AWS Certified Solutions Architect: Professional - An Introduction

So, in my last blog entry I started structuring the learning process, starting with AWS core sevices ( Compute and Networking, Storage and CDN, Database, Application Services, Deployment and Management ), beginning with Compute services.

In the end I make a short break and notify you that I would talk about AWS Security more specifically the Shared Responsibility Model.

But wait. I realised that this approach was missing the big picture, so I restarted with the basics.

What I need to study in order to be approved? Which contents? Which weight they have?

So, nothing better than go to the official AWS requirements for the Cert:

AWS Knowledge:

• AWS core services, including: Compute and Networking, Storage and CDN, Database, Application Services, Deployment and Management. 
• Security features that AWS provides and best practices 
• Able to design and implement for elasticity and scalability 
• Network technologies as they relate to AWS networking, including: DNS and load balancing, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and AWS Direct Connect 
• Storage and archival options 
• State management 
• Database and replication methodologies 
• Self-healing techniques and fault-tolerant services 
• Disaster Recovery and fail-over strategies 
• Application migration plans to AWS 
• Network connectivity options 
• Deployment and management 

General IT Knowledge:

• Large-scale distributed systems architecture
• Eventual consistency 
• Relational and non-relational databases 
• Multi-tier architectures: load balancers, caching, web servers, application servers, networking and databases 
• Loose coupling and stateless systems 
• Content Delivery Networks
• System performance tuning 
• Networking concepts including routing tables, access control lists, firewalls, NAT, HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, OSI model 
• RESTful Web Services, XML, JSON 
• One or more software development models 
• Information and application security concepts including public key encryption, remote access, access credentials, and certificate-based authentication

As I said in the warning in the previous blog post, you need to have previous IT experience and knowledge of several IT topics as you can see in the General IT Knowledge section above. 

As important as this is the weight of each topic in the exam:

As you can see, you will not be asked specific things about the services, like what is bucket name rules but you will need to know the services in order to build secure, elastic, reliable, high available and cost-friendly solutions.

Pay attention to Security, Scalability, Data Storage and High Availability topics as they represent 65% from the entire exam points.

Read the detailed domain areas and topics covered in the AWS cert content blueprint: http://d0.awsstatic.com/Train%20&%20Cert/docs/AWS_certified_solutions_architect_professional_blueprint.pdf

How will we structure the content? Following the "AWS Knowledge" section above, starting with Core Services, than focusing on Security and so on.