AWS Cloud Practitioner

Key points

• Region -> Availability Zones -> Edge Locations
• Standard reserved instances can be sold in the Marketplace, convertible reserved instances can be exchanged with a different configuration
• Internet gateway at VPC to connect to public
• Network ACL (access control list): stateless at subnet, default allow all
• Security groups: stateful at instances, default deny all

Cloud computing advantages

1. Capital expense -> variable expense
2. Massive economies of scale
3. Stop guessing capacity
4. Increase speed and agility
5. Stop paying and maintaining data centres
6. Go global in minutes

AWS values

1. Agility: fast deployment
2. Elasticity: on demand
3. Availability: multiple AZ
4. Flexibility: variety of products
5. Security: shared responsibility model

Well architected framework pillars

1. Operational Excellence
2. Security
3. Reliability
4. Performance Efficiency
5. Cost Optimisation

Support plans

1. Free
2. Developer: business hours email
3. Business: 24x7 email, phone and chat, full Trusted Advisor
4. Enterprise: dedicated TAM (technical account manager), Concierge support team, SLA < 15 mins for critical cases

AWS products

Analytics

• Amazon Athena: SQL query over S3
• Amazon EMR: Hadoop framework
• Amazon CloudSearch: search solution
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service: real time search
• Amazon Kinesis: real time data, usually media related
• Amazon Redshift: data warehouse
• Amazon QuickSight: interactive dashboard of business insights
• AWS Data Pipeline: move data across AWS and on-prem
• AWS Glue: ETL (extract, transform, load)
• AWS Lake Formation: secure data lake
• Amazon MSK (managed streaming for Kafka): Apache Kafka

Support plans

1. Free
2. Developer: business hours email
3. Business: 24x7 email, phone and chat, full Trusted Advisor
4. Enterprise: dedicated TAM (technical account manager), Concierge support team, SLA < 15 mins for critical cases

AWS products

Analytics

• Amazon Athena: SQL query over S3
• Amazon EMR: Hadoop framework
• Amazon CloudSearch: search solution
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service: real time search
• Amazon Kinesis: real time data, usually media related
• Amazon Redshift: data warehouse
• Amazon QuickSight: interactive dashboard of business insights
• AWS Data Pipeline: move data across AWS and on-prem
• AWS Glue: ETL (extract, transform, load)
• AWS Lake Formation: secure data lake
• Amazon MSK (managed streaming for Kafka): Apache Kafka

Application integration

• AWS Step Functions: state machine of Lambda functions
• Amazon MQ: message broker for ActiveMQ
• Amazon SQS (simple queue service): put in queue and wait for pull
• Amazon SNS (simple notification service): push notification
• Amazon SWF (simple workflow): task oriented flow

Cost management

• AWS Cost Explorer: predict cost
• AWS Budgets: set alerts
• AWS Cost & Usage Report: granular cost details
• Reserved Instance (RI) Reporting: manage reserved instances cost
• AWS TCO (total cost of ownership): cost for migrating to cloud
• AWS Simple Monthly Calculator: predict cost without account

Business applications

• Alexa for Business: book meeting rooms etc
• Amazon WorkDocs: Google Doc
• Amazon WorkMail: Gmail with calendar
• Amazon Chime: video conferencing

Compute

• Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud): VM
  • On demand: pay by second based on hourly rate
  • Reserved: 75% discount, 3-year convertible cheapest
  • Spot: 90% discount, short and interruptible
  • Dedicated: isolated hardware
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: adjust number of EC2
• Amazon ECR (elastic container registry): manage Docker containers
• Amazon ECS (elastic container service): orchestration for Docker containers
• Amazon EKS (elastic kubernetes service): manage k8s containers
• Amazon Lightsail: user friendly deployment for small applications
• AWS Batch: manage batch jobs
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: package deploy (application + capacity etc)
• AWS Fargate: serverless container
• AWS Lambda: serverless code run, charged by running time
• AWS Serverless Application Repository: deploy code snippets
• AWS Outposts: hybrid API
• VMware Cloud on AWS: vSphere on AWS

Compute

• Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud): VM
  • On demand: pay by second based on hourly rate
  • Reserved: 75% discount, 3-year convertible cheapest
  • Spot: 90% discount, short and interruptible
  • Dedicated: isolated hardware
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: adjust number of EC2
• Amazon ECR (elastic container registry): manage Docker containers
• Amazon ECS (elastic container service): orchestration for Docker containers
• Amazon EKS (elastic kubernetes service): manage k8s containers
• Amazon Lightsail: user friendly deployment for small applications
• AWS Batch: manage batch jobs
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: package deploy (application + capacity etc)
• AWS Fargate: serverless container
• AWS Lambda: serverless code run, charged by running time
• AWS Serverless Application Repository: deploy code snippets
• AWS Outposts: hybrid API
• VMware Cloud on AWS: vSphere on AWS

Customer engagement

• Amazon Connect: customer support centre
• Amazon SES (simple email service): send professional email

Database

• Amazon Aurora: serverless MySQL and PostgreSQL, auto scaling
• Amazon RDS (relational database service): common DB with patching and backup
• Amazon DynamoDB: serverless key-value DB, no SQL
• Amazon ElastiCache: cache frequent query results
• Amazon Neptune: graph DB (usually for social media)
• Amazon QLDB (quantum ledger database): serverless ledger DB
• Amazon Timestream: serverless time series DB (usually for IoT)
• Amazon DocumentDB: serverless document DB with MongoDB

Desktop and app streaming

• Amazon WorkSpaces: VDI
• Amazon AppStream: desktop application delivery

Developer

• AWS CodeCommit: GitHub, version control
• CodeBuild: serverless compilation of source code, test and produce software package for deployment
• CodeDeploy: automate deployment, avoid downtime
• CodePipeline: automate updates with testing
• AWS CodeStar: orchestration of above
• Amazon Corretto: OpenJDK (Java development kit)
• AWS Cloud9: IDE
• AWS X-Ray: analyse and debug applications

Machine learning

• SageMaker: serverless all in one ML for newbie
• Amazon Comprehend: NLP
• Amazon Lex: Alexa speech recognition
• Amazon Polly: text to speech
• Amazon Rekognition: image recognition
• Amazon Translate: translation
• Amazon Transcribe: speech to text
• Amazon Elastic Inference: EC2 + SageMaker for deep learning
• Amazon Forecast: forecasting
• Amazon Textract: text and data extraction from scanned documents
• Amazon Personalize: individual recommendations for users
• Amazon Deep Learning AMIs: EC2 AMI for deep learning
• AWS DeepLens: pre trained deep learning models
• AWS DeepRacer: race car for reinforcement learning
• AWS Inferentia: ML inference chip

Management and governance

• Amazon CloudWatch: usage and alarms
• AWS Auto Scaling: adjust capacity
• AWS Control Tower: set up initial environment
• AWS Systems Manager: manage AWS products with insights dashboard
• AWS CloudFormation: deploy AWS products with template
• AWS CloudTrail: AWS API call log
• AWS Config: change management
• AWS OpsWorks: configuration management with Chef and Puppet
• AWS Service Catalog: organisation’s IT services
• AWS Trusted Advisor: identify and suggest improvements
  1. Cost
  2. Performance
  3. Security
  4. Fault tolerance
  5. Optimise
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard: affects from AWS service outage
• AWS Managed Services: ongoing management of AWS infrastructure
• AWS Console Mobile Application: manage AWS products status on the go
• AWS License Manager: manage licenses
• AWS Well-Architected Tool: review workloads

Others

• Amazon Sumerian: VR, AR, 3D applications
• Amazon Managed Blockchain: Fabric and Ethereum
• Amazon GameLift: serverless game servers
• Amazon Lumberyard: 3D game engine
• AWS IoT Core: manage IoT devices (connection and communication)
• AWS Partner Device Catalog: find compatible device and hardware for IoT solutions
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder: media transcoder
• AWS Elemental MediaConvert: new video transcoder
• AWS RoboMaker: manage robotics applications
• AWS Ground Station: serverless satellite operations

Study resources

• AWS official training: https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=60697
• AWS overview whitepaper: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/aws-overview.pdf
• Cloud practitioner full course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hLmDS179YE
• AWS services overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkT4iFRkaZk
• Exam dump: https://www.examtopics.com/exams/amazon/aws-certified-cloud-practitioner

Exam

• Study time: 12 hours
• Exam time: 27 minutes
• Result: 881 / 1000 PASS
• Note: mainly testing on the understanding of different AWS products, a lot of questions were shown in the exam dump