🚀 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! 🚀