Introduction

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 book 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 carefully read this book from cover to cover.

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 book as a guide to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can focus your study efforts properly.

You should have at least six months of hands-on experience with AWS before taking the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam. If you're relatively new to AWS, we strongly recommend our own AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide: CLF-C01 Exam (Author Sybex, 2019) as a primer.

Even though this book is designed specifically for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam, some of your fellow readers have found it useful for preparing for the SysOps Administrator and DevOps Engineer exams.

Hands-on experience is crucial for exam success. Each chapter in this study guide contains hands-on exercises that you should strive to complete during or immediately after you read the chapter. It's vital to understand that the exercises don't cover every possible scenario for every AWS service. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The exercises provide you with a foundation to build on. Use them as your starting point, but don't be afraid to venture out on your own. Feel free to modify them to match the variables and scenarios you might encounter in your own organization. Keep in mind that some of the exercises and figures use the AWS Web Console, which is in constant flux. As such, screenshots and step-by-step details of exercises may change. Use these eventualities as excuses to dig into the AWS online documentation and browse around the Web Console on your own. Also remember that although you can complete many of the exercises within the bounds of the AWS Free Tier, getting enough practice to pass the exam will likely require you to spend some money. But it's money well spent, as getting certified is an investment in your career and your future.

Each chapter contains review questions to thoroughly test your understanding of the services and concepts covered in that chapter. They also test your ability to integrate the concepts with information from preceding chapters. Although the difficulty of the questions varies, rest assured that they are not “fluff.” We've designed the questions to help you realistically gauge your understanding and readiness for the exam. Avoid the temptation to rush through the questions to just get to the answers. Once you complete the assessment in each chapter, referring to the answer key will give you not only the correct answers but a detailed explanation as to why they're correct. It will also explain why the other answers are incorrect.

The book also contains a self-assessment exam with 39 questions, two practice exams with 50 questions each to help you gauge your readiness to take the exam, and flashcards to help you learn and retain key facts needed to prepare for the exam.

This AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA-C03 Exam, Fourth Edition is divided into two parts: “The Core AWS Services” and “Architecting for Requirements.”

Part I, “The Core AWS Services”

The first part of the book dives deep into each of the core AWS services. These services include ones you probably already have at least a passing familiarity with: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), virtual private cloud (VPC), Identity and Access Management (IAM), Route 53, and Simple Storage Service (S3), to name just a few.

Some AWS services seem to serve similar or even nearly identical purposes. You'll learn about the subtle but important differences between seemingly similar services and, most importantly, when to use each.

Part II, “Architecting for Requirements”

The second part of the book is a set of best practices and principles aimed at helping you design, implement, and operate systems in the cloud. PART II focuses on the following four pillars of good design:

• Resilient architectures
• High-performing architectures
• Secure architectures
• Cost-optimized architectures

Each chapter of PART II revisits the core AWS services in light of a different pillar. Also, because not every AWS service is large enough to warrant its own chapter, PART II simultaneously introduces other services that, although less well known, may still show up on the exam. Appendix B, “Additional Services,” contains brief descriptions of many smaller services that don't fit easily elsewhere in the book.

Achieving the right balance among these pillars is a key skill you need to develop as a solutions architect. Prior to beginning PART II, we encourage you to peruse the Well-Architected Framework white paper, which is available for download at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/welcome.html.

What Does This Book Cover?

This book covers topics you need to know to prepare for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam:

• Chapter 1: Introduction to Cloud Computing and AWS This chapter provides an overview of the AWS Cloud computing platform and its core services and concepts.
• Chapter 2: Compute Services This chapter covers EC2 instances—the virtual machines that you can use to run Linux and Windows workloads on AWS. It also covers the Elastic Block Store service that EC2 instances depend on for persistent data storage.
• Chapter 3: AWS Storage In this chapter, you'll learn about Simple Storage Service (S3) and Glacier, which provide unlimited data storage and retrieval for AWS services, your applications, and the Internet. You'll also discover the Snowball family of physical appliances you can use to transfer very large volumes of data to and from your AWS account.
• Chapter 4: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) This chapter explains Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a virtual network that contains network resources for AWS services.
• Chapter 5: Database Services In this chapter, you will learn about some different managed database services offered by AWS, including Relational Database Service (RDS), DynamoDB, and Redshift.
• Chapter 6: Authentication and Authorization—AWS Identity and Access Management This chapter covers AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which provides the primary means for protecting the AWS resources in your account.
• Chapter 7: CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and AWS Config In this chapter, you'll learn how to log, monitor, and audit your AWS resources.
• Chapter 8: The Domain Name System and Network Routing: Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront This chapter focuses on the Domain Name System (DNS) and Route 53, the service that provides public and private DNS hosting for both internal AWS resources and the Internet. It also covers CloudFront, Amazon's global content delivery network.
• Chapter 9: Data Ingestion, Transformation, and Analytics Data comes in many shapes and sizes, and the more data you have, the more unwieldy it becomes. This chapter explains how AWS can help you ingest, transform, and analyze data at scale.
• Chapter 10: Resilient Architectures This chapter will show you how to architect and integrate AWS services to achieve a high level of reliability for your applications. You'll learn how to plan around and recover from inevitable outages to keep your systems up and running. You'll also learn how Simple Queue Service (SQS) fits into the picture.
• Chapter 11: High-Performing Architectures This chapter covers how to build highly performing systems and use the AWS elastic infrastructure to rapidly scale up and out to meet peak demand.
• Chapter 12: Secure Architectures In this chapter, you'll learn how to use encryption and security controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and systems on AWS. You'll also learn about the various security services such as GuardDuty, Inspector, Shield, and Web Application Firewall.
• Chapter 13: Cost-Optimized Architectures This chapter will show you how to estimate and control your costs in the cloud.

Interactive Online Learning Environment and Test Bank

The authors have worked hard to provide some really great tools to help you with your certification process. The interactive online learning environment that accompanies the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate...