- Do take time to do the AWS exam Prep course .
- Explore through the lectures several times.
- Read all the white papers slowly and carefully, stopping frequently to think about when and how that service or feature could be used and when it is not an optimal solutions. Think in terms of: technical fit, operational and support fit, and cost fit. How does it scale up, how does it scale back, how long does that take, is there a performance hit while it is doing that? Is it more cost effective in high load situations or low load situation? What is the trade off between doing it yourself and using the service?
- Whenever you see a term you should be able to talk about it for 30 seconds. Pros, Cons, best use case, worst use case, related services, common misunderstandings.
- Don't waste time rehearsing practice questions. Use them as research challenges. Why answers are wrong is possibly more important than why an answer is right.
If you have seen a question more that twice it is of no further value. Any further use of it leads to memorizing random answers which isn't learning and will not help you on the exam.
If you do these things you should pass either exams with a healthy score.
Exam Essentials
Understand the global infrastructure. AWS provides a highly available technology infrastructure platform with multiple locations worldwide. These locations are composed of regions and Availability Zones. Each region is located in a separate geographic area and has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones.
Understand regions. An AWS region is a physical geographic location that consists of a cluster of data centers. AWS regions enable the placement of resources and data in multiple locations around the globe. Each region is completely independent and is designed to be completely isolated from the other regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability. Resources aren't replicated across regions unless organizations choose to do so.
Understand Availability Zones. An Availability Zone is one or more data centers within a region that are designed to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. Availability Zones provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other zones in the same region. By placing resources in separate Availability Zones, organizations can protect their website or application from a service disruption impacting a single location.
Understand the hybrid deployment model. A hybrid deployment model is an architectural pattern providing connectivity for infrastructure and applications between cloud-based resources and existing resources that are not located in the cloud.
Understand the difference between a region, an Availability Zone(AZ) and an Edge Location.
è A Region is a physical location in the world which consists of two or more Availability Zones(AZ’s).
è An AZ is one ore more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.
è Edge Locations are end points for AWS which are used for caching content. Typically this consists of CloudFront, Amazon’s Content Delivery Network(CDN).
S3 – Exam Tips :
è Remember that S3 is Object-based : ie., allows you to upload files.
è Files can be from 0 bytes to 5 TB.
è There is unlimited Storage
è Files are stored in Buckets.
è S3 is a universal namespace. That is, names must be unique globally.
è Read after write consistency for PUTS of new objects.
è Eventual consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES ( can take some time to propagate).
è Exam questions for S3 Storage Classes/Tiers :
- S3( durable, immediately available, frequently accessed).
- S3 – IA (durable, immediately available, frequently accessed).
- S3 One Zone – IA ( even cheaper than IA, but only in one availability zone).
- Glacier – Archived data, where you can wait 3 – 5 hours before accessing.
è In exam point of view remember the core fundamentals of an S3 Object :
- Key(name)
- Value(data)
- Version ID
-- Metadata
- Subresources
4) AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam
5) AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate
6) AWS Developer Associate