DAY 1
Objective : Study
the Exam Guide and create a working study plan.
I am experienced AWS user (administrator) and I plan to get a certificate in first attempt but as confusing as it was getting as to from where and how to start. I finally decided to write a study plan and my day to day progress and share it with others as well with the help of this blog.
One thing that I realised is that AWS is
a plethora of services and we may or may not be using all of them in our day to
day operations hence we are left out of that practical knowledge. I started reading Exam Guide and also referred to AWS In Action but somewhere I was not satisfied with the way I was progressing.
So, rather than getting lost in documentation and practicing
services to get hold of them I decided its better to decode the Exam Guide and understand
what AWS really want me to prepare for.
Here is
the download link for the Exam Guide (PDF).
As per
exam guide one of the expectations from examinee is that they should be well
aware of the architecture principals of the AWS. So where do I find this information?
Answer is obvious.
I
should read the AWS White Papers focusing on architecture best practices.
Problem is all white papers are scattered all over the documentation and its
really hard to get to them. As we need to prepare a study plan we should be
able to gather all the study material before we start. To save time I have
included links to most of the white papers at the end of the article.
Second
expectation mentioned is that as solution architect I should be able to guide
a team of developers or system administrators to build a project, which follows
the best practices of AWS.
How
Guide has bifurcated hands-on experience and theory?
The
section named AWS Knowledge clearly mentions that examinee’s should have
hand-on experience on compute, networking, storage and database services.
This
means that examinees should be familiar with the following services:
-
EC2
(compute).
-
VPC
(networking)
-
S3,
Glacier, EBS, Storage Gateway (storage)
-
Aurora,
RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, AWS Database Migration Services (Database)
Lets
segregate these and other components/services in buckets of highest % in exam
coverage.
60%
Bucket :
-
Planning
and Designing Cloud services
-
Monitoring
and Logging.
-
AWS
Architecture
-
Price/Cost
Evaluation, Budgeting
-
Trade-offs
evaluation i.e Cost vs High Availability
-
Hybrid
IT Architectures (Direct Connect, Storage Gateway, VPC, Directory Services etc)
-
Elasticity
and Scalability (Auto-Scaling, SQS, ELB, CloudFront etc)
20%
Bucket :
-
AWS
Shared responsibility Model
-
Compliances
-
IAM
-
VPC
-
KMS
-
CloudTrail
-
Firewall,
VPN
-
Design
Patterns
-
DoS
Mitigation
-
Security
Groups, ACL’s
-
CloudWatch
-
Trusted
Advisor
-
CloudWatch
Logs
-
Disaster
Recovery
o
Recovery
Time Objective
o
Recovery
Point Objective
o
Amazon
Elastic Block Store
-
AWS
Import/Export
-
Storage
Gateway
-
Route53
-
Validation
of data recovery methods
10%
Bucket :
-
BeanStalk
-
CloudFormation
-
OpsWorks
-
VPC,
IAM
-
AMI
-
How
to create/operate hybrid IT Architectures
-
High
Availablity by installing instances acrsoss regions.
-
IAM
best practices
-
10%
Bucket:
-
Troubleshooting
of all above mentioned services
After
understanding the study guide now I am in a position to prepare my study plan.
I plan to take 60% bucket head-on and cover theory and practical as much as
possible. Moving on to 20% and 10% buckets. As, I went through the content I
found VPC, IAM and Logs to be appearing repeatedly in most of the buckets so
let make these as priority and not to forget that VPC is an integral part of
EC2 so I’ll prioritize that too.
I think
now the study path is pretty clear and I know what to take up first and where
should I focus more.
Links
to all whitepapers and important documentations :
Build highly-scalable and reliable web or mobile-web
applications
PDF AWS_ac_ra_web_01.pdf
Build highly reliable systems that serve massive amounts of
content and media
PDF AWS_ac_ra_media_02.pdf
Build auto-scalable batch processing systems like video
processing pipelines
PDF AWS_ac_ra_batch_03.pdf
Build systems that quickly failover to new instances in an event
of failure
PDF AWS_ac_ra_ftha_04.pdf
Large Scale Processing and Huge Data sets
Build high-performance computing systems that involve Big Data
PDF AWS_ac_ra_largescale_05.pdf
Ad Serving
Build highly-scalable online ad serving solutions
PDF AWS_ac_ra_adserving_06.pdf
Disaster Recovery for Local Applications
Build cost-effective Disaster Recovery solutions for on-premises
applications
PDF
AWS_ac_ra_disasterrecovery_07.pdf
File Synchronization
Build simple file synchronization service
PDF AWS_ac_ra_filesync_08.pdf
Media Sharing
Cloud-powered Media Sharing Framework
PDF
AWS_ac_ra_mediasharing_09.pdf
Online Games
Build powerful online games
PDF AWS_ac_ra_games_10.pdf
Log Analysis
Analyze massive volumes of log data in the cloud
PDF
AWS_ac_ra_loganalysis_11.pdf
Financial Services Grid Computing
Build highly scalable and elastic grids for the Financial Services
Sector
PDF AWS_ac_ra_financialgrid_12.pdf
E-Commerce Website Part 1: Web Frontend
Build elastic Web Front-ends for an e-Commerce website
PDF
AWS_ac_ra_ecommerce_webfrontend_14.pdf
E-Commerce Website Part 2: Checkout Pipeline
Build highly scalable checkout pipeline for an e-Commerce website
PDF
AWS_ac_ra_ecommerce_checkout_13.pdf
E-Commerce Website Part 3: Marketing and Recommendations
Build highly scalable recommendation engine for an e-Commerce
website
PDF
AWS_ac_ra_ecommerce_marketing_15.pdf
Time Series Processing
Build elastic systems that process time series data
PDF
AWS_ac_ra_timeseriesprocessing_16.pdf
WHITEPAPERS
AWS Well-Architected Framework
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf
AWS Cloud Architecture Best Practices Whitepaper
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices.pdf
Building Fault-Tolerant Applications on AWS Whitepaper
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
aws-building-fault-tolerant-applications.pdf
Using AWS for Disaster Recovery Whitepaper
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
aws-disaster-recovery.pdf
Operational Checklists for AWS
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
aws-operational-checklists.pdf
Web Hosting Best Practices Whitepaper
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
aws-web-hosting-best-practices.pdf
Leveraging Different Storage Options in the AWS Cloud Whitepaper
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
aws-storage-options.pdf
AWS Security Best Practices Whitepaper
Download Whitepaper (PDF)
aws-security-best-practices.pdf
NIST WEBSECURITY FRAMEWORK
NIST_Cybersecurity_Framework_CSF.pdf
AWS Well-Architected
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