A curated list of AWS certification materials: videos courses, practice exams, prep tips, etc.
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- Official AWS Certification Pages
- Whitepapers
- FAQs
- Learning Resources
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
- AWS Certified Developer - Associate
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional
- AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty
- AWS Certified Database - Specialty
- Currently Available AWS Certifications
- AWS Certification Preparation Page
- AWS Training
- Schedule and Manage Exams
- Benefits for AWS Certified Individuals
- AWS Well-Architected Framework
- AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence Pillar
- AWS Well-Architected Framework: Reliability Pillar
- AWS Well-Architected Framework: Security Pillar
- AWS Well-Architected Framework: Performance Efficiency Pillar
- AWS Well-Architected Framework: Cost Optimization Pillar
- AWS: Overview of Security Processes
- Backup, Archive, and Restore Approaches Using AWS
- Big Data Analytics Options on AWS
- Blue/Green Deployments on AWS
- Getting Started with Amazon Aurora
- How AWS Pricing Works
- Overview of Amazon Web Services
- Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda
- API Gateway
- Auto Scaling
- CloudFormation
- CloudWatch
- CloudTrail
- DynamoDB
- EBS (Elastic Block Store)
- EC2
- ElastiCache
- Elastic Beanstalk
- IAM (Identity and Access Management)
- KMS (Key Management Service)
- Kinesis Data Streams
- Lambda
- RDS
- Route53
- S3
- SQS (Simple Queue Service)
- SNS (Simple Notification Service
- VPC
- AWS Cheat Sheets
- Amazon Web Services In Plain English
- Discovering AWS: Short Explanation of Each Service
- AWS concepts from A to Z
- AWS VPC Core Concepts in an Analogy and Guide
- 30 minute extension for your AWS Certification exam
- AWS Quick Reference Guide
- 8 Steps to the Ultimate AWS Certification Plan
- Reddit's r/AWSCertifications
- A Cloud Guru Forums
- Linux Academy Community
- ExamTopics Free Exam Material
- Certification Quiz Show on Twitch
- AWS re:Invent Videos
- AWS Stash: a collection of AWS related videos
Learn cloud fundamentals and best practices
- Youtube video course by Andrew Brown of ExamPro: 4 hours
- AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (Second Edition)
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Training Bootcamp
- paid A Cloud Guru course by Ryan Kroonenburg: 9.7 hours and 1 practice exam
- paid Udemy course by Stephane Maarek: 11 hours, 5 articles and 1 practice test
- paid Udemy course by Zeal Vora: 16.5 hours, 14 articles and 1 practice test
- paid Whizlabs course: 6 hours and 21 labs
- paid Udemy course by Alan Rodrigues: 9 hours, 13 articles and 2 practice tests
- Official Sample Questions
- Exam topics +800 questions (mostly accessible without Login)
- paid Udemy Practice Exam Questions by Neal Davis: 6 practice tests
- paid Tutorials Dojo 4 practice exams by Jon Bonso
- paid Whizlabs: 3 Full-Length Mock Exams (195 unique questions) and Practice Tests – 3 Set of the quiz (65 questions in each quiz)
- AWS CCP - Thoughts, My Journey, My Opinion
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Study Path
- AWS Practitioner Training Notes / Cheat Sheets
- I Sat the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam Online: Here's What Happened
- Video: Passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam on the first try!
- Video: How I passed AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam (882/1000)
- Rishab Kumar's Notes on AWS Certfied Cloud Practitioner
Learn to design highly available systems
- Youtube video course by Andrew Brown of ExamPro: 10.5 hours video
- paid Udemy course by Stephane Maarek: 23.5 hours video and 2 practice tests
- paid A Cloud Guru course by Ryan Kroonenburg: 22.7 hours video and 1 practice exam
- paid Video course by Adrian Cantrill: 50+ hours video and 2 practice exams
- Official Sample Questions for SAA-C01
- Official Sample Questions for SAA-C02
- 20 sample questions by Digital Cloud Training
- Exam topics +500 questions (mostly accessible without Login)
- paid Tutorials Dojo 5 practice exams by Jon Bonso
- paid Whizlabs 7 mock exams (600+ practice questions)
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam – SAA-C02 Study Path
- Certification Training Notes by Digital Cloud Training
- Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam
- AWS in bullet points
- alozano-77's personal notes from Adrian Cantrill's (SAA-C02) course
- Reddit's u/iCHAIT's notes and tips
- Passing AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam
- AWS CSAA - Thoughts, My Journey, My Opinion + What Next
- Passing the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam in 2020
- Video: How I passed AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Exam (845/1000)
- Rishab Kumar's Notes on Solutions Architect Associate
- AWS SAA-C02 Study Guide
- Personal notes from Adrian Cantrill's (SAA-C02) course
- How I get the AWS Solution Architect Associate Certificate in 90 hours. (SAA-C02)
Learn to develop applications for the cloud
- Youtube video course by Andrew Brown of ExamPro: 12 hours video
- paid A Cloud Guru course by Ryan Kroonenburg and Faye Ellis: 21 hours video and 1 practice exam
- Official Sample Questions
- 20 sample questions by Digital Cloud Training
- Whizlabs 25 Practice Questions with Exhaustive Explanations
- AWS Developer - Associate Flash Cards
- Exam topics +400 questions (mostly accessible without Login)
- paid Tutorials Dojo 4 practice exams by Jon Bonso
- paid Whizlabs 12 mock exams (745 practice questions)
- paid DigitalCloud Training practice exams (+350 questions)
- AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam Study Path
- Study Guide Notes
- How did I Pass AWS Certified Developer Associate (AWS CDA) Exam?
- Rishab Kumar's Notes on Certified Developer Associate
Learn to automate applications, networks, and systems
- paid A Cloud Guru course by Ryan Kroonenburg and Faye Ellis: 20 hours video and 1 practice exam
- paid Linux Academy course by Mark Richman: 29 hours video and 10 quizzes/exams
- paid Udemy course by Stephane Maarek: 19.5 hours video and 1 practice tests
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Exam Study Path
- Video: Passing AWS SysOps Admin First Try! Certification study tips and experience
- Passed AWS Sysops Administrator
- How to become AWS SysOps Administrator Associate?
Learn to design highly available systems
- paid A Cloud Guru course by Scott Pletcher: 14 hours video, 1 practice exam
- paid Udemy course by Stephane Maarek: 13 hours video
- paid Linux Academy course by Adrian Cantrill: 52 hours video and 1 quizz/exam
- Official Sample Questions
- Exam topics +800 questions (mostly accessible without Login)
- paid Tutorials Dojo 4 practice exams by Jon Bonso
- paid Whizlabs 5 mock exams (400 practice questions)
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Study Path
- My AWS Solution Architect Professional Certification Experience
- paid A Cloud Guru course by Nick Triantafillou: 10 hours video, 1 practice exam
- paid Linux Academy course by Craig Arcuri: 31 hours video and 10 quizzes/exams
- paid Udemy course by Stephane Maarek: 20.5 hours video and 1 practice test
- What it takes to pass the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional exam
- 4 Tips for Becoming an AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
- How to pass AWS DevOps Engineer Professional exam?
Learn to design, build, secure, and maintain analytics solutions
This certification was formerly known as AWS Certified Big Data - Specialty.
- paid A Cloud Guru course by Sanjay Kotecha: 14 hours video
- paid Linux Academy course by Terrence Cox: 18 hours video and 1 practice exam
- paid Udemy course by Frank Kane and Stephane Maarek: 12.5 hours video and 1 practice test
- Becoming AWS Certified in Big Data Specialty in 2 Months
- Becoming an AWS Certified Data Analytics — NEW April 2020
Validate your ability to recommend, design, and maintain the optimal AWS database solution to improve performance, reduce costs, and enable innovation
Contributions welcome!
To the extent possible under law, Pavel Timofeev has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.
My topics and notes used when studying to AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) Examination
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) examination is intended for individuals who have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to demonstrate basic knowledge of the AWS platform, including:
- Available services and their common use cases
- AWS Cloud architectural principles (at the conceptual level)
- Account security and compliance.
In the result, you're able to demonstrate an understanding of AWS Cloud economics including: costs, billing, and analysis, and the value proposition of the AWS Cloud.
Trade capital expense for variable expense – Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can pay only when you consume computing resources, and pay only for how much you consume.
Benefit from massive economies of scale – By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay as-you-go prices.
Stop guessing capacity – Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often end up either sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little capacity as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.
Increase speed and agility – In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.
Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers – Focus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers.
Go global in minutes – Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS provides you with the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources and is most similar to existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Removes the need for your organization to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
Software as a Service (SaaS) - Provides you with a completed product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to Software as a Service are referring to end-user applications. With a SaaS offering you do not have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed; you only need to think about how you will use that particular piece of software. A common example of a SaaS application is web-based email which you can use to send and receive email without having to manage feature additions to the email product or maintain the servers and operating systems that the email program is running on.
- Operational Excellence
- Ability to run and monitor systems
- Infra as code
- Frequent, small and reversible changes
- Antecipate failures
- Security
- Ability to procted info, systems and assets
- Least privilege principle (IAM)
- Automated with best pratices
- Realiabilty
- Ability to recover from infra or service disruptions
- Scale horizontally to increase aggreate system availability
- Stop guessing capacity with auto scale
- Performance Efficiency
- Ability to use computing resources efficiently
- Go global in minutes
- Serverless architectures
- Cost Optimization
- Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point
- Pay only for what you use
- Use Cloudwatch
- Tags to catalog resources
- IAM is a Global service
- Root account should not be used to operate AWS, as it not follows the least previlege principle
- Users should be created instead, they can be grouped
- Groups can only contain users (not other groups)
- Users are not required to belong to a group, but they can belong of multiple groups
- Policies (JSON) can be applied to groups or users
- Roles for EC2 Instances or AWS Services
- IAM Credential Reports and IAM Access Advisor can help you audit IAM usage
- IAM Policy Simulator: you can test and troubleshoot IAM policies
- Some best practices for IAM are: To use MFA (Multi Factor Authentication), to use a good password policy for users, to never share IAM users or access keys!
- On-Demand
- Reserved
- 1y minimum
- Convertible: long jobs with flexible instances types over time
- Scheduled: for a repeated time scheduled reservation
- Spot: short jobs and cheap. But you can easily lose it due to the pricing model.
- Dedicated
- Dedicated Host: to have a physical server just for you.
- Dedicated Instance: hardware is dedicated to you, you may share the hardware with other instances in your account and no control over which your dedicated hardware your instance will be running.
- Instance Store: provides temporary block-level storage for your instance. This storage is located on disks that are physically attached to the host computer.
- Volumes are network drives that can be mounted to an instance at time (consider as true to this exam context)
- Persists data that still lives even after instance termination
- Bound to a specific AZ
- Snapshots can be copied to any region
- AMI's are built to a specific region, but they can be copied across regions
- EC2 Image Builder automate the creation, maintaining, validation and testing of AMI's (and it can be scheduled)
- EC2 Local Instance Store can be used to speed up a physical disk connection to EC2 instance
- Amazon EFS (Elastic File System): is a NFS that can be mounted to several EC2 instances at once, and it costs 3x more than an EBS. It's multi AZ inside a region
- High availability means your app running at least in 2 availability zones
- Scability: ability to accomodate a larger load by increasing the hardware (scaling up) or by adding nodes (scale out)
- Elasticity: after the system is being scalable, elasticity means that the system can auto-scale based on the load
- 4 kinds of load balancers:
- Application Load Balancer (http[s] only)
- Network Load Balancer
- Gatewau Load Balancer
- Classic Load Balancer (deprecated, old genereation)
- Naming conventions for buckets
- No uppercase
- No underscore
- 3-63 characters long
- No IP numbers
- Must start with lowercase letter or number
- It needs to be globally unique
- There isn't directory/folder concept, but prefixes that are part of the object key that can be long and with slashes (/)
- Max object size is 5TB (which needs to be uploaded with multipart if they are bigger than 5 GB)
Any access can be granted to an object if any of the conditions below are true, and there's no explict DENY.
- IAM Policies: attaching IAM policies for a specific user
- Bucket policies, where rules are attached directly to buckets
- Object Access Control List (OACL) - granular control
- Bucket Access Control List (BACL)
- Versioning is required for replication
- Cross Region Replication [CRR]: compliance, lower latency, replicate between accounts
- Same Region Replication [SRR]: log aggregation, live replication between prod and test accounts
- Buckets can be in different accounts
- Asynchronous process
- Amazon S3 General Purpose Storage
- Amazon S3 Standard Infrequent Access (IA)
- Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access.
- Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering
- Amazon S3 Glacier
- Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive
- Relational Databases (OLTP): RDS / Aurora
- Memory: ElastiCache
- Key-Value: DynamoDB (Serverless) + DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator Cache)
- Warehouse (OLAP): Redshift
- Hadoop Cluster: EMR
- Athena: query data from S3
- Quicksight: Dashboards from your data
- DocumentDB: Amazon Aurora for MongoDB
- QLDB: Financial Transactions Ledger
- Managed Blockchain
- Glue: Transform data using ETL for Redshift
- Database Migration: DMS
- Graph Database: Neptune
- Helps you to manage EC2 and On-Premises system at scale, in a hybrid way.
- Gives you visibility and control of your infrastructure on AWS.
- Provides a unified user interface so you can view operational data from multiple AWS services.
- It can group resources, like Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EKS clusters, Amazon S3 buckets, or Amazon RDS instances, by application, view operational data for monitoring and troubleshooting.
- Chef & Puppet as a service, an alternative to SSM
- CloudWatch
- Metrics: monitor services performance and biling metrics
- Alarms: automate notification, perform ec2 actions, notifications via SNS based on metrics
- Logs: collect logs from EC2, servers, lambdas, etc
- Event Bridge: react to events or trigger a rule based on a schedule
- CloudTrail: audit API calls within your account
- CloudTrail Insights: automated analysis of your CloudTrail events
- X-Ray: trace requests through your services
- Shared Responsability Model
- Customer is responsible for security IN the cloud (customer data, platforms, applications, OS, network configuration and security, firewall, client and server side encryption, etc)
- AWS is responsible for security OF the cloud (compute, storage, database, networking, hardware, local access security, power, regions, availability zones and edge locations)
- WAF: Web application firewall helps you control bot traffic, sql injection, cross-site scripting, etc
- AWS Shield: managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS
- AWS KMS (Key Management Service) is responsible to manage encryption keys for AWS Services at a software level
- CloudHSM manage encryption at a hardware level (HSM = Hardware Security Module)
- AWS Secret Manager for secret management (mostly on the exam related to RDS)
- AWS Artifact: not really a service, but on demand compliance documentation and AWS agreements
- GuardDuty, Macie and Security Hub are used to identify possible security issues
- AWS Macie: Uses machine learning to analyse your S3 buckets and prevent data loss by automatically discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data
- AWS Glue: Serverless data integration service that uses ETL (extract, transform, and load) pipelines to transform data
- AWS GuardDutty: threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3
- AWS Security Hub: Centrally view and manage security alerts and automate security checks
- AWS Detective: deep findings and analysys on the possible root cause on the issues identified by the services above
- Amazon Inspector: Automated security assessment service to help improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS
- Abuse to report for abusive or illegal purposes that you detect
- Actions that can be only performed by the root user
- Change account settings
- Close your account
- Change or cancel support plans
- Register as reseller on Reserved Instance Marketplace
- Signup for GovCloud
- AWS Organizations to organize organizational units and SCP (service control policies) to restrict accounts powers
- AWS Control Tower to setup multi acccount environment according with best pratices
- AWS Config: enables you to continuously monitor, audit, and evaluate the configurations changes of your AWS resources.
- CloudFormation to deploy stacks
- CloudTrail to record API calls made within your account
- AWS Pricing Calculator can help you estimate costs for your solution
- AWS Biling Dashboard show your monthly costs in a high level overview
- Cost Allocation tracks costs on a detailed level
- Cost Explorer allows you to visualize, understand and manage your costs and usages over time
- Trusted Advisor analyse your accounts and provides recommendations on:
- Cost Optimization
- Performance
- Security
- Fault Tolerance
- Service Limits
- Full Trusted Advisor available on Business and Enterprise plans
- Customer Service and Communities
- AWS Trusted Advisor (core checks only)
- AWS Personal Health Dashboard
- Business hours emails access to Cloud Support Associates
- Unlimited Cases / 1 primary contact
- SLA for response times
- General Guidance: <=24 business hours
- System impaired: <=12 business hours
- Full Trusted Advidor + API access
- 24x7 phone email and chat to Cloud Support Engineers
- Unlimited cases / Unlimited contacts
- Access to Infrastructure Event Management for an additional fee
- SLA for response times
- General Guidance: <=24 business hours
- System impaired: <=12 business hours
- Production System Impaired: <=4 hours
- Production System Down: <=1 hour
- Access to Technical Account Manager (TAM)
- Concierge Support Team (for billing and account best pratices)
- Infrastructure Event Management, Well-Architected & Operation Reviews
- SLA for response times
- same as business
- Business-critical system down: <=15 minutes