AWS Solutions Architect Associate with Practice Test

In this lesson, we cover the essentials of managing your own AWS account, utilizing the free tier, and performing course demonstrations. While most labs are covered under the free tier, viewers should be aware of potential charges, advised to budget $10-$20, and ensure to clean up resources and set up billing alerts to avoid unexpected costs.

This lesson delves into the rapid growth of AWS, comparing traditional physical data centers with AWS's scalable, cost-efficient cloud solutions, highlighting why AWS certifications are in high demand. By illustrating the elasticity and efficiency of AWS, it underscores how cloud infrastructure reduces the need for overprovisioning and maintenance, allowing IT professionals to focus more on application management rather than hardware upkeep.

This lesson explains the fundamental concepts of AWS regions, availability zones, and edge locations. It details how regions are geographic areas with multiple availability zones for redundancy, and how edge locations are used by services like CloudFront to enhance the speed and responsiveness of web content globally.

In this lesson, we explore the basics of key AWS services, including EC2 for virtual servers, VPC for networking, RDS for managed databases, and more. Through a detailed demonstration, viewers are introduced to the AWS services page, emphasizing the vast array of products available and their practical applications, while additional resources are provided for deeper exploration.

This lesson explains the differences between managed and unmanaged AWS services, using analogies to illustrate the concepts. An unmanaged service, like EC2, requires full user control and responsibility for setup, maintenance, and scaling, while a managed service, like S3, offers convenience with AWS handling the setup, maintenance, and security, freeing users from these tasks.

This lesson introduces the AWS Well-Architected Framework, a resource for designing robust AWS architectures, emphasizing its six key pillars. Focusing on the security pillar, it highlights best practices and overall design concepts rather than specific configurations, and recommends reviewing these pillars, particularly for those pursuing higher-level AWS certifications.

In this lesson, we provide a brief introduction to the AWS console home screen, focusing on how to select different regions and access various AWS services. We explain how to navigate the console, switch between regions, and differentiate between regional and global services, emphasizing the dynamic nature of the AWS console interface.

In this lesson, we learn how to generate access keys for an IAM user and utilize them with the AWS CLI to manage resources in an AWS account. The video demonstrates the steps for creating access keys, installing the AWS CLI, configuring it with the access keys, and executing commands, while emphasizing the importance of treating access keys with the same security as passwords.

In this lesson, we demonstrate how to sign up for an AWS account and explain the limitations of the AWS free tier. We guide you through the account creation process, including email verification, credit card information, and selecting a support plan, while emphasizing the importance of monitoring free tier usage to avoid unexpected charges.

In this lesson, we demonstrate how to set up a budget and billing alert in the AWS console. We guide you through creating a monthly budget, setting a spending threshold, and configuring email notifications to alert you when your spending approaches or exceeds the set budget.

In this lesson, we demonstrate how to use AWS Cost Explorer to analyze billing details and track spending trends. By utilizing various filters and grouping options, we show how to gain insights into monthly costs, service-specific expenses, and potential forgotten resources, along with setting up alerts for price changes through the AWS Price List API.

In this lesson, we explore AWS Organizations and how they simplify the management of multiple AWS accounts by centralizing policy application and account management. Through an example scenario, we demonstrate creating a master account, organizing member accounts into organizational units (OUs), and applying service control policies to manage permissions and access across multiple accounts efficiently.

This lesson covers how to use consolidated billing in AWS to manage payments for multiple accounts under a single bill, without granting access to services across those accounts. We demonstrate setting up consolidated billing, adding new or existing AWS accounts, and handling invitations for joining an AWS organization.

This lesson demonstrates how to use AWS Organizations to assign policies to different AWS accounts. We show the process of creating a new organizational unit, moving accounts into it, enabling organization features, and creating policies to manage service access within the organization.

In this lesson, we explore how AWS Organizations' service control policies (SCPs) can restrict the root user of an AWS account, traditionally considered to have unrestricted access. We explain that SCPs intersect with IAM policies, meaning if an SCP blocks access to a service, even the root user cannot access that service, providing a way to enforce global controls within AWS accounts.

In this lesson, we explore the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, detailing the division of security responsibilities between AWS and its customers. AWS handles the security of the cloud, including physical data center security and managed service maintenance, while customers are responsible for security in the cloud, such as managing their virtual private cloud, patching their operating systems, and configuring security groups and IAM credentials.

In this lesson, we explore the basics of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), focusing on the importance of securing access to your AWS account through authentication and authorization. We emphasize the need to use IAM users for administrative tasks while securing the root user account with multi-factor authentication and minimizing its use to enhance security and accountability within AWS.

In this lesson, we learn about the purpose of IAM users and groups in AWS, and how groups can streamline permission management for larger sets of users. By assigning policies to user groups instead of individual users, we simplify administration and adhere to the principle of least privilege, ensuring that users have only the necessary access to perform their tasks.

In this lesson, we learn how to read and interpret IAM policies written in JSON format, focusing on understanding actions, resources, and conditions. We explore examples of policies to understand their effects, such as granting all EC2 actions, enforcing specific conditions, and adhering to the principle of least privilege by specifying narrow permissions.

In this lesson, we learn how to secure an AWS account using multi-factor authentication (MFA), which combines something you know (username and password) with something you have (hardware device or smartphone). The video demonstrates setting up a virtual MFA device, like Google Authenticator, to generate secure codes for logging into AWS, emphasizing the importance of MFA even for experimental accounts to prevent unauthorized access and potential misuse.

In this lesson, we demonstrate the basic configuration of IAM in an AWS account, emphasizing the importance of choosing a consistent AWS region and securing the root user account with multi-factor authentication. We guide you through accessing the IAM dashboard, ensuring best practices for root account security, and preparing to create IAM users and groups for effective account management.

In this lesson, we demonstrate how to manage IAM users in an AWS account, including creating a new user and assigning permissions. We emphasize the importance of consistent region selection, ensuring root account security, and utilizing AWS managed policies for efficient permission management.

In this lesson, we demonstrate how to use IAM user groups to efficiently assign permissions across multiple IAM users. By creating an "administrators" group and assigning administrator access to it, we simplify permission management by adding users to the group rather than assigning permissions individually.

In this lesson, we demonstrate how to create IAM users and groups, and use the policy generator to assign IAM policies. We create a policy that allows all EC2 actions except for terminating instances, then apply this policy to a user group, and verify the permissions using the AWS Policy Simulator.

In this lesson, we explore using Web Identity Federation to provide access to AWS resources without storing credentials on end user devices. This approach allows users to log in with services like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, granting temporary AWS credentials, thereby enhancing security and eliminating the need to manage user credentials directly.

This video demonstrates how to use AWS Trusted Advisor, primarily focusing on its security checks, but also highlighting its utility for cost optimization, performance enhancement, fault tolerance, and operational excellence. Trusted Advisor provides recommendations and alerts for your AWS account, including basic security checks and service limits, with more comprehensive features available under higher-tier support plans like Business and Enterprise.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create access keys in the AWS console and use them in the AWS CLI. We'll walk through generating access keys for an IAM user, configuring the AWS CLI with those keys, and executing AWS CLI commands to manage resources efficiently.

In this video, I'll share important IAM tips to help you manage user permissions effectively, including generating a credentials report. We'll review how to analyze user access, identify unnecessary permissions, and ensure proper cleanup of IAM resources and other AWS assets to maintain security and avoid unnecessary costs.

In this video, we'll learn about performing penetration testing within your AWS account, starting with an overview of the AWS penetration testing policy. We'll explore the permitted services, such as EC2 and RDS, and demonstrate how to use security solutions like Kali Linux from the AWS Marketplace, while emphasizing the importance of staying updated with AWS policies to ensure compliance.

In this video, we'll explore the basic concepts of Amazon S3, focusing on the distinction between object storage and block storage. We'll demonstrate how S3 serves as a highly durable, scalable solution for storing files like photos and videos, and how it can be used to host static websites, offering unlimited storage capacity for various types of data.

In this video, we'll explore the different storage classes available in S3 and how they impact pricing. We'll discuss how to select the appropriate storage class based on access frequency and durability needs, highlighting options like S3 Standard, Standard-Infrequent Access, and Intelligent-Tiering, which can help optimize costs by automatically categorizing data based on usage patterns.

In this video, we'll explore the consistency model of S3, focusing on its importance for the AWS certification exam. Specifically, we'll cover S3's immediate consistency for new object uploads (PUTs) and its eventual consistency for overwrite and delete operations, explaining how data is replicated across multiple physical facilities to ensure durability and availability.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create an S3 bucket in the AWS Management Console and explain some key configuration options. We'll cover how to set bucket properties, adjust permissions, and upload objects, while also reviewing important details such as the requirement for unique bucket names and the different storage classes available in S3, including their impact on cost and performance.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to configure encryption on an S3 bucket using the AWS Management Console. We'll cover how to set default encryption for the entire bucket, ensuring that all future objects are encrypted, and how to configure encryption for individual objects using both S3-managed keys (SSE-S3) and AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS).

In this video, we'll explore the concept of S3 versioning and its benefits and limitations. We'll also cover how to enable versioning, the implications for storage costs, and additional features like cross-region replication and lifecycle management for efficient data handling and cost control.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to configure lifecycle rules on an S3 bucket to automatically manage the transition and expiration of objects based on specified criteria. We'll set rules to move objects between different storage classes to optimize costs and configure expiration policies to clean up unnecessary data, providing an efficient way to manage S3 storage.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to configure S3 cross-region replication, ensuring data redundancy across different geographical locations. We will enable versioning on the source bucket, create a destination bucket in a different region, and set up replication rules to automatically copy new objects while ensuring that deletions in the source bucket do not affect the replicated data.

In this lesson, we'll explore how to use CloudFront, AWS's content delivery network, to efficiently deliver content from an S3 bucket with reduced latency. We'll cover the setup process, explain key concepts like edge locations and origins, and discuss security features like signed URLs, web application firewalls, and enforcing SSL encrypted sessions.

In this lesson, I'll demonstrate how to create a CloudFront distribution using an S3 bucket as the origin. We will cover the setup process, including configuring origin settings, enabling bucket access restrictions, setting up time-to-live (TTL) values for cache control, and verifying the distribution to ensure it delivers content efficiently from CloudFront edge locations.

In this video, we'll explore EC2, AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud, and understand the fundamental building blocks, including virtual machines, physical hosts, and hypervisors. We'll discuss how hypervisors enable multiple virtual machines to share the same physical hardware resources, allowing AWS to efficiently run multiple EC2 instances on shared physical servers.

In this video, we'll learn about the basics of EC2 and how to create virtual servers in an AWS account. EC2 allows you to rent virtual servers (instances) running on AWS's infrastructure, manage their operating systems, and store data using Elastic Block Store (EBS), all while selecting specific instance types and sizes to fit your needs.

In this video, we'll learn how EC2 instance types are named and the different families of instances available for purchase. The naming pattern includes the instance family, generation, and size, such as a T3 micro, where T stands for general purpose, 3 is the generation, and micro is the size, while different families include general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, and storage optimized instances, each tailored for specific types of workloads.

In this video, we'll learn about Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes used for EC2 instances, which provide block storage similar to a traditional hard disk. EBS volumes can be attached to EC2 instances, replicated across storage systems for redundancy, and offer features such as encryption and snapshots for backups, while ephemeral storage provides local high-performance storage but is lost if the instance stops or the host fails.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to launch (create) an EC2 instance in the AWS console, starting by selecting a specific region and then navigating to the EC2 dashboard. After choosing an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and an appropriate instance type, such as the T3 micro for its balance of performance and cost, I'll configure and boot up a new instance named Rick Crisci Web one.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create a key pair while launching an EC2 instance, which is necessary for securely accessing the instance remotely using programs like Putty or Remote Desktop. I'll show the steps to generate a new key pair, download the key file to your local computer, and use it to configure remote access, highlighting the importance of the key pair for managing your EC2 instances.

In this video, we'll continue the process of launching our first EC2 instance by completing the necessary network configuration. I'll show you how to select a VPC, choose a subnet, assign a public IP address, and create a security group with appropriate firewall rules for the instance.

In this video, we'll learn about security groups and how they can be used to protect EC2 instances by applying firewall rules directly to the interfaces of these instances. I'll demonstrate how to create, configure, and apply security groups to control and secure the traffic flow, ensuring only authorized access to your EC2 instances.

In this video, we'll continue launching our EC2 instance by configuring storage, specifically using Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. I'll demonstrate how to choose between general purpose SSD, which is suitable for most use cases, and provisioned IOPS volumes for higher performance needs, as well as options for volume size, IOPS allocation, delete on termination settings, and encryption.

In this video, we'll explore the advanced settings available when launching an EC2 instance, covering options such as purchasing spot instances, configuring IAM instance profiles, enabling instance auto recovery, and setting termination protection. Additionally, we'll discuss detailed CloudWatch monitoring and its impact on monitoring frequency and associated costs.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to use an EC2 user data script to run a series of commands on an EC2 instance after it has been launched. This script automates tasks such as updating the operating system, installing an Apache web server, and creating a simple test website, ensuring the instance is ready to handle work immediately upon booting up.

In this video, we'll explore the different details of an EC2 instance to find essential information such as public and private IP addresses, instance type, VPC, subnet, security groups, and EBS volumes. We'll also cover how to use tags to organize AWS resources, making it easier to manage and identify instances based on various criteria like department, environment, and compliance requirements.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to connect to an EC2 instance using various methods. We'll explore options like EC2 Instance Connect, which launches a terminal session directly in the browser, Session Manager for connecting from within the AWS console without requiring open ports, and using your own SSH client or Remote Desktop with the necessary key pair for secure access.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to resize an existing EC2 instance. We'll stop the instance, change its type from a T2 micro to a T3 micro for better performance and cost efficiency, and then restart it to verify that everything is working correctly with the new configuration.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create a custom Amazon Machine Image (AMI). By creating an AMI from a configured EC2 instance, we can quickly launch new instances with the same setup, including the operating system, updates, and installed software like a web server, ensuring consistent and efficient deployments.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to stop, start, and terminate EC2 instances. Stopping an instance shuts it down and releases its public IP, while terminating an instance permanently destroys it along with its associated data, ensuring you manage resources effectively to avoid unexpected charges.

In this video, we'll learn about the different purchasing options available for EC2 instances, focusing on how to manage costs effectively. We'll cover on-demand pricing, which offers flexibility but at a higher cost, reserved instances that provide significant discounts for long-term commitments, and the highly flexible savings plans that offer substantial savings across various instance types and AWS services.

In this video, we'll explore spot instances, a purchasing option in AWS that allows you to bid for unused EC2 capacity at significantly reduced prices. We'll discuss how spot instances work, the benefits of potential savings up to 90%, and the trade-off of instances being terminated if the spot price exceeds your bid, making them ideal for flexible workloads like batch processing where data loss isn't a concern.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to request a spot instance in the AWS console. By navigating to the EC2 dashboard, I'll show you the steps to create a spot instance, set a maximum price per hour, and configure the instance to be terminated if the spot price exceeds this limit, ultimately illustrating how to leverage AWS spot instances for significant cost savings.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to set up EC2 Auto Recovery, which automatically restarts an instance on a different physical host if a system status check fails. By enabling auto recovery in the advanced details during the instance launch, we ensure that instances experiencing host failures are quickly rebooted, maintaining their availability without requiring a CloudWatch alarm.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create a Windows EC2 instance and configure RAID 0 to stripe data across multiple EBS volumes. The process includes setting up a new security group, launching the instance with additional volumes, and configuring RAID 0 in the Windows operating system to improve data throughput by combining multiple volumes into a single drive.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create a Windows EC2 instance and configure RAID 0 using multiple EBS volumes. This involves setting up a security group, launching the instance, configuring the additional volumes, and using Windows Disk Management to stripe data across the EBS volumes for improved performance.

In this video, we'll compare and contrast EBS and instance store, two storage technologies in AWS. EBS provides persistent, long-term storage, akin to permanent handprints in cement, whereas instance store offers ephemeral storage, similar to temporary handprints in sand, making it ideal for short-term, high-speed tasks like clustered data processing or batch processing but not suitable for long-term data retention.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create an EC2 instance with ephemeral storage, also known as instance store. We'll cover the process of selecting an appropriate instance type, configuring the instance, and managing the ephemeral storage, including how it behaves during instance stop and restart operations, and highlight its temporary nature.

In this video, we'll explore how to work with EBS volumes in the AWS console. We'll create a new EBS volume, attach it to an EC2 instance, and then demonstrate how to detach and delete the volume, emphasizing the importance of managing and cleaning up resources to avoid unexpected costs.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to assign an IAM role to an EC2 instance, which allows the instance to access specific AWS resources like S3 without embedding credentials. We'll create a new EC2 instance, assign it an IAM role with full S3 access, verify its permissions using the AWS CLI, and then remove the role to show the impact on access permissions, emphasizing the security benefits of using IAM roles over embedded credentials.

In this video, we'll learn about network load balancers and their role in distributing traffic across EC2 instances in multiple availability zones. We'll focus on setting up a network load balancer, configuring it to direct traffic to EC2 instances within a target group, ensuring high availability within a single AWS region, and discussing how it scales automatically to handle varying traffic patterns.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create a network load balancer in the AWS console. We'll go through the steps of launching multiple EC2 instances across different availability zones, setting up a network load balancer to distribute traffic, and configuring a target group to manage and monitor these instances.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to verify the proper operation of an internet-facing network load balancer in AWS. We'll review and adjust security group settings, ensure the load balancer can accept HTTP traffic from the internet, and confirm that traffic is being correctly distributed across multiple EC2 instances in different availability zones.

In this video, we'll learn about the differences between internet-facing and internal load balancers in AWS. An internet-facing load balancer has a publicly resolvable DNS name and distributes incoming traffic from the internet to multiple EC2 instances across availability zones, while an internal load balancer, which lacks a public DNS address, handles traffic between internal application components, providing scalability and availability benefits without exposing the instances directly to the internet.

In this video, we'll visit the AWS console to explore an internet-facing network load balancer. We demonstrate how the load balancer's DNS name, which resolves to different IP addresses across availability zones, ensures high availability by distributing traffic to EC2 instances in different zones, and how you can use the nslookup command to view these IP addresses.

In this video, we'll learn about AWS Elastic Load Balancer health checks and how they enhance availability. We demonstrate configuring health check parameters, such as response timeout and check frequency, and explain how the load balancer distributes traffic across healthy instances in multiple availability zones, ensuring reliable application performance even if some instances or zones fail.

In this video, we'll configure health checks on a network load balancer and simulate failures of targets within the target group. We'll demonstrate stopping services on specific instances and observe how the load balancer responds to ensure high availability, showing how traffic is rerouted to healthy instances and how DNS updates reflect the current state of available targets.

In this video, we'll explore target groups in depth, focusing on different types of targets such as EC2 instances and IP addresses. We'll examine how a network load balancer distributes traffic to these targets, including those within an AWS VPC and external targets, highlighting the use of Route 53 for DNS routing and the implications of routing traffic to on-premises servers.

In this video, we'll learn about target group health and how it affects the behavior of an Elastic Load Balancer when a certain number of targets fail. By setting a minimum threshold for healthy targets, you can ensure that the load balancer only distributes traffic to nodes that meet this threshold, thereby maintaining the reliability and performance of your application.

In this video, we'll learn how to configure target group health to specify a minimum percentage of healthy targets required in a specific availability zone. We'll demonstrate this by adjusting the settings to ensure at least 60% of targets must be healthy for a load balancer node to be considered healthy, and then test the configuration by stopping an instance and observing the load balancer's response.

In this video, we'll explore how a network load balancer distributes TCP and UDP traffic across web servers in different availability zones. We'll explain how the load balancer selects targets based on specific parameters for TCP connections and the flow hash algorithm for UDP traffic, ensuring consistent routing for each type of traffic.

In this video, we'll learn how cross-zone load balancing distributes workloads across EC2 instances in multiple availability zones to improve performance and balance traffic. By enabling cross-zone load balancing, traffic from the load balancer's nodes is evenly distributed across all targets in all availability zones, avoiding the performance issues that arise when instances are unevenly distributed.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to configure cross-zone load balancing on a network load balancer in AWS. By enabling this feature in the AWS console, you can ensure that traffic is distributed evenly across all targets in different availability zones, improving load distribution and performance.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to set up an application load balancer in the AWS console. We'll create two EC2 instances with unique HTML pages, configure two target groups for these instances, and prepare to set up rules in the application load balancer to distribute traffic based on specific conditions.

In this video, we'll complete the demonstration of setting up an application load balancer. We'll create another target group including both web servers, configure the load balancer with appropriate rules, and ensure it distributes traffic to the correct instances based on specific conditions.

In this video, we'll test our application load balancer to ensure that the rules are functioning correctly. We'll validate the health of our target groups, check the proper distribution of traffic according to specified rules, and simulate a failure to observe how the load balancer handles it.

In this video, we'll learn about application load balancer rules and conditions and how they can be used to influence and control traffic distribution. We'll explore host conditions, path conditions, and source IP conditions, demonstrating how to route requests based on host names, URLs, and source IP addresses to specific target groups for more tailored traffic management.

In this video, we'll learn how to configure sticky sessions with an application load balancer to ensure user sessions are consistently directed to the same instance. By enabling stickiness at the target group level, the load balancer binds user sessions to a specific instance using a load balancer-generated cookie, maintaining session persistence and state information across multiple requests.

In this video, we'll learn about gateway load balancers and how they can route traffic through security appliances before reaching application servers. We'll explore the AWS marketplace to find these appliances and demonstrate how to configure a gateway load balancer to distribute traffic across virtual security appliances, ensuring all traffic is inspected before reaching the backend application servers.

In this video, we'll learn how to use auto scaling with an elastic load balancer to handle changes in workload. Auto scaling allows you to dynamically adjust the number of EC2 instances based on demand, ensuring that resources can grow or shrink to meet the needs of your application.

In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create an auto scaling group in the AWS console. We'll set up a launch configuration to define the instance type, AMI, and other details, and then configure the auto scaling group to manage the number of instances based on demand, ensuring high availability and load balancing across multiple availability zones.