AMAZON WEB SERVICES SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT
An AWS Solutions Architect is a professional responsible for designing and architecting solutions on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform to meet business and technical requirements. This role requires a deep understanding of AWS services, best practices, and architectural principles to create secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions.
THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVES OF AN AWS SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT INCLUDE:
- Understanding Business Requirements : Work closely with stakeholders to understand their business objectives, goals, and technical requirements. Translate business requirements into scalable and reliable cloud solutions.
- Designing Cloud Architectures : Design and architect cloud solutions on AWS that align with business goals and technical requirements. This involves selecting appropriate AWS services, defining architectural patterns, and creating high-level and low-level designs.
- Scalability and Performance : Design architectures that can scale horizontally and vertically to handle varying workloads and traffic patterns. Optimize performance and efficiency by selecting the right mix of AWS services and configurations.
- Security and Compliance : Implement security best practices to protect AWS resources and data from unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security threats. Ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.
- Cost Optimization: Optimize AWS architectures for cost-effectiveness by selecting the right instance types, storage options, and pricing models. Implement cost management strategies to minimize cloud spending while maximizing value.
- Reliability and Availability : Design architectures that are highly available, fault-tolerant and resilient to failures. Implement redundancy, failover mechanisms, and disaster recovery solutions to ensure continuous availability of services.
- Networking and Connectivity : Design networking architectures on AWS, including virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets, routing, and connectivity options. Establish secure and reliable network connections between on-premises environments and AWS.
- Data Storage and Management: Design storage architectures using AWS storage services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB. Define data storage and management strategies based on requirements for durability, availability, and performance.
- Scalability and Performance : Design architectures that can scale horizontally and vertically to handle varying workloads and traffic patterns. Optimize performance and efficiency by selecting the right mix of AWS services and configurations.
COURSE CONTENTS OF AWS SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT
- Understanding AWS regions, availability zones, and edge locations.
- How to select the appropriate region for your workload.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2):
- Instance types, families, and sizes.
- Pricing models (On-Demand, Reserved, Spot).
- AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) and instance purchasing options.
- AWS Lambda:
- Serverless computing model.
- Event-driven architecture.
- Supported languages and triggers.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon $3):
- Object storage basics.
- Storage classes (Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier).
- Security features and encryption options.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS):
- Block-level storage for EC2 instances.
- Volume types (SSD, HDD).
- Snapshots and volume backups.
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS):
- Managed file storage service.
- File system types and performance modes.
- Integration with EC2 instances and scalability.
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC):
- Subnets, route tables, and internet gateways.
- Security groups and network ACLs.
- VPC peering and VPN connections.
- Amazon Route 53:
- Domain registration and DNS management.
- Routing policies (Simple, Weighted, Latency).
- Auto Scaling:
- Scaling policies and launch configurations.
- Integration with other AWS services.
- Elastic Load Balancing (ELB):
- Load balancer types (Application, Network, Classic).
- Health checks and target groups.
- AWS pricing models and cost management.
- Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
- Cost allocation tags and cost explorer.
- AWS Lambda functions and event sources.
- Building serverless applications with AWS services (API Gateway, DynamoDB, $3).
- Analyzing case studies and architectural challenges.
- Applying AWS services to solve real-world problems.
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS):
- Managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB).
- Multi-AZ deployments and read replicas.
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM):
- Users, groups, roles, and policies.
- Access keys and permissions.
- Encryption key management.
- Integration with other AWS services.
- Amazon CloudWatch:
- Metrics, alarms, and dashboards.
- Logs and log retention.
- AWS CloudTrail:
- Auditing and tracking API activity.
- Compliance and governance.
- AWS CloudFormation:
- Infrastructure as code (laC) concepts.
- Templates and stack creation.
- Amazon CloudFront:
- Content delivery network (CDN) service.
- Caching, distribution, and origin management.
- AWS Edge Locations:
- Architectural patterns for scalability, security, and performance.
- Best practices for designing resilient and cost-effective architectures.
Preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect — Associate exam involves studying these topics in detail, gaining hands-on experience with AWS services, and practicing with sample exam questions to familiarize yourself with the exam format and difficulty level.