AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Curriculum
1. Introduction to AWS
• Overview of cloud computing
• Benefits of AWS
• AWS global infrastructure: Regions and Availability Zones
• AWS Management Console and AWS CLI basics
2. Designing Resilient Architectures
• Principles of fault tolerance and high availability
• Designing multi-tier architectures
• Load balancing with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
• Implementing Auto Scaling for dynamic workloads
3. Designing High-Performing Architectures
• Selecting the appropriate instance types (EC2, ECS, Lambda)
• Optimizing performance through caching with Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator
• Storage solutions: EBS, EFS, S3, Glacier
• Database solutions: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift
4. Designing Secure Applications and Architectures
• AWS Shared Responsibility Model
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Securing data at rest and in transit
• Implementing security groups and network ACLs
• Using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption
• AWS Security Services: Shield, WAF, Macie, GuardDuty
5. Designing Cost-Optimized Architectures
• Understanding AWS pricing models
• Cost-effective storage solutions
• Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances
• Cost management tools: AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets
• Monitoring costs with AWS CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor
6. Designing Operationally Excellent Architectures
• Best practices for operational excellence
• Using AWS CloudFormation for Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Monitoring and logging: AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail
• Automating deployments with AWS CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
7. Migration to AWS
• AWS Migration Hub and AWS Application Discovery Service
• Strategies for migrating applications and databases
• Using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
• Managing hybrid cloud architectures
8. Architecting for the Cloud
• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Reliability, performance efficiency, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence
• Implementing disaster recovery strategies: RTO and RPO
• Backup and recovery solutions with AWS Backup and Storage Gateway
9. Advanced Networking Architectures
• VPC design and subnetting
• Implementing VPN and Direct Connect
• Route 53 for DNS management
• Using AWS Transit Gateway for large-scale network architectures
Hands-On Labs and Projects
• Deploying a multi-tier application using EC2, ELB, and RDS
• Setting up a serverless application with AWS Lambda and API Gateway
• Implementing a secure VPC architecture with public and private subnets
• Configuring Auto Scaling and Load Balancing for high availability
