Section 2: Categories and Descriptions

  Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Section 2 Lesson 5

Things you’ll need to know to pass the Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam

High Level Understanding

  • Desktop & App Streaming (High level – Workspaces)
  • Management Tools (Minimal)

Must know the following

AWS Global Infrastructure

Will not be quizzed on exact numbers!

  • 14 Regions & 38 Availability Zones (AZ) (Dec 2016)
  • 4 More Regions & 11 More AZ 2017
  • What is a Region
    • Geographical Area
    • 2 or more AZ
  • What is an Availability Zone
    • A Data Center (or logical collection of Data Centers)
    • AZs are close to each other, but not dependent on each other.
    • AZs are all parts of Regions (If not part of a Region, it is not an AZ)
  • What is an Edge Location
    • CDN End Points for CloudFront
    • Over 66 Edge Locations
    • Appears many Edge Locations are NOT in AWS Regions

&nbsp

Network and Content Delivery

VPC – Virtual Private Cloud (Very Important!)

  • Virtual Data Center
  • Multiple VPCs per Region
  • Can connect different VPCs together

Route53

  • DNS Service
  • Can register Domain Names through Route53
  • Named Route53 for the DNS Port.  Haha!

Cloud Front

  • Content Delivery Network
  • Made from several different Edge Locations
  • Cache assets such as
    • Video
    • Large Media Files
  • Will be covered during “Storage” section of this course

Direct Connect (Might come up on Exam)

  • Connect Physical Data Centers to AWS using dedicated lines
  • Lines are NOT the Internet
  • Possibly used for Security
  • Usually need a very reliable connection for pushing a lot of data there and back

Compute

EC2

  • Elastic Compute Cloud
  • Virtual Machines in the Cloud

EC2 Container Service a.k.a ECS (Not in this exam)

  • Highly Scalable, High Performing Container Management Service for Docker
  • Allows a user to run applications on a Managed Cluster of EC2 Instances

Elastic Beanstalk

  • Upload your code (Example: PHP/MySQL)
  • Will auto provision everything you need
  • Frequent for Developer Exam, not much Solution Architect

Lambda (Not in Exam)

  • Revolutionary Services of Cloud Computing
  • No access to host OS
  • Upload Code, Code responds to Events
  • Used for Echo or Alexa (Talk to them, Lambda talks back)

Lightsail

  • “Out of the box” Cloud
    • WordPress
    • Jumla
  • Basically for people that do not know how to use AWS.


https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/learn/v4/t/lecture/4228418?start=0

Storage

S3

  • Simple Storage Service
  • Virtual disk in the cloud where you can store “objects”
  • Objects are files
  • Not good for applications, databases, games, etc. (Use Block for these)

Glacier

  • Archiving – long term storage
  • Very low cost, very slow
  • Usually for legal requirements

EFS

  • Elastic File Service
  • file based storage, can be shared between vms
  • Can be used for Applications, Databases, etc.  (Block?)

Storage Gateway

  • Way to connect S3 to on prem data center
  • Normally a vm that you install locally and communicate with S3

\

Databases

RDS

  • Relational Database Service
    • MySql
    • Maria
    • PostGres
    • SQL
    • More

DynamoDB

  • Non-relational (No-SQL)
  • Very scaleable
  • High Performance

Redshift

  • Amazon Data Warehouse storage
  • Good for running reports, does not affect production databases
  • Not too important for Associate levels

Elasticache

  • Caching data in cloud.
  • Top ten selling items… price doesn’t change, image doesn’t change, etc.
  • Mostly Developer, part Solutions Arch.

Migration

Snowball

  • Started as Import/Export of disks
  • Good for using Terabytes of data
  • Physical appliance (breif case sized)
  • Load with data, then send back to AWS
  • Setup Fee / Daily Rate
  • Snowball Edge –
  • Important.

DMS

  • Database Migration Service
  • Migrate On Prem dbs to AWS cloud
  • Migrate AWS cloud DBs to other regions or Redshift
  • No downtime. Uses replication
  • Can migrate to different DBs (Oracle to Arora) -> DMS does the conversion.
    • Oracle
    • SQL
    • MySQL
    • Arora
    • PostGres
    • ASE

SMS

  • Server Migration Services
  • Targets VMware VMs
  • 50 Concurrent

Analytics

Athena

  • Can be used to run SQL queries on S3
    • .CSV or JSON files, etc.
    • Turns Flat Files into searchable databases

EMR

  • Elastic MapReduce
  • Big Data processing
    • What it is
    • How to access it
  • Uses Hadoop

Cloud Search / Elastic Search

  • Search capibility for your website
  • Cloud Search – Managed
  • Elastic Search – Open source

Kinesis

  • IMPORTANT – Know what it does
  • Streaming and analyzing real time data on huge scales
  • Financial transactions
  • Social media streams (FB/ Twitter)
  • Election results

Data Pipeline

  • Move data from one place to another. (S3 to DynamoDB or back, etc)

Quick Sight

  • Visualization Tool
  • Rich dashboards
  • Can use different sources (DynamoDB, S3, Redshift, etc.)


https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/learn/v4/t/lecture/4228420?start=0

Security & Identity

IAM

  • Identity and Access Management – IMPORTANT
  • Fundamental to AWS
  • How you sign in and Authenticate
  • Assign users and groups, etc.

Inspector

  • Agent you install on your vm
  • Reports what is going on

Certificate Manager

  • Free SSL for your domain names

Directory Service

  • Active Directory Service

WAF

  • Web Application Firewall
  • Protects at the Application Layer
  • Stops things like SQL Injections, etc

Artifacts

  • Security & Compliance Documentations
  • Security, Identity & Compliance > Compliance Reports
    • ISO 9001 Compliance
    • PCI SDD Attestation of Compliance

Management Tools

Cloud Watch

  • Monitor performance of your environment
  • EC2, CPU, Disk, RAM, etc.

Cloud Formation

  • Turning your infrastructure into Code
  • Describes your environment
  • Using command line, can provision 50 servers.
  • Will need to know this INSIDE OUT for Solutions Architect

Cloud Trail

  • Auditing AWS resources
  • Changes to your environment.

Opsworks

  • Configuration Management using Chef
  • Something like cookbooks???

Config

  • Monitoring like Cloud Trail, but you can set alerts

Service Catalog

  • for Larger Enterprises
  • Allows these organizations to grant access to some AWS services while blocking access to others.

Trusted Advisor

  • Automated Optimization scanning scripts
  • Cost Optimization
  • Scaling recommendations

Application Services

Step Functions

  • Visualizing what is going on inside your applications

SWF

  • Simple Work Flow
  • Way of coordinating automated and Human tasks
  • Project management?

API Gateway

  • Door for your apps to access backend services
  • Lambda functions

AppStream

  • Streaming applications to your users

Elastic Transcoder

  • Transcodes videos to suit all different devices.

Developer Tools

CodeCommit

  • GitHub
  • Secure your code securely in the cloud

CodeBuild

  • Pay by the minute
  • Compile your code in different environments

CodeDeploy

  • Deploy your code to your EC2 Instances

CodePipeline

  • Keeping track of all your versions of code
  • test, production, etc.

Mobile Services

Mobile Hub

  • Add, configure and design features for your mobile apps
  • User Authentication, Data Storage, Backend Logic, Push Notifications, content delivery, analytics
  • Has it’s own console

Cognito

  • Makes easy for users to sign up and sign into your apps
  • Social Identity providers
    • Gmail, Facebook, etc.

Device Farm

  • Improve the quality of your apps by allowing testing on hundreds of real physical smartphones

Mobile Analytics

  • Collect App usage data

Pinpoint

  • Understand and engage with your mobile apps.
  • See what your users are doing
  • Like google analytics with targeted ad campaigns

Business Productivity

WorkDocs

  • Securely storing documents

WorkMail

  • Exchange for AWS
  • Email

Amazon Chime

  • ???

Internet of Things

iOT

  • A way of having billions of devices and keeping track of them.

Desktop & App Streaming

WorkSpaces

  • VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface)
  • Keeping your workspace in the cloud.

AppStream 2.0

  • Streaming applications to your users


https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/learn/v4/t/lecture/6166432?start=0

Artificial Intelligence

Alexa

  • Amazon’s Voice service in the cloud
  • Access via an Echo
  • Triggering a Lambda
  • Lex = Alexa without Echo
    • Can imbed into devices

Polly

  • Converts Text to Voice
  • Multiple voices, multiple languages

Rekognition

  • Upload picture and will tag objects
  • Person 99.3%, bike 87.2%, rock 68.4%, outdoors 83.1%
  • Includes facial recognition

Machine Learning

  • Provide statistics (age, race, sex, etc)
  • Machine learning analyze that data and predict outcomes.

Messaging

SNS

  • Simple Notification Services
  • Email, Text
  • Can be used for publishing

SQS

  • Decoupling applications
    • EC2 polls SQS for jobs
    • Starts processing, but dies mid stream
    • SQS still stores the job so another instance can process

SES

  • Simple Email Service

 

LEAVE A COMMENT