AWS Solutions Architect Associate

AWS Global Infrastructure

Regions: Geographic locations (e.g., US East, EU Central).
Availability Zones (AZs): Physically isolated data centers within regions (min. 2 per region).
Edge Locations: Cache points for quicker data access globally.

Route53

Amazon’s scalable DNS and Domain Name Registration service.

DNS Record Type	Description
SOA	Start of Authority
A	IPv4 address record
CNAME	Alias to another domain
MX	Mail exchange record
PTR	Reverse DNS lookup
NS	Name Server record
Alias	AWS specific enhanced CNAME

Routing Policies

Simple: Basic DNS routing.
Weighted: Traffic split by percentage.
Latency-Based: Optimal latency routing.
Failover: Active-passive setup.
Geographical: Routing based on user location.
Geographical Proximity: Advanced geo-routing with bias.
Multivalue Answer: Simple with health checks.

IAM (Identity and Access Management)

Controls AWS resource access.

IAM Entity	Description
Users	Individual AWS users
Groups	Collection of users
Roles	Assume temporary identity
Policies	Define permissions

IAM Policy Types

Identity-Based Policies: Directly attached to users/groups.
Resource-Based Policies: Attached directly to resources.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Scalable virtual computing environment.

Instance Storage: Ephemeral (temporary) or EBS (persistent).
Volumes: Root (default deleted on termination), Additional (persists by default).
Placement Groups: Cluster (low latency), Spread (hardware isolation), Partition (large-scale distribution).

Instance Launch Types

On-Demand: Short workloads, predictable.
Reserved: Long workloads (standard, convertible, scheduled).
Spot: Cheap but less reliable.
Dedicated Hosts/Instances: Reserved hardware.

Databases on AWS

Relational (RDS)

Engines: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MariaDB, MySQL, MS SQL, Aurora.

Multi-AZ (Disaster recovery)
Read Replicas (Performance)

NoSQL (DynamoDB)

Eventual consistency (1s latency)
Streams integration with Lambda

Redshift (OLAP)

Data warehouse solution
Automated backups, Cross-region replication

Aurora

MySQL/PostgreSQL compatible
High performance, durability, and scalability

ElastiCache

Redis (Multi-AZ, advanced operations)
Memcached (Simple caching)

CloudFront (CDN)

Caches data at edge locations globally
Integration with S3, ELB, EC2
Supports read/write via S3 Transfer Acceleration

Elastic Load Balancing

Type	Description
Application (ALB)	Layer 7 routing (HTTP/HTTPS)
Network (NLB)	Heavy traffic, TCP/UDP routing
Classic	Deprecated basic routing

EC2 Auto Scaling

Launch configurations define instance setup
Auto Scaling Groups manage instance scaling

Amazon FSx

High-performance file systems:

FSx for Windows (SMB support)
FSx for Lustre (High throughput computing)

AWS WAF (Web App Firewall)

Protects applications against common web threats. Integrates with:

CloudFront
ALB
API Gateway

Amazon S3

Object storage with global namespace.
Storage classes: Standard, IA, Intelligent Tiering, Glacier.

Features

Versioning, Lifecycle management
Cross-region replication
Server/client-side encryption

AWS Storage Gateway

Integrates on-premises data with AWS Cloud.

File Gateway
Volume Gateway (Stored/Cached)
Tape Gateway (Virtual tapes)

AWS Messaging

Service	Description
SQS	Queue service (standard/FIFO)
SWF	Workflow management
SNS	Notification service (push-based)

Elastic Transcoder

Media file transcoding service supporting various formats and resolutions.

API Gateway

Front-end for APIs with caching, throttling, and CORS support.

AWS Kinesis

Streaming data platform:

Streams: Data persistence
Firehose: Real-time processing
Analytics: Real-time analytics

AWS Cognito

Identity management for web/mobile applications:

User Pools (Authentication)
Identity Pools (Authorization)

Amazon EMR (Hadoop)

Managed big data framework (Hadoop, Spark).

Amazon Inspector

Security assessments for AWS resources.

CloudWatch Agent

Detailed monitoring/logging (memory, disk usage).

Amazon MQ

Managed messaging broker supporting multiple protocols.

Happy Learning AWS!