AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide with 900 Practice Test Questions: Associate (SAA-C03) Exam

AWS

Certified Solutions Architect

Study Guide

Associate (SAA-C03) Exam

Fourth Edition

Ben Piper

David Clinton

Copyright © 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada and the United Kingdom.

ISBN: 978-1-119-98262-3

ISBN: 978-1-119-98264-7 (ebk.)

ISBN: 978-1-119-98263-0 (ebk.)

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people who helped us create AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA-C03 Exam, Fourth Edition.

First, a special thanks to our friends at Wiley. Kenyon Brown, senior acquisitions editor, got the ball rolling on this project and pushed to get this book published quickly. His experience and guidance throughout the project was critical. Kim Wimpsett, project editor, helped push this book forward by keeping us accountable to our deadlines. Her edits made many of the technical parts of this book more readable.

Doug Holland reviewed the chapters and questions for technical accuracy. Not only did his comments and suggestions make this book more accurate, he also provided additional ideas for the chapter review questions to make them more challenging and relevant to the exam.

Lastly, the authors would like to thank each other!

About the Author

Ben Piper is a networking and cloud consultant who has authored multiple books, including the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide: Foundational CLF-C01 Exam (Sybex, 2019) and Learn Cisco Network Administration in a Month of Lunches (Manning, 2017). You can contact Ben by visiting his website: benpiper.com.

David Clinton is a Linux server admin and AWS solutions architect who has worked with IT infrastructure in both academic and enterprise environments. He has authored books—including (with Ben Piper) the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide: Foundational CLF-C01 Exam (Sybex, 2019), The Ubuntu Linux Bible (with Chris Nagos; Wiley, 2020), and Teach Yourself Data Analytics in 30 Days (Bootstrap IT, 2021).

In a previous life, David spent 20 years as a high school teacher. He currently lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and family and can be reached through his website: bootstrap-it.com.

About the Technical Editor

Doug Holland is a Cloud Solutions Architect based in Northern California with over 20 years of industry experience. He holds a master's degree in software engineering from Oxford University and has been recognized for his technical leadership as a Microsoft MVP and Intel Black Belt Developer.

Table of Exercises

EXERCISE 1.1   Use the AWS CLI

EXERCISE 2.1   Launch an EC2 Linux Instance and Log In Using SSH

EXERCISE 2.2   Assess the Free Capacity of a Running Instance and Change Its Instance Type

EXERCISE 2.3   Assess Which Pricing Model Will Best Meet the Needs of a Deployment

EXERCISE 2.4   Create and Launch an AMI Based on an Existing Instance Storage Volume

EXERCISE 2.5   Create a Launch Template

EXERCISE 2.6   Install the AWS CLI and Use It to Launch an EC2 Instance

EXERCISE 2.7   Clean Up Unused EC2 Resources

EXERCISE 3.1   Create a New S3 Bucket and Upload a File

EXERCISE 3.2   Enable Versioning and Life Cycle Management for an S3 Bucket

EXERCISE 3.3   Generate and Use a Presigned URL

EXERCISE 3.4   Enable Static Website Hosting for an S3 Bucket

EXERCISE 3.5   Calculate the Total Life Cycle Costs for Your Data

EXERCISE 4.1   Create a New VPC

EXERCISE 4.2   Create a New Subnet

EXERCISE 4.3   Create and Attach a Primary ENI

EXERCISE 4.4   Create an Internet Gateway and Default Route

EXERCISE 4.5   Create a Custom Security Group

EXERCISE 4.6   Create an Inbound Rule to Allow Remote Access from Any IP Address

EXERCISE 4.7   Allocate and Use an Elastic IP Address

EXERCISE 4.8   Create a Transit Gateway

EXERCISE 4.9   Create a Blackhole Route

EXERCISE 5.1   Create an RDS Database Instance

EXERCISE 5.2   Create a Read Replica

EXERCISE 5.3   Promote the Read Replica to a Master

EXERCISE 5.4   Create a Table in DynamoDB Using Provisioned Mode

EXERCISE 6.1   Lock Down the Root User

EXERCISE 6.2   Assign and Implement an IAM Policy

EXERCISE 6.3   Create, Use, and Delete an AWS Access Key

EXERCISE 6.4   Create and Configure an IAM Group

EXERCISE 7.1   Create a Trail

EXERCISE 7.2   Create a Graph Using Metric Math

EXERCISE 7.3   Deliver CloudTrail Logs to CloudWatch Logs

EXERCISE 8.1   Create a Hosted Zone on Route 53 for an EC2 Web Server

EXERCISE 8.2   Set Up a Health Check

EXERCISE 8.3   Configure a Route 53 Routing Policy

EXERCISE 8.4   Create a CloudFront Distribution for Your S3-Based Static Website

EXERCISE 10.1   Create a Launch Template

EXERCISE 11.1   Configure and Launch an Application Using Auto Scaling

EXERCISE 11.2   Sync Two S3 Buckets as Cross-Region Replicas

EXERCISE 11.3   Upload to an S3 Bucket Using Transfer Acceleration

EXERCISE 11.4   Create and Deploy an EC2 Load Balancer

EXERCISE 11.5   Create a Nested Stack

EXERCISE 11.6   Create a CloudWatch Dashboard

EXERCISE 12.1   Create a Limited Administrative User

EXERCISE 12.2   Create and Assume a Role as an IAM User

EXERCISE 12.3   Configure VPC Flow Logging

EXERCISE 12.4   Encrypt an EBS Volume

EXERCISE 13.1   Create an AWS Budget to Send an Alert

EXERCISE 13.2   Build Your Own Stack in Simple Monthly Calculator

EXERCISE 13.3   Request a Spot Fleet Using the AWS CLI

Introduction

Studying for any certification always involves deciding how much of your studying should be practical hands-on experience and how much should be simply memorizing facts and figures. Between the two of us, we've taken dozens of IT certification exams, so we know how important it is to use your study time wisely. We've designed this book to help you discover your strengths and weaknesses on the AWS platform so that you can focus your efforts properly. Whether you've been working with AWS for a long time or whether you're relatively new to it, we encourage you to carefully read this book from cover to cover.

Passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam requires understanding the components and operation of the core AWS services as well as how those services interact with each other. Read through the official documentation for the various AWS services. Amazon offers HTML, PDF, and Kindle documentation for many of them. Use this book as a guide to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can focus your study efforts properly.

You should have at least six months of hands-on experience with AWS before taking the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam. If you're relatively new to AWS, we strongly recommend our own AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide: CLF-C01 Exam (Author Sybex, 2019) as a primer.

Even though this book is designed specifically for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam, some of your fellow readers have found it useful for preparing for the SysOps Administrator and DevOps Engineer exams.

Hands-on experience is crucial for exam success. Each chapter in this study guide contains hands-on exercises that you should strive to complete during or immediately after you read the chapter. It's vital to understand that the exercises don't cover every possible scenario for every AWS service. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The exercises provide you with a foundation to build on. Use them as your starting point, but don't be afraid to venture out on your own. Feel free to modify them to match the variables and scenarios you might encounter in your own organization. Keep in mind that some of the exercises and figures use the AWS Web Console, which is in constant flux. As such, screenshots and step-by-step details of exercises may change. Use these eventualities as excuses to dig into the AWS online documentation and browse around the Web Console on your own. Also remember that although you can complete many of the exercises within the bounds of the AWS Free Tier, getting enough practice to pass the exam will likely require you to spend some money. But it's money well spent, as getting certified is an investment in your career and your future.

Each chapter contains review questions to thoroughly test your understanding of the services and concepts covered in that chapter. They also test your ability to integrate the concepts with information from preceding chapters. Although the difficulty of the questions varies, rest assured that they are not fluff. We've designed the questions to help you realistically gauge your understanding and readiness for the exam. Avoid the temptation to rush through the questions to just get to the answers. Once you complete the assessment in each chapter, referring to the answer key will give you not only the correct answers but a detailed explanation as to why they're correct. It will also explain why the other answers are incorrect.

The book also contains a self-assessment exam with 39 questions, two practice exams with 50 questions each to help you gauge your readiness to take the exam, and flashcards to help you learn and retain key facts needed to prepare for the exam.

This AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA-C03 Exam, Fourth Edition is divided into two parts: The Core AWS Services and Architecting for Requirements.

Part I, The Core AWS Services

The first part of the book dives deep into each of the core AWS services. These services include ones you probably already have at least a passing familiarity with: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), virtual private cloud (VPC), Identity and Access Management (IAM), Route 53, and Simple Storage Service (S3), to name just a few.

Some AWS services seem to serve similar or even nearly identical purposes. You'll learn about the subtle but important differences between seemingly similar services and, most importantly, when to use each.

Part II, Architecting for Requirements

The second part of the book is a set of best practices and principles aimed at helping you design, implement, and operate systems in the cloud. PART II focuses on the following four pillars of good design:

Resilient architectures

High-performing architectures

Secure architectures

Cost-optimized architectures

Each chapter of PART II revisits the core AWS services in light of a different pillar. Also, because not every AWS service is large enough to warrant its own chapter, PART II simultaneously introduces other services that, although less well known, may still show up on the exam. Appendix B, Additional Services, contains brief descriptions of many smaller services that don't fit easily elsewhere in the book.

Achieving the right balance among these pillars is a key skill you need to develop as a solutions architect. Prior to beginning PART II, we encourage you to peruse the Well-Architected Framework white paper, which is available for download at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/welcome.html.

What Does This Book Cover?

This book covers topics you need to know to prepare for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Cloud Computing and AWS This chapter provides an overview of the AWS Cloud computing platform and its core services and concepts.

Chapter 2: Compute Services This chapter covers EC2 instances—the virtual machines that you can use to run Linux and Windows workloads on AWS. It also covers the Elastic Block Store service that EC2 instances depend on for persistent data storage.

Chapter 3: AWS Storage In this chapter, you'll learn about Simple Storage Service (S3) and Glacier, which provide unlimited data storage and retrieval for AWS services, your applications, and the Internet. You'll also discover the Snowball family of physical appliances you can use to transfer very large volumes of data to and from your AWS account.

Chapter 4: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) This chapter explains Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a virtual network that contains network resources for AWS services.

Chapter 5: Database Services In this chapter, you will learn about some different managed database services offered by AWS, including Relational Database Service (RDS), DynamoDB, and Redshift.

Chapter 6: Authentication and Authorization—AWS Identity and Access Management This chapter covers AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which provides the primary means for protecting the AWS resources in your account.

Chapter 7: CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and AWS Config In this chapter, you'll learn how to log, monitor, and audit your AWS resources.

Chapter 8: The Domain Name System and Network Routing: Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront This chapter focuses on the Domain Name System (DNS) and Route 53, the service that provides public and private DNS hosting for both internal AWS resources and the Internet. It also covers CloudFront, Amazon's global content delivery network.

Chapter 9: Data Ingestion, Transformation, and Analytics Data comes in many shapes and sizes, and the more data you have, the more unwieldy it becomes. This chapter explains how AWS can help you ingest, transform, and analyze data at scale.

Chapter 10: Resilient Architectures This chapter will show you how to architect and integrate AWS services to achieve a high level of reliability for your applications. You'll learn how to plan around and recover from inevitable outages to keep your systems up and running. You'll also learn how Simple Queue Service (SQS) fits into the picture.

Chapter 11: High-Performing Architectures This chapter covers how to build highly performing systems and use the AWS elastic infrastructure to rapidly scale up and out to meet peak demand.

Chapter 12: Secure Architectures In this chapter, you'll learn how to use encryption and security controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and systems on AWS. You'll also learn about the various security services such as GuardDuty, Inspector, Shield, and Web Application Firewall.

Chapter 13: Cost-Optimized Architectures This chapter will show you how to estimate and control your costs in the cloud.

Interactive Online Learning Environment and Test Bank

The authors have worked hard to provide some really great tools to help you with your certification process. The interactive online learning environment that accompanies the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA-C03 Exam, Fourth Edition provides a test bank with study tools to help you prepare for the certification exam—and increase your chances of passing it the first time! The test bank includes the following:

Sample TestsWe’ve included many knowledge-testing questions, including the assessment test at the end of this Introduction and the chapter tests that include the review questions at the end of each chapter. In addition, there are five practice exams with 50 questions each. Use these questions to test your knowledge of the study guide material. The online test bank runs on multiple devices.

Flashcards The online text banks include 100 flashcards specifically written to hit you hard, so don't get discouraged if you don't ace your way through them at first. They're there to ensure that you're really ready for the exam. And no worries—armed with the review questions, practice exams, and flashcards, you'll be more than prepared when exam day comes. Questions are provided in digital flashcard format (a question followed by a single correct answer). You can use the flashcards to reinforce your learning and provide last-minute test prep before the exam.

Resources You'll find some AWS CLI and other code examples from the book for you to cut and paste for use in your own environment. A glossary of key terms from this book is also available as a fully searchable PDF.

Go to www.wiley.com/go/sybextestprep to register and gain access to this interactive online learning environment and test bank with study tools. Accessing the test bank for the first time can sometimes be a challenge. Don't be afraid to reach out to Support (+1 888-884-5669 or www.efficientlearning.com/contact-us) for help; they'll make sure you get there!

Exam Objectives

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for people who have experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. In general, you should have the following before taking the exam:

A minimum of one year of hands-on experience designing systems on AWS

Hands-on experience using the AWS services that provide compute, networking, storage, and databases

Ability to define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements

Ability to provide implementation guidance

Ability to identify which AWS services meet a given technical requirement

An understanding of the four pillars of the Well-Architected Framework

An understanding of the AWS global infrastructure, including the network technologies used to connect them

An understanding of AWS security services and how they integrate with traditional on-premises security infrastructure

The exam covers four different domains, with each domain broken down into objectives.

Objective Map

The following table lists each domain and its weighting in the exam, along with the chapters in the book where that domain's objectives are covered.

How to Contact the Publisher

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Assessment Test

True/false: The Developer Support plan provides access to a support application programming interface (API).

True

False

True/false: AWS is responsible for managing the network configuration of your EC2 instances.

True

False

Which of the following services is most useful for decoupling the components of a monolithic application?

SNS

KMS

SQS

Glacier

An application you want to run on EC2 requires you to license it based on the number of physical CPU sockets and cores on the hardware you plan to run the application on. Which of the following tenancy models should you specify?

Dedicated host

Dedicated instance

Shared tenancy

Bring your own license

True/false: Changing the instance type of an EC2 instance will change its elastic IP address.

True

False

True/false: You can use a Quick Start Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to create any instance type.

True

False

Which S3 encryption option does not require AWS persistently storing the encryption keys it uses to decrypt data?

Client-side encryption

SSE-KMS

SSE-S3

SSE-C

True/false: Durability measures the percentage of likelihood that a given object will not be inadvertently lost by AWS over the course of a year.

True

False

True/false: After uploading a new object to S3, there will be a slight delay (one to two seconds) before the object is available.

True

False

You created a virtual private cloud (VPC) using the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block 10.0.0.0/24. You need to connect to this VPC from your internal network, but the IP addresses in use on your internal network overlap with the CIDR. Which of the following is a valid way to address this problem?

Remove the CIDR and use IPv6 instead.

Change the VPC's CIDR.

Create a new VPC with a different CIDR.

Create a secondary CIDR for the VPC.

True/false: An EC2 instance must be in a public subnet to access the Internet.

True

False

True/false: The route table for a public subnet must have a default route pointing to an Internet gateway as a target.

True

False

Which of the following use cases is well suited for DynamoDB?

Running a MongoDB database on AWS

Storing large binary files exceeding 1 GB in size

Storing JSON documents that have a consistent structure

Storing image assets for a website

True/false: You can create a DynamoDB global secondary index for an existing table at any time.

True

False

True/false: Enabling point-in-time RDS snapshots is sufficient to give you a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 10 minutes.

True

False

Which of the following steps does the most to protect your AWS account?

Deleting unused Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies

Revoking unnecessary access for IAM users

Rotating root access keys

Restricting access to S3 buckets

Rotating Secure Shell (SSH) key pairs

Which of the following can be used to encrypt the operating system of an EC2 instance?

AWS Secrets Manager

CloudHSM

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

AWS Security Token Service (STS)

What is a difference between a token generated by the AWS Security Token Service (STS) and an IAM access key?

The token generated by STS can't be used by an IAM principal.

An IAM access key is unique.

The token generated by STS can be used only once.

The token generated by STS expires.

True/false: EC2 sends instance memory utilization metrics to CloudWatch every five minutes.

True

False

You configured a CloudWatch alarm to monitor CPU utilization for an EC2 instance. The alarm began in the INSUFFICIENT_DATA state and then entered the ALARM state. What can you conclude from this?

The instance recently rebooted.

CPU utilization is too high.

The CPU utilization metric crossed the alarm threshold.

The instance is stopped.

Where do AWS Config and CloudTrail store their logs?

S3 buckets

CloudWatch Logs

CloudTrail Events

DynamoDB

Amazon Athena

True/false: An EC2 instance in a private subnet can resolve an A resource record for a public hosted zone hosted in Route 53.

True

False

You want to use Route 53 to send users to the application load balancer closest to them. Which of the following routing policies lets you do this with the least effort?

Latency routing

Geolocation routing

Geoproximity routing

Edge routing

True/false: You can use an existing domain name with Route 53 without switching its registration to AWS.

True

False

You're designing an application that takes multiple image files and combines them into a video file that users on the Internet can download. Which of the following can help you quickly implement your application in the fastest, most highly available, and most cost-effective manner?

EC2 spot fleet

Lambda

Relational Database Service (RDS)

Auto Scaling

You're using EC2 Auto Scaling and want to implement a scaling policy that adds one extra instance only when the average CPU utilization of each instance exceeds 90 percent. However, you don't want it to add more than one instance every five minutes. Which of the following scaling policies should you use?

Simple

Step

Target tracking

PercentChangeInCapacity

True/false: EC2 Auto Scaling automatically replaces group instances directly terminated by the root user.

True

False

Which ElastiCache engine can persistently store data?

MySQL

Memcached

MongoDB

Redis

Which of the following is not an AWS service?

CloudFormation

Puppet

OpsWorks

Snowball

True/false: S3 cross-region replication uses transfer acceleration.

True

False

Which of the following services can you deactivate on your account?

Security Token Service (STS)

CloudWatch

Virtual private cloud (VPC)

Lambda

Which of the following services can alert you to malware on an EC2 instance?

AWS GuardDuty

AWS Inspector

AWS Shield

AWS Web Application Firewall

True/false: If versioning is enabled on an S3 bucket, applying encryption to an unencrypted object in that bucket will create a new, encrypted version of that object.

True

False

Which instance type will, if left running, continue to incur costs?

Spot

Standard reserved

On-demand

Convertible reserved

True/false: The EBS Lifecycle Manager can take snapshots of volumes that were once attached to terminated instances.

True

False

Which of the following lets you spin up new web servers the quickest?

Lambda

Auto Scaling

Elastic Container Service

CloudFront

True/false: CloudFormation stack names are case-sensitive.

True

False

Answers to Assessment Test

B. The Business plan offers access to a support API, but the Developer plan does not. See Chapter 1 for more information.

B. Customers are responsible for managing the network configuration of EC2 instances. AWS is responsible for the physical network infrastructure. See Chapter 1 for more information.

C. Simple Queue Service (SQS) allows for event-driven messaging within distributed systems that can decouple while coordinating the discrete steps of a larger process. See Chapter 9 for more information.

A. The dedicated host option lets you see the number of physical CPU sockets and cores on a host. See Chapter 2 for more information.

B. An elastic IP address will not change. A public IP address attached to an instance will change if the instance is stopped, as would happen when changing the instance type. See Chapter 2 for more information.

A. A Quick Start AMI is independent of the instance type. See Chapter 2 for more information.

D. With SSE-C you provide your own keys for Amazon to use to decrypt and encrypt your data. AWS doesn't persistently store the keys. See Chapter 3 for more information.

A. Durability corresponds to an average annual expected loss of objects stored on S3, not including objects you delete. Availability measures the amount of time S3 will be available to let you retrieve those objects. See Chapter 3 for more information.

B. S3 uses a read-after-write consistency model for new objects, so once you upload an object to S3, it's immediately available. See Chapter 3 for more information.

C. You can't change the primary CIDR for a VPC, so you must create a new one to connect it to your internal network. See Chapter 4 for more information.

B. An EC2 instance can access the Internet from a private subnet provided it uses a NAT gateway or NAT instance. See Chapter 4 for more information.

A. The definition of a public subnet is a subnet that has a default route pointing to an Internet gateway as a target. Otherwise, it's a private subnet. See Chapter 4 for more information.

C. DynamoDB is a key-value store that can be used to store items up to 400 KB in size. See Chapter 5 for more information.

A. You can create a global secondary index for an existing table at any time. You can create a local secondary index only when you create the table. See Chapter 5 for more information.

A. Enabling point-in-time recovery gives you an RPO of about five minutes. The recovery time objective (RTO) depends on the amount of data to restore. See Chapter 5 for more information.

B. Revoking unnecessary access for IAM users is the most effective of the listed measures for protecting your AWS account. See Chapter 6 for more information.

C. KMS can be used to encrypt Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes that store an instance's operating system. See Chapter 6 for more information.

D. STS tokens expire and IAM access keys do not. An STS token can be used more than once. IAM access keys and STS tokens are both unique. An IAM principal can use an STS token. See Chapter 6 for more information.

B. EC2 doesn't track instance memory utilization. See Chapter 7 for more information.

C. The transition to the ALARM state simply implies that the metric crossed a threshold but doesn't tell you what the threshold is. Newly created alarms start out in the INSUFFICIENT_DATA state. See Chapter 7 for more information.

A. Both store their logs in S3 buckets. See Chapter 7 for more information.

A. An EC2 instance in a private subnet still has access to Amazon's private DNS servers, which can resolve records stored in public hosted zones. See Chapter 8 for more information.

C. Geoproximity routing routes users to the location closest to them. Geolocation routing requires you to create records for specific locations or create a default record. See Chapter 8 for more information.

A. Route 53 is a true DNS service in that it can host zones for any domain name. You can also register domain names with or transfer them to Route 53. See Chapter 8 for more information.

B. Lambda is a highly available, reliable, serverless compute platform that runs functions as needed and scales elastically to meet demand. EC2 spot instances can be shut down on short notice. See Chapter 10 for more information.

A. A simple scaling policy changes the group size and then has a cooldown period before doing so again. Step scaling policies don't have cooldown periods. Target tracking policies attempt to keep a metric at a set value. PercentChangeInCapacity is a simple scaling adjustment type, not a scaling policy. See Chapter 10 for more information.

A. Auto Scaling always attempts to maintain the minimum group size or, if set, the desired capacity. See Chapter 10 for more information.

D. ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis, but only the latter can store data persistently. See Chapter 11 for more information.

B. Puppet is a configuration management platform that AWS offers via OpsWorks but is not itself an AWS service. See Chapter 11 for more information.

B. S3 cross-region replication transfers objects between different buckets. Transfer acceleration uses a CloudFront edge location to speed up transfers between S3 and the Internet. See Chapter 11 for more information.

A. You can deactivate STS for all regions except US East. See Chapter 12 for more information.

A. GuardDuty looks for potentially malicious activity. Inspector looks for vulnerabilities that may result in compromise. Shield and Web Application Firewall protect applications from attack. See Chapter 12 for more information.

A. Applying encryption to an unencrypted object will create a new, encrypted version of that object. Previous versions remain unencrypted. See Chapter 12 for more information.

C. On-demand instances will continue to run and incur costs. Reserved instances cost the same whether they're running or stopped. Spot instances will be terminated when the spot price exceeds your bid price. See Chapter 13 for more information.

A. The EBS Lifecycle Manager can take scheduled snapshots of any EBS volume, regardless of attachment state. See Chapter 13 for more information.

C. Elastic Container Service lets you run containers that can launch in a matter of seconds. EC2 instances take longer. Lambda is serverless, so you can't use it to run a web server. CloudFront provides caching but isn't a web server. See Chapter 13 for more information.

A. Almost everything in CloudFormation is case sensitive. See Chapter 11 for more information.

PART I

The Core AWS Services

Chapter 1

Introduction to Cloud Computing and AWS

The cloud is where much of the serious technology innovation and growth happens these days, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), more than any other, is the platform of choice for business and institutional workloads. If you want to be successful as an AWS solutions architect, you'll first need to understand what the cloud really is and how Amazon's end of it works.

TO MAKE SURE YOU'VE GOT THE BIG PICTURE, THIS CHAPTER WILL EXPLORE THE BASICS:

What makes cloud computing different from other applications and client-server models

How the AWS platform provides secure and flexible virtual networked environments for your resources

How AWS provides such a high level of service reliability

How to access and manage your AWS-based resources

How to migrate existing on-premises resources to your AWS account

Where you can go for documentation and help with your AWS deployments

Cloud Computing and Virtualization

The technology that lies at the core of all cloud operations is virtualization. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, virtualization lets you divide the hardware resources of a single physical server into smaller units. That physical server could therefore host multiple virtual machines (VMs) running their own complete operating systems, each with its own memory, storage, and network access.

FIGURE 1.1 A virtual machine host

Virtualization's flexibility makes it possible to provision a virtual server in a matter of seconds, run it for exactly the time your project requires, and then shut it down. The resources released will become instantly available to other workloads. The usage density you can achieve lets you squeeze the greatest value from your hardware and makes it easy to generate experimental and sandboxed environments.

Cloud Computing Architecture

Major cloud providers like AWS have enormous server farms where hundreds of thousands of servers and disk drives are maintained along with the network cabling necessary to connect them. A well-built virtualized environment could provide a virtual server using storage, memory, compute cycles, and network bandwidth collected from the most efficient mix of available sources it can find.

A cloud computing platform offers on-demand, self-service access to pooled compute resources where your usage is metered and billed according to the volume you consume. Cloud computing systems allow for precise billing models, sometimes involving fractions of a penny for an hour of consumption.

Cloud Computing Optimization

The cloud is a great choice for so many serious workloads because it's scalable, elastic, and often a lot cheaper than traditional alternatives. Effective deployment provisioning will require some insight into those three features.

Scalability

A scalable infrastructure can efficiently meet unexpected increases in demand for your application by automatically adding resources. As Figure 1.2 shows, this most often means dynamically increasing the number of virtual machines (or instances as AWS calls them) you've got running.

FIGURE 1.2 Copies of a machine image are added to new VMs as they're launched.

AWS offers its autoscaling service through which you define a machine image that can be instantly and automatically replicated and launched into multiple instances to meet demand.

Elasticity

The principle of elasticity covers some of the same ground as scalability—both address how the system manages changing demand. However, though the images used in a scalable environment let you ramp up capacity to meet rising demand, an elastic infrastructure will automatically reduce capacity when demand drops. This makes it possible to control costs, since you'll run resources only when they're needed.

Cost Management

Besides the ability to control expenses by closely managing the resources you use, cloud computing transitions your IT spending from a capital expenditure (capex) framework into something closer to operational expenditure (opex).

In practical terms, this means you no longer have to spend $10,000 up front for every new server you deploy—along with associated electricity, cooling, security, and rack space costs. Instead, you're billed much smaller incremental amounts for as long as your application runs.

The cloud paradigm also makes it easy to scale resources up and down to meet changing demand. For an online e-commerce business, for instance, that might mean deploying extra resources only during periods of peak demand and then automatically decommissioning them as demand falls.

That doesn't necessarily mean your long-term cloud-based opex costs will always be less than you'd pay over the lifetime of a comparable datacenter deployment. But it does mean you won't have to expose yourself to risky speculation about your long-term needs. If, sometime in the future, changing demand calls for new hardware, AWS will be able to deliver it within a minute or two.

To help you understand the full implications of cloud compute spending, AWS provides a free Pricing Calculator at http://calculator.aws/#. This calculator helps you perform proper apples-to-apples comparisons between your current datacenter costs and what an identical operation would cost you on AWS.

The AWS Cloud

Keeping up with the steady stream of new services showing up on the AWS Console can be overwhelming. But as a solutions architect, your main focus should be on the core service categories. This section briefly summarizes each of the core categories (as shown in Table 1.1) and then does the same for key individual services. You'll learn much more about all of these (and other) services through the rest of the book, but it's worth focusing on these short definitions, because they lie at the foundation of everything else you're going to learn.

TABLE 1.1 AWS service categories

Table 1.2 describes the functions of some core AWS services, organized by category.

TABLE 1.2 Core AWS services (by category)