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We would like to thank the following people who helped us create AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA‐C02 Exam, Third 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. Stephanie Barton, 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.
Todd Montgomery 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!
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
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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) and Linux in Action (Manning Publications, 2018)—and created more than two dozen video courses teaching Amazon Web Services and Linux administration, server virtualization, and IT security for Pluralsight.
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
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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 (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 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: Associate SAA‐C02 Exam, Third Edition 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‐C02 Exam, Third Edition is divided into two parts: “The Core AWS Services” and “The Well‐Architected Framework.”
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.
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 five pillars of good design:
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.
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 d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf
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This book covers topics you need to know to prepare for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam:
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‐C02 Exam, Third 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:
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:
The exam covers five different domains, with each domain broken down into objectives.
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.
Domain | Percentage of Exam | Chapters |
---|---|---|
Domain 1: Design Resilient Architectures | 30% | |
1.1 Design a multi‐tier architecture solution | 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11 | |
1.2 Design highly available and/or fault‐tolerant architectures | 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14 | |
1.3 Design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services | 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 14 | |
1.4 Choose appropriate resilient storage | 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11 | |
Domain 2: Design High‐Performing Architectures | 28% | |
2.1 Identify elastic and scalable compute solutions for a workload | 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11 | |
2.2 Select high‐performing and scalable storage solutions for a workload | 2, 3, 9, 11 | |
2.3 Select high‐performing networking solutions for a workload | 5, 8, 9, 11 | |
2.4 Choose high‐performing database solutions for a workload | 5, 11 | |
Domain 3: Design Secure Applications and Architectures | 24% | |
3.1 Design secure access to AWS resources | 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12 | |
3.2 Design secure application tiers | 3, 6, 12 | |
3.3 Select appropriate data security options | 3, 4, 6, 7, 12 | |
Domain 4: Design Cost‐Optimized Architectures | 18% | |
4.1 Identify cost‐effective storage solutions | 2, 3, 13 | |
4.2 Identify cost‐effective compute and database services | 2, 13 | |
4.3 Design cost‐optimized network architectures | 8, 13 |
INSUFFICIENT_DATA
state and then entered the ALARM
state. What can you conclude from this?
PercentChangeInCapacity
appspec.yml
file? (Choose two.)
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 1 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 14 for more information.
A, C. CodeDeploy looks for the appspec.yml
file with the application files it is to deploy, which can be stored in S3 or on GitHub. See Chapter 14 for more information.
B. You can use CodeDeploy to deploy an application to Lambda or EC2 instances. But an AWS Systems Manager command document works only on EC2 instances. See Chapter 14 for more information.