Exam Prep: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (Coursera)

At the end of this course you will have all the knowledge and tools to help you identity your strengths and weaknesses in each certification domain areas that are being tested on the certification exam.
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for individuals who perform in a solutions architect role. The exam validates a candidate’s ability to design secure and robust solutions by using AWS technologies. The exam also validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks: Design a solution by using appropriate AWS services and by following architectural principles based on requirements. Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the workload lifecycle.

What You Will Learn

• The 4 domains -Designing Resilient, High-Performing, Secure, Cost-optimized Architectures- in the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam
• Certification exam-level practice questions written by experts from AWS
• Optional hands-on exercises designed to solidify understanding of cloud concepts you need to know for the exam

Syllabus

WEEK 1
Welcome to Exam Prep: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate! In this course, we present content on all four knowledge domains that are covered in the exam. It's important to understand that on the exam, questions from all domains are presented in random order. This week, you will get an overview of relevant concepts and services for Designing Resilient Architectures (Domain 1). For this domain, question walkthroughs cover designing a multi-tier architecture solution, designing highly available or fault-tolerant architectures, and decoupling mechanisms by using AWS services. In addition, this week features an optional hands-on exercise for this domain so that you can practice creating a serverless architecture with an AWS Lambda function. The Lambda function inserts a test item into an Amazon DynamoDB table and uploads a test object to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. An accompanying video walkthrough shows one possible solution for addressing the requirements for the exercise.

WEEK 2
Welcome to Week 2! This week, you will review relevant concepts and services for Designing High-performing Architectures (Domain 2) so you can get a benchmark of your knowledge in this area. Question walkthroughs for this domain address the topics of identifying and selecting storage, network, and database solutions that are elastic, scalable, and high performing. An optional exercise for Domain 2 gives you an opportunity to practice creating a VPC with two public and two private subnets. You will then launch an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance into the public subnet. This exercise has an accompanying video walkthrough that shows one possible solution for completing the exercise.

WEEK 3
Welcome to Week 3! This week, you will get an overview of relevant concepts and services for Designing Secure Applications and Architectures (Domain 3) so you can get a benchmark of your knowledge in this area. For this domain, the question walkthroughs focus on designing secure access to AWS resources, designing secure application tiers, and selecting the appropriate data security options. This week features an optional hands-on exercise for Domain 3, where you compare and contrast two AWS database services: Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB. An accompanying video walkthrough shows one possible solution for addressing the requirements for the exercise.

WEEK 4
Welcome to Week 4! This week, you will review relevant concepts and services on Designing Cost-optimized Architectures (Domain 4) so you can get a benchmark of your knowledge in this area. The question walkthroughs for this domain cover identifying cost-effective storage solutions, selecting compute and database services, and designing cost-optimized network architectures. In this week’s optional exercise, you will launch a pre-written employee directory application on Amazon EC2. The application must be scalable and highly available. This week also includes a practice assessment that includes questions from all exam domains.