AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Study Guide [SAA-C02]
You can access SAA-C02 Exam AWS official page here
Preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02) exam? Don’t know where to start? This post is the AWS Solutions Architect [Associate] Certificate Study Guide (with links to each objective in the exam domain).
I have curated a detailed list of articles from AWS documentation and other websites for each objective of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect [Associate] (SAA-C02) exam. Please share the post within your circles so it helps them to prepare for the exam.
Skills Measured
- Design Resilient Architectures – 30%
- Design High-performing Architectures – 28%
- Design Secure Applications and Architectures – 24%
- Design Cost-optimized Architectures – 18%
SAA-C02 Exam Free Study Guide
For each test objective, I’ve compiled a thorough collection of articles from Microsoft documentation. Please feel free to forward this page to your friends and coworkers in order to assist them in preparing for the test .
Design Resilient Architectures - 30%
Design a Multi-tier Architecture Solution
- Review the whitepaper on AWS serverless multi-tier architecture
- Building three-tier architectures with security groups
- Designing a Three-Tier Architecture in AWS
- Serverless multi-tier architecture on AWS
- AWS Services needed to implement multi-tier design:
- VPC: Implementing a 3-tier architecture with public & private subnets
- VPC: Three Tier Architecture for Web Applications in AWS
- Availability Zones: Spread 3 tiers across 3 availability zones
- Other AWS services to build a modular VPC architecture
- Subnets (a subnetwork or a smaller network within a VPC)
- Network ACLs acts as a firewall to traffic in a subnet
- Route tables to route the traffic from the subnet
- NAT gateways enable private resources to connect to the internet
Design Highly Available and/or Fault-tolerant Architectures
- High Availability
- Designing web apps for High Availability in AWS
- Building Highly Available systems with AWS
- Make the most of AWS High Availability architecture for workloads
- Architecting for 99.9% Availability
- Achieving “five nines” in the AWS cloud
- High availability architecture on AWS
- Architecting for Reliability: High Availability Architectures
- AWS services that enable High Availability:
- Amazon Regions & Availability Zones
- High Availability Application Architectures in Amazon VPC
- AWS VPC High Availability best practices
- Highly Available AWS Elastic Load Balancer
- Highly Available Amazon Simple Queue Service
- Increase the availability of your application on EC2
- Highly available Elastic IP addresses
- Fault-tolerance
- Review the whitepaper on fault-tolerant components on AWS
- Designing for fault-tolerance
- How-to: Achieving Fault Tolerance and Redundancy in EC2
- Building fault-tolerant applications on AWS
- AWS fault-tolerant architecture
Design Decoupling Mechanisms Using AWS Services
- Why decoupled and headless architectures are the future?
- Decoupling – What is it and why is it important?
- Synchronous and asynchronous AWS decoupling solutions
- Decoupling larger applications with Amazon EventBridge
- Decouple applications using Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS
- Decoupling with SQS, SimpleDB, and SNS
- Design loosely coupled architecture with Amazon SQS & SNS
Choose Appropriate Resilient Storage
Design High-performing Architectures - 28%
Identify Elastic and Scalable Compute Solutions for a Workload
- Cloud elasticity vs. cloud scalability
- AWS Well-architected framework – Elasticity
- Elastic compute solutions
- What is Amazon EC2?
- What is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
- Getting started using Elastic Beanstalk
- What is Amazon Elastic Container Service?
- What is Amazon EKS?
- What Is Amazon Elastic Container Registry?
- Use AWS Auto Scaling to optimize performance & costs
- Real World AWS Scalability
- Scale-out Computing on AWS
- Scale your web application — one step at a time
- How to build scalable web apps with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Select High-performing and Scalable Storage Solutions for a Workload
- Review the Performance Efficiency pillar whitepaper
- Storage architecture selection
- Performance Efficiency design principles
- How do you select your storage solution?
- Object storage
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (s3)
- What is Amazon S3?
- Best Practices: Optimizing Amazon S3 Performance
- Design Patterns: Optimizing Amazon S3 performance whitepaper
- Performance Guidelines for Amazon S3
- Scale indefinitely on S3 with these secrets of the S3 masters
- Block storage
- Amazon Elastic Block Store
- What is Amazon EBS?
- Amazon EBS volume types
- How to optimize the performance of Amazon EBS volumes?
- How to optimize Amazon Elastic Block Store for higher performance?
- AWS EBS volumes push the scalability envelope
- File system storage
- Amazon Elastic File System
- What is Amazon Elastic File System?
- Amazon EFS Performance
- Amazon EFS Performance Tips
- Getting the best performance out of Amazon EFS
- Amazon Elastic File System (EFS): Scale Durable File Systems
- Horizontal scaling using Amazon Elastic File System
- Amazon FSx
- What is Amazon FSx for Windows File Server?
- Amazon FSx for Lustre Performance
- Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Performance
- Amazon FSx for Lustre: Dive on high-performance file storage
- Walkthrough: Scaling-out performance with Shards
- Archival storage
- Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive
- What is Amazon S3 Glacier?
- Other Storage solutions for high-performance
- S3 Transfer Acceleration
Select High-performing Networking Solutions for a Workload
- Review the following videos:
- Connectivity to AWS and hybrid AWS network architectures
- Optimizing Network Performance for Amazon EC2 Instances
- Network Architecture Selection
- Wikipedia article on Network Performance
- Enable & configure enhanced networking on my EC2 instances
- AWS Services for high-performing networking solutions:
- AWS Global Accelerator
- It Creates accelerators to improve the performance of your app by directing traffic to the best-suited endpoints in the AWS network
- AWS Global Accelerator
- Get started with AWS Global Accelerator
- Achieve up to 60% better performance with Global Accelerator
- AWS Global Accelerator: Improving latency & design for failure
- Improve application performance for your traffic with Global Accelerator
- Improve your app’s performance with AWS Global Accelerator
- Global Accelerator: Building performant applications
- AWS Direct Connect
- Establishes a dedicated network connection from the on-premises network to the cloud
- AWS Direct Connect
- AWS Direct Connect (for connecting to the on-premises network)
- Connect your data center to AWS with Direct Connect
- AWS Virtual Private Network
- AWS VPN connections extend your on-premises networks to the cloud. Similar to Direct Connect. But VPNs use IPSec (with the help of the Internet) to connect your network with AWS. Whereas Direct Connect uses a dedicated private network to establish connections (does not use the Internet). Similar to Express Route if you come from the Azure world.
- AWS VPN
- Getting started – AWS Site-to-Site VPN
- Improve VPN Network Performance with Global Accelerator
- Troubleshoot low bandwidth issues on my VPN connection
- AWS Transit Gateway
- A cloud router. It connects multiple VPCs in your account with the on-premises network (if needed) with a central hub. Replaces many 1-1 connections between the VPCs.
- AWS Transit Gateway
- Scaling VPN throughput using AWS Transit Gateway
- Increasing bandwidth between VPCs by using Transit Gateway
- AWS CloudFront
- CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It stores a copy of your website assets in different edge locations around the world. When a user requests a resource, it is served from the nearest edge location, thereby reducing latency.
- Amazon CloudFront
- Improve your website performance with CloudFront
- Amazon S3+CloudFront: A match made in the Cloud
- AWS Outposts
- For running AWS infrastructure and other services in an on-premises environment. So you needn’t move your sensitive data to the cloud. You move the cloud to the location of your data.
- What are AWS Outposts?
- AWS Outposts: A deep-dive
- AWS Local Zones
- Moves AWS Compute, Storage, DBs closer to centers where no AWS regions exist.
- What are AWS Local Zones?
- Low-latency computing with AWS Local Zones
- Why Outposts, Local Zones, & Wavelength are game-changing for enterprises?
- AWS Wavelength
- Move AWS services to the edge of the 5G network, so traffic from 5G devices can reach servers in Wavelength Zones.
- Introduction to AWS Wavelength
- AWS Wavelength for delivering ultra-low latency apps for 5G
- Use Wavelength to deliver apps that require ultra-low latency
Choose High-performing Database Solutions for a Workload
- Database architecture selection – Performance efficiency pillar
- Relational databases
- Simple stuff, data tables related to each other via primary-foreign key relationships. A great fit for transactions (OLTP) in the financial world.
- What is a Relational Database?
- What is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)?
- Best practices for Amazon RDS
- Configuring parameters related to performance
- Tuning Amazon RDS performance
- What is Amazon Aurora?
- Managing Performance for Aurora DB Clusters
- Amazon Aurora performance assessment
- Deep Dive on Amazon Aurora performance tuning
- Amazon Redshift
- Performance of Amazon Redshift
- Top 10 performance tuning techniques for Amazon Redshift
- Improving Amazon Redshift Performance
- Key-value database
- A type of NoSQL database (not only SQL). The unique identifier is the key. The value can be any data structure. It is widely used by web applications for storing user session details.
- What is a Key-Value Database?
- What is Amazon DynamoDB?
- Best practices for designing and architecting with DynamoDB
- Amazon DynamoDB: Performance & cost optimization at any scale
- In-memory databases
- A database that’s housed in memory (RAM) instead of the disk. So it is volatile (you lose all data on failure) but gives you faster response times. Widely used in BI applications, so the user can drill-down/up or filter the report across dimensions with minimal latency.
- What is an In-memory database?
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
- Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached
- Boosting performance with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
- Performance at Scale with Amazon ElastiCache
- Accelerate Application Performance with Amazon ElastiCache
- Caching strategies
- Document database
- Data is stored in JSON-like documents. Used when the data is not relational. For example, scanned images, PDF files, etc., In manufacturing aircraft, different parts have a different number of attributes. Storing the information in the Document database can accommodate for the potential increase in the attributes required.
- What is a Document database?
- What is Amazon DocumentDB?
- Amazon DocumentDB performance
- Best practices for Amazon DocumentDB
- Graph database
- A graph database is best used to describe relationships between entities. These databases consist of nodes (store data entities) and edges (store relationships between entities). They are mostly used in recommendation engines in e-commerce and social media applications.
- What is a Graph database?
- Amazon Neptune
- Performance and Scaling in Amazon Neptune
- Amazon Neptune: A scalable graph database for OLTP
- Time-series database
- Used for monitoring software/financial/physical systems like equipment & machinery where there is a heavy dependence on time.
- Wikipedia: Time series database
- Amazon Timestream
- Ledger database
- Databases that are immutable (you cannot update a customer’s address, just add a new record) & with a cryptographically verifiable log. Used where an accurate description of history is required. For example, GDPR, tracking Credit/debit history in banking transactions.
- Do I need a Ledger database? What is it?
- Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB)
- Building System of Record Applications with Amazon QLDB
- Database caching for high performance
- Database Caching in AWS
- What is caching and how it works?
- AWS caching solutions
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Boosting database performance with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
- Caching for performance with Amazon DocumentDB & ElastiCache
- Supercharge query caching with AWS database services
- Database caching strategies using Redis
- Build high-performance, Internet-scale applications with AWS Databases
Design Secure Applications and Architectures - 24%
Design Secure Access to AWS Resources
- Security Pillar: AWS well-architected framework
- AWS security design principles
- AWS Identity & Access Management
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- What is IAM?
- IAM best practices to live by
- 10 IAM Design Principles
- Security best practices in IAM
- Business use cases for IAM
- High Availability IAM Design Patterns
- Approaches for addressing Identity & Access Management:
- a. Secure access credentials
- AWS Security Token Service
- Generates temporary security credentials that are limited in privileges and in duration. Enables you to provide access to users without creating AWS identities.
- Introduction to AWS (STS)
- AWS Security Token Service API Reference
- Temporary security credentials in IAM
- IAM Instance profiles
- A way for EC2 instances to access AWS APIs.
- Using instance profiles
- Create an IAM instance profile for your EC2 instances
- Difference between an AWS role and an instance profile
- b. Principle of least privileges
- Granting least privileges in AWS
- Defining least-privileged permissions for actions by AWS services
- Remove unnecessary credentials
- AWS Organizations
- Organize several accounts into groups to create an organizational structure. Apply policies to individual organizational units or the entire organization.
- What are AWS Organizations?
- Best practices for Organizational Units with AWS Organizations
Design Secure Application Tiers
- Building three-tier architectures with security groups
- Three Tier Architecture for Web Applications in AWS
- Secure an AWS Three-tier Web Architecture
- Create and Configure App-Tier Security Group
- Create and Configure Data-Tier Security Group
- Setting up a basic two-tier web application in Amazon Web Services
- Amazon EC2 security groups for Linux instances
- AWS Best Practices: 3-Tier Infrastructure
Select Appropriate Data Security Options
- Data Protection in AWS
- Data protection
- Best practices for securing sensitive data in AWS data stores
- How to build a data security strategy in AWS
- Data Protection Best Practices for AWS
- Best practices for data protection on Amazon S3
- Different approaches to consider for Data security in AWS are:
- a. Data Classification
- Analyzing and organizing data based on criticality and sensitivity so that appropriate data protection controls can be applied. For example, if you store sensitive data in your S3 buckets, then you can classify such objects with the help of object tagging.
- Tagging your Amazon EC2 resources
- Amazon S3 object tagging
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
- An Introduction to AWS Key Management Service
- Using key policies in AWS KMS
- AWS Key Management Service Best Practices
- b. Encryption/Tokenization
- Encryption transforms the sensitive content into a form that is unreadable to the hacker without the secret key (the reverse process is decryption).
- Tokenization defines a token to represent a sensitive piece of information.
- Protecting data using encryption
- A Deep Dive into AWS Encryption Services
- Protect data using server-side encryption
- Protect data using client-side encryption
- AWS CloudHSM
- What is AWS CloudHSM?
- When to use AWS CloudHSM?
- Data Protection in AWS CloudHSM
- c. Secure data at rest
- Encryption of Data at Rest
- Securing data at rest with encryption
- Protect data at rest with EC2 Instance Store Encryption
- Amazon S3
- How Amazon S3 uses AWS KMS?
- Encrypt your S3 objects with AWS KMS key
- Amazon EBS
- Amazon EBS encryption
- How Amazon EBS uses AWS KMS?
- Amazon Glacier:
- Data encryption at rest for Amazon Glacier
- d. Secure data in transit
- How do you protect your data in transit?
- Protecting data in transit with encryption
- AWS Certificate Manager
- ACM overview
- Automate encryption in transit with ACM
- Continuous encryption in transit with ACM
- Elastic Load Balancing supports ACM integration
- Encryption in Transit with Amazon CloudFront
- e. Backup/replicate/recover your data
- Amazon S3
- How to backup files to Amazon S3?
- Amazon S3 cross-region replication
- Script the backup of files to S3
- Retrieve an S3 object that was deleted
- Restore an S3 object that was archived
Design Cost-optimized Architectures - 18%
Identify Cost-effective Storage Solutions
- AWS storage optimization whitepaper
- Amazon S3
- Storage classes in AWS S3
- Optimize Amazon S3 Storage
- Optimizing storage costs using Amazon S3
- Cost optimization guidelines for Amazon S3
- Amazon Elastic Block Store
- Optimize Amazon EBS Storage
- Optimizing Amazon EBS storage usage
- EBS optimization strategies for better cost savings
- 5 ways to reduce EBS costs from AWS Monthly Bills
- Monitor storage costs with AWS cost & reporting tools
- Analyzing your costs with Cost Explorer
- Managing your costs with AWS Budgets
- Detailed Billing Reports
Identify Cost-effective Compute and Database Services
- Compute
- Amazon EC2 pricing
- Guide to AWS EC2 and how to control Its costs
- How to reduce AWS EC2 compute cost?
- Identify optimal EC2 instance type using AWS Compute Optimizer
- Optimize cost for your AWS compute
- Optimize your costs with AWS compute pricing options
- AWS Lambda Pricing
- AWS Lambda cost optimization
- How to optimize AWS Lambda costs (with examples)
- Cost optimization for Kubernetes on AWS
- Building for cost optimization for EKS with Spot Instances
- Database
- Amazon RDS Pricing
- Using Cost Management to save costs on RDS Reserved Instances
- Saving with AWS RDS: Identifying the top 3 cost drivers
- Cost optimization for RDS in AWS
- Optimize Amazon Aurora with MySQL
- Reducing Aurora PostgreSQL storage I/O costs
- 4 steps to reduce your Amazon Redshift costs
- Amazon Redshift cost optimization techniques
- 3 cost-cutting tips for Amazon DynamoDB
- How to optimize DynamoDB & reduce costs?
- 10 tips to optimize your DynamoDB costs
Design Cost-optimized Network Architectures
- Cost optimization pillar whitepaper
- Enterprise Network Architectures on AWS
- Reduce your AWS costs & save up to $500k with these guidelines
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud & other network services
- Amazon VPC pricing
- Reduce Cost with Amazon VPC Endpoints
- CloudFront pricing
- How to reduce Amazon Cloudfront costs?
- Amazon Route 53 pricing
- AWS Direct Connect pricing
- AWS Transit Gateway pricing
- Elastic Load Balancer
- Elastic Load Balancing pricing
- Cut AWS ELB costs by 90% using Application Load Balancers
- Idle Elastic Load Balancer
This brings us to the end of the AWS Solutions Architect [Associate] (SOA-C02) Exam Preparation Study Guide.
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