AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam (SAA-C03) Bootcamp
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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 both 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:
- Read the technical brief on AWS global infrastructure (website)
- Take AWS Technical Essentials (live course with Mark Wilkins)
- Take AWS Certified Solutions Architect Prep Session (live course with Mark Wilkins)
Recommended follow-up:
- Read AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) Cert Guide, 2nd Edition (book by Mark Wilkins)
- Read Learning Amazon Web Services (AWS): A Hands-On Guide to the Fundamentals of the AWS Cloud (book by Mark Wilkins)
- Carry out suggested reviews of class material, answer the supplied focused test questions, and perform the suggested AWS well-architected labs to reinforce your learning using instructor supplied notes and labs after class
https://learning.oreilly.com/live-events/hands-on-aws-in-3-weeks/0636920057763/ https://learning.oreilly.com/live-events/hands-on-aws-containers-with-ecs-and-fargate/0642572005002/
Before this course: https://learning.oreilly.com/live-events/aws-technical-essentials/0636920192039/ https://learning.oreilly.com/live-events/aws-certified-solutions-architect-prep-session/0636920328803/
Related Certification Note if this course helps prepare for a specific certification exam. https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Day 1
Exam Details (20 minutes)
- Class flow - Lecture
- Exam information - Lecture
- AWS Well-Architected Lab Pillars to know - Lecture
- Class resources - Lecture
Regions, AZs and Edge Locations (30 minutes)
- AWS regions – services, availability, costs - Lecture / Demo
- Reviewing compliance standards supported at AWS - Lecture / Demo
- Availability zones – designing for failover, reliability, and availability - Lecture
- Local zones – what they are useful for - Lecture
- Regional services – Understanding the AWS regional campus and reliability/failover design - Lecture / Demo
- Edge locations, regional edge caches - Lecture
10 minute break
Edge Services (20 Minutes)
- Edge services – Route 53 (DNS), CloudFront (CDN), Web Application Firewall (WAF) - Lecture
- Lambda at the edge - Lecture
- In-class project: Review Availability Zones and choose the AWS region for deployment and availability zones for several scenarios
Networking Services (30 minutes)
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) - Lecture / Demo
- Multiple VPC’s - Lecture / Demo
- Create a custom VPC - Demo
- Subnets (private and public)
- Route tables - Lecture / Demo
- VPC gateways – IGW, VGW, NAT, Egress Only Internet Gateway - - Lecture / Demo
- VPC connectivity (Internet Gateway, Virtual Private Gateway) - - Lecture / Demo
- IP addresses (private, public, Elastic IP) - Lecture / Demo
- Ordering an Elastic IP address - Demo
10 Minute Break
VPC Connectivity (30 minutes)
- Endpoints - Lecture / Demo
- Peering and Sharing - Lecture / Demo
- Security Groups - Lecture / Demo
- NACL’s - Lecture / Demo
- VPC flow logs - Lecture / Demo
- Virtual private network - Lecture / Demo
- Transit gateway - Lecture / Demo
- VPN Connections, Direct Connect -Lecture
- In class project: Review proposed VPC design and list the faults and suggested improvements
Compute Services (20 Minutes)
- EC2 instance types: Virtual, Dedicated, Single-tenant, Bare metal - Lecture
- Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) - Lecture / Demo
- Using the EC2 image builder - Lecture / Demo
- EC2 instance configuration steps - User data - Tags - Security Groups - Key pairs - Launch templates - - Lecture / Demo
10 Minute Break
EC2 Instance Pricing (30 Minutes)
- EC2 instance pricing: On-demand, Reserved instances, Spot instance requests - Lecture
- Capacity Reservations - Lecture / Demo
- Spot Fleet - Lecture / Demo
- Understanding AWS service limits – hard and soft limits - Lecture / Demo
- Additional network interfaces - Lecture / Demo
- EC2 instance basic monitoring metrics - Lecture / Demo
- EC2 Auto-Recovery - Lecture / Demo
AWS Storage Services (20 minutes)
- EC2 instance stores - Lecture / Demo
- Elastic Block Storage - Lecture / Demo
- Volume types and features - Lecture / Demo
- Snapshots - Lecture / Demo
Day 2
AWS Storage Services- continued (50 minutes)
- Amazon EFS - Lecture / Demo
- Amazon FSx for Windows File Server storage - Lecture / Demo
- Amazon RDS Databases - Lecture / Demo
- Amazon S3 Storage - Lecture / Demo
- Durability and consistency definitions - Lecture
- Amazon S3 Storage classes - Lecture / Demo
- Versioning - Lecture / Demo
- In class project: Review RDS design requirements and make recommendations
10 minute break
AWS Storage Services- continued (20 minutes)
- Amazon S3 Lifecycle management and replication- Lecture / Demo
- Amazon S3 notifications - Lecture / Demo
- Amazon S3 Glacier storage - Lecture / Demo
- Archives and Vaults - Lecture / Demo
- WORM policies - Lecture / Demo
- AWS Storage Gateway - Lecture / Demo
- AWS Backup - Lecture / Demo
AWS Administration (30 minutes)
- AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower, Service Control Policies - Lecture - Demo
- CloudTrail operation - Lecture - Demo
- Monitoring with CloudWatch - Lecture / Demo
- Selecting CloudWatch Metrics and Alarms - Lecture / Demo
- Key Management Service
- AWS Config and Managed rules - Lecture / Demo
- Lambda functions and Custom rules - Lecture
- Monitoring threats with Guard Duty - Lecture / Demo
10 minute break
Scaling Applications (50 minutes)
- Elastic Load Balancer service - Lecture
- Application load balancer - Lecture / Demo
- Network load balancer - Lecture / Demo
- Target groups - Lecture / Demo
- ELB features - Lecture
- Health checks - Lecture / Demo
- Deregistration - Lecture / Demo
- Attributes - Lecture / Demo
- ELB Pricing - Lecture / Demo
- EC2 Auto Scaling - Lecture
- Scaling concepts - Lecture
- AWS Auto Scaling - Lecture / Demo
- Launch configurations - Lecture / Demo
- Auto Scaling group - Lecture / Demo
10 minute break
Scaling Application - continued (20 minutes)
- Scaling policy - Lecture / Demo
- EC2 Auto Scaling options - Lecture / Demo
- Using CloudWatch alarms - Lecture / Demo
- AWS Auto Scaling - Lecture / Demo
- Database scaling options (DynamoDB, RDS, Aurora) - Lecture / Demo
Managing Cloud Costs (25 minutes)
- Calculating AWS Costs - Lecture / Demo
- AWS Budgets - Lecture / Demo
- Cost Explorer - Lecture / Demo
- Creating Cost Allocation Tags - Lecture / Demo
- Data Transfer Costs - Lecture / Demo
Wrap Up: Next Steps (10 Minutes)
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.