, applications, and a long list of AWS services keep their data.

It's an excellent platform for the following:

• Maintaining backup archives, log files, and disaster recovery images
• Running analytics on big data at rest
• Hosting static websites

S3 provides inexpensive and reliable storage that can, if necessary, be closely integrated with operations running within or external to AWS.

Lesson 4: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service provides the networking layer of EC2. A VPC is a virtual network that can contain EC2 instances as well as network resources for other AWS services. By default, every VPC is logically isolated from all other networks. You can, however, connect your VPC to other networks, including the Internet, on-premises networks, and other VPCs.

In addition to EC2, VPCs are foundational to many AWS services, so understanding how they work is fundamental to your success on the exam and as an AWS architect. Don't assume you can ignore VPCs just because you're not using EC2.

Lesson 5: Database Services

In this lesson, you'll learn the differences between these two database types and how to select the right one for your application. You'll also learn how to use the managed database services that AWS provides to get the level of performance and reliability your applications require, as well as how to protect your data and recover it in the event of a database failure.

This lesson will introduce three different managed database services provided by AWS:

• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Amazon Redshift
• DynamoDB

Lesson 6: Authentication and Authorization – AWS Identity and Access Management

In this lesson, you're going to learn about IAM identities—which are sometimes described as principals. An identity represents an AWS user or a role. Roles are identities that can be temporarily assigned to an application, service, user, or group.

Lesson 7: CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and AWS Config

CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and AWS Config are three services that can help you ensure the health, performance, and security of your AWS resources and applications. These services collectively help you keep an eye on your AWS environment by achieving the following goals:

• Tracking Performance
• Detecting Application Problems
• Detecting Security Problems
• Logging Events
• Maintaining an Inventory of AWS Resources

Lesson 8: The Domain Name System and Network Routing: Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront

Making your cloud resources accessible to the people and machines that will consume them is just as important as creating them in the first place. Facilitating network access to your content generally has three goals: availability, speed, and accurately getting the right content to the right users.  Amazon's Route 53 is built to manage domain services, but it can also have a significant impact on the precision, reliability, and speed with which resources are delivered.  CloudFront, Amazon's global content delivery network (CDN), can take both speed and accuracy a few steps further.  You're going to learn about how AWS addresses all three of those functions in this lesson.

Lesson 9: Data Ingestion, Transformation and Analytics

In Lesson 5, “Database Services,” you learned how to store and query both structured and unstructured data in AWS using relational and nonrelational databases, respectively. In this lesson, we'll build on that knowledge and dive deeper into data ingestion, transformation, and analytics. In this lesson, you'll learn about the following services:

• AWS Data Lake
• AWS Glue
• AWS Transfer Family
• Kinesis Video Streams
• Kinesis Data Streams
• Kinesis Data Firehose

Lesson 10: Resilient Architectures

In this lesson, you'll learn how to design your AWS environment to tolerate resource failures so that the failure of an instance or even an entire availability zone doesn't cause your entire application to become unavailable. You'll also learn how to recover from unavoidable failures. If all of your application's instances go down or if your application crashes because of a bug, security breach, database corruption, or just human error, you'll know how to recover quickly.

Lesson 11: High-Performing Architectures

This lesson will teach you the design principles that'll help you squeeze the most performance possible out of your cloud resources. It's not enough to just make sure everything is running; getting full value from AWS requires that you leverage the features that set the cloud apart from legacy environments.

Lesson 12: Secure Architectures

In this lesson, you'll learn how to apply security controls to every system that touches your data—storage, compute, and networking—to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data throughout its life cycle.

Lesson 13: Cost-Optimized Architectures

Even if you do everything right and design the perfect, multitiered, scalable, and highly available application environment, it'll be a complete waste if it ends up costing too much. No plan is complete without a solid cost assessment. And even if you did make it all happen for the right price, are you sure nothing expensive has accidentally been left running on any of the accounts under your control or you haven't been compromised by hackers?

The best protection from unpleasant surprises is by understanding how you're billed for using AWS services, how you can deploy resources in the most cost-effective way, and how you can automate cost event–alerting protocols. That's what you'll learn about here.

All necessary course materials are included.

Certification(s):

This course prepares a student to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate national certification exam.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.