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AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam (SAA-C03) Bootcamp

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Get ready for test day with this deep dive into Amazon's cloud offerings

Course Outcomes

  • Be fully equipped with the knowledge and study tools you need to prepare for your SAA-C03 exam
  • Gain a high-level understanding of the breadth of AWS infrastructure, including its regions, availability zones, and edge locations
  • Be conversant in the core topics and services covered by the SAA-C03 exam, from AWS storage, compute, and networking services to the AWS Well-Architected Framework
  • Have the ability to scale and manage applications on AWS, with a broad understanding of how to carry out basic AWS administration and cost management tasks.

AWS cloud infrastructure is a secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform that offers hundreds of fully-featured services from data centers around the world. Whether you need to deploy application workloads globally in a single click or are building and deploying specific applications closer to your end users with minimal latency, AWS gives you the cloud infrastructure you need where and when you need it. Getting certified in AWS helps prove you have the necessary skills to leverage this expansive infrastructure.

Join expert Mark Wilkins to get ready for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam or simply to learn about the services and capabilities of the AWS cloud. In this two-part series, you'll become conversant with the core services that you need to know, either to successfully complete the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam (SAA-C03) or to develop the knowledge and skills to operate securely within the AWS cloud. You’ll be guided through a mix of live demonstrations, presentations, discussions, a focused project, and post-course labs that reinforce key concepts.

Student materials for study after class to support prepping for the exam include test questions, cheat sheets, flash cards, technical briefs, and guidance on the Well-Architected Labs to complete.

NOTE: With today’s registration, you’ll be signed up for all sessions. Although you can attend any of the sessions individually, we recommend participating in both days and pursuing the live test scenarios after each session.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Learn all about the SAA-C03 exam logistics and build a study plan for successful test taking.
  • Understand the purpose of Regions, Availability Zones, Local Zones and Edge Locations, and be able to design applications with high-availability in mind.
  • Understand AWS networking services and components and be able to create and deploy a custom virtual private cloud, designing with availability zones and subnets, VPC connectivity, IP addressing, endpoints, NAT services, and more.
  • Understand and apply best practices for deploying AWS EC2 instances, instance families, and the Amazon Elastic Container Service with Fargate.
  • Understand AWS storage options and how to use them, from creating and managing Amazon S3 buckets to deploying and managing a data lake.
  • Understand how to design load balancing and scaling options for application reliability, failover, and scale based on demand.
  • Understand the available AWS managed services for performing monitoring, troubleshooting and managing compliance, using tools like AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudTrail, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Macie.
  • Be able to design cost-optimized architectures, create budgets and alerts, and use tools like AWS Cost Explorer to manage cloud costs.

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re prepping to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam
  • You’re a system administrator or software developer moving to AWS and need to learn about AWS services and the global infrastructure of AWS cloud.
  • You’re a cloud engineer or architect responsible for AWS applications and design and need to understand how to properly build, secure, and operate your application stacks.
  • You’re an IT professional who needs to develop AWS technical knowledge and skills for daily operation and migration.

Prerequisites

  • Interest in cloud technology, and a solid understanding of computing, are sufficient to get a lot out of this class.
  • In addition, a technical background in networking, system administration, and working with virtualized resources will be beneficial as background for the security concepts presented in class.

Course Setup:

  • An AWS account (free tier—required to complete postcourse labs if you want to follow along with the hands-on portion)

Recommended preparation:

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Day 1

Day 1 – Hour 1 (30 Minutes)

  • Introduction
  • Required knowledge
  • Steps for AWS Certification success.
  • AWS documentation.
  • Well-Architected Framework Labs.
  • How the exam is graded.
  • AWS Skill Builder free resources.
  • Exam scheduling
  • Well-Architected Framework pillars
  • Re-certification rules

Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures

Day 1 – Hour 1 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 1.1 Design secure access to AWS resources

  • Design secure access to AWS resources.
  • AWS IAM (Users, Groups, Roles, Policies)

10 Minute Break

Day 1 – Hour 2 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 1.1 Design secure access to AWS resources

  • AWS Organizations (Control Tower, AWS IAM Identity Center)
  • Resource Access Manager
  • The AWS shared responsibility model

Day 1 – Hour 2 (30 Minutes) Task Statement 1.2 Determine Secure Workloads and Applications

  • Security groups, Route tables, Network ACLs, NAT gateways, VPN, Egress-Only Internet Gateway, Direct Connect, AWS Direct Connect Gateway

10 Minute Break

Day 1 – Hour 3 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 1.2 Determine Secure Workloads and Applications

  • Secure application access (AWS Shield, AWS Secrets Manager)
  • Amazon Cognito, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Macie, AWS Config)
  • DNS Firewall, Network Firewall
  • VPC Flow Logs

Day 1 – Hour 3 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 1.3 Determine Appropriate Data Security Controls

  • AWS Key Management Service
  • AWS Certificate Manager
  • AWS Backup

Day 1 – Hour 3 (10 Minutes)

  • Sample test questions

10 Minute Break

Domain 2: Design Resilient Architecture

Day 1 – Hour 4 (50 Minutes) Task Statement 2.1 Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures

  • Amazon API Gateway
  • Stateless vs Stateful Applications
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service
  • AWS SNS, AWS Step Functions
  • Amazon EventBridge
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • AWS Storage Types (Object, file, block)

Day 2

Day 2 – Hour 1 (25 Minutes) Task Statement 2.1 Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures

  • AWS container services (ECS, Kubernetes, AWS Fargate)
  • AWS Edge Locations Services (CloudFront, WAF, Route 53, and Lambda@Edge)
  • Data Storage Options at AWS (S3, S3 Glacier, EBS, FSx for Windows File Server, EFS)
  • AWS Storage Gateway

Day 2 – Hour 1 (25 Minutes)

Task Statement 2.2 Design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures

  • AWS Regions and Availability Zones
  • Multi-AZ Design
  • Amazon Route 53 (Routing policy types, traffic patterns)
  • AWS X-Ray

10 Minute Break

Day 2 – Hour 2 (25 Minutes) Task Statement 2.2 Design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures

  • Disaster recovery Strategies (Backup, pilot light, warm standby, active-active)
  • Immutable Infrastructure
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Day 2 – Hour 2 (15 Minutes)

  • Sample test questions

10 Minute Break

Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures

Day 2 – Hour 3 (30 Minutes) Task Statement 3.1 Determine high-performing and scalable storage solutions.

  • Hybrid storage (EFS, FSx for Windows File Server, AWS S3 on Outposts)
  • AWS DataSync
  • S3 Glacier Storage

Day 2 – Hour 3 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 3.1 Determine high-performing and scalable storage solutions.

  • FSx for Windows File Server features (performance, storage types, data deduplication, backup and restore windows authentication)
  • Elastic file system (General-purpose, Max I/O operation, performance and throughput modes, EFS storage classes)

10 Minute Break

Day 2 – Hour 4 (30 Minutes) Task Statement 3.1 Determine high-performing and scalable storage solutions.

  • Amazon EBS volume and performance options
  • S3 storage classes, lifecycle policies
  • Cross-and-Same-Region Replication (CCR)
  • Bucket policies
  • Query string authentication
  • S3 Glacier storage classes and retrieval options Day 2 – Hour 4 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 3.2 Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions
  • AWS EC2 instances
  • EC2 Auto Recovery
  • Dedicated hosts and instances
  • Placement Groups

Day 3

Day 3 – Hour 1 (50 Minutes)

Task Statement 3.2 Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions

  • EBS-optimized instances
  • Launch templates
  • AMI’s and EC2 Image Builder
  • Elastic Load Balancing Service (Application, Network, Gateway)
  • Target groups, health checks
  • Cross-zone load balancing
  • EC2 Auto Scaling
  • Auto Scaling Components
  • Scaling options, predictive scaling
  • AWS Auto Scaling

10 Minute Break

Day 3 – Hour 2 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 3.3 Determine High-Performing Database Solutions

  • Amazon ElastiCache (Redis and Memcached)
  • Database engines with appropriate use cases.
  • Database capacity planning
  • Determining an appropriate database type
  • Configuring read replicas
  • RDS Database Instances
  • Amazon Aurora
  • Amazon DynamoDB

Day 3 – Hour 2 (15 Minutes) Task Statement 3.4 Determine High-Performing and scalable network architectures

  • AWS Global Accelerator
  • Designing network architecture (subnets, IP addresses)
  • EC2 instance address types: IPv4, IPv6

Day 3 – Hour 2 (15 Minutes) Task Statement 3.5 Determine High-Performing data Ingestation and transformation solutions

  • Amazon Athena, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon QuickSight
  • AWS Glue
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • AWS Lake Formation
  • Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
  • AWS Storage Gateway (File, Volume, Tape)

10 Minute Break

Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

Day 3 – Hour 3 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 4.1 Design Cost-Optimized Storage Solutions

  • Cost Allocation Tags
  • Cost Management Tools (Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
  • Data Transfer Family
  • S3 Object Lifecycles
  • EBS Pricing Considerations

Day 3 – Hour 3 (30 Minutes) Task Statement 4.2 Design Cost Optimized Compute Solutions

  • Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans
  • Cost-effective AWS compute services (EC2, Lambda, Fargate)
  • Availability of workload types (production, non-production)
  • EC2 Pricing considerations
  • EC2 Instances: Pricing options
  • On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Spot Requests
  • Regional and Zonal Limits
  • Savings Plans

10 Minute Break

Day 3 – Hour 4 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 4.3 Design Cost-optimized Database Solutions

  • Database replication (Multi-AZ, Multi-region)
  • Database capacity planning
  • Backup and retention policies
  • Determining appropriate database engines (Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon DynamoDB utilization levels
  • Amazon Aurora Serverless v2

Day 3 – Hour 4 (20 Minutes) Task Statement 4.4 Design Cost-Optimized Network Architectures

  • NAT Gateways (Single- multi-AZ).
  • Routing and peering (AWS Transit Gateway, VPC Peering).
  • Minimize data transfer costs (Region to Region, Availability Zone to Availability. Zone, private to public, Global Accelerator, VPC endpoints).
  • Transit Gateway vs Peering

Day 3 – Hour 4 (10 Minutes)

Wrap-up: Final questions

Your Instructor

  • Mark Wilkins

    Mark Wilkins has more than 20 years’ experience designing, deploying, and supporting software and hardware technology in the corporate and small business world. Currently, Mark provides training and consulting services to corporate customers throughout North America. Previously, as course director for Global Knowledge, Mark developed and taught technical seminars and developed courseware for the 2008 Microsoft official curriculum stream.

    Since 2010, Mark has focused on cloud services, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM SoftLayer. Among Mark’s many certifications are Amazon Web Services Architect - Associate and AWS Sys-Ops - Associate. He is the author of Learning AWS, published in 2019 by Addison-Wesley.

Skill covered

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate