DEV Community

Alec Dutcher
Alec Dutcher

Posted on • Edited on

Section 3.3 - AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide

This series is intended to be a personal study guide. Information may not be comprehensive or accurate. I am sharing it in case others find it useful. Please feel free to comment if any information is inaccurate.

Return to Exam Guide

3.3 Identify the core AWS services

Describe the categories of services on AWS

  • Compute - instances, containers, serverless computing
  • Storage- scalable, reliable, secure, fast-access
  • Network - VPCs, connections to other cloud resources and the internet
  • Database - managed database services cover a wide range of database types and use cases

Identify AWS compute services

  • Recognize there are different compute families
    • Each instance type offers different compute, memory, and storage capabilities, and is grouped in an instance family based on these capabilities
  • Recognize the different services that provide compute
    • Lambda
      • Run code without provisioning infrastructure
      • Respond to code execution requests
      • Pay per millisecond
    • Elastic Container Service (ECS)
      • Fully managed container orchestration service
      • Launch containers with preferred CI/CD and automation tools
    • EC2
      • Offers complete control over compute resources with choice of processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model
  • Recognize that elasticity is achieved through auto-scaling
    • Compute services automatically adjust to meet workload demands
  • Identify the purpose of load balancers
    • Distribute network traffic to improve application scalability

Identify the different AWS storage services

  • Describe S3
    • Object storage with eleven 9s of durability (99.999999999%)
    • Multiple storage classes to reduce cost
      • Standard
      • Intelligent Tiering - optimizes storage costs by monitoring access patterns
      • Standard Infrequent Access - data accessed less frequently but needed quickly
      • One Zone Infrequent Access - similar to standard, but for workloads that don’t require availability
      • Glacier - archive storage
      • Glacier Deep Archive - long-term archive storage
    • Data stored in Buckets
    • Charges for storage and for retrieval
  • Describe S3 Glacier
    • S3 storage class designed for archive storage
    • Data transfer takes minutes to hours
    • Glacier Deep Archive is lowest-cost storage class
  • Describe Elastic Block Store (EBS)
    • Block storage service designed for EC2
    • Multiple volume types to optimize performance and cost
    • SSD for transactional workloads
    • HDD for throughput intensive workloads
  • Describe Snowball
    • Edge computing, data migration, and edge storage device
    • Storage Optimized - block and object storage suitable for local storage and data transfer
    • Compute Optimized - more CPUs and an optional GPU for added compute
  • Describe Elastic File System (EFS)
    • File system that automatically grows and shrinks as files are added and removed
    • Provisioning and maintenance are not required
    • Share file data between applications
  • Describe Storage Gateway
    • Hybrid cloud services that connect on-prem applications with cloud storage
    • Move backups to the cloud, cache data locally for low-latency

Identify AWS networking services

  • Identify VPC - isolate cloud resources by building a virtual network environment
  • Identify security groups - virtual firewall for instance in a VPC
  • Identify the purpose of Route 53 - DNS service for routing users to applications
  • Identify VPN, Direct Connect
    • VPN - build a cloud-based VPN on the Amazon network
    • Direct Connect - bypass public internet and connect to AWS resources directly through the AWS network

Identify different AWS database services

  • Install databases on EC2 compared to managed databases
  • Identify RDS
    • Relational Database Service
    • Managed relational database service
    • Multiple database engines available (Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server)
  • Identify DynamoDB
    • NoSQL key-value database
    • Single-digit millisecond performance and near infinite throughput
    • Easily integrates with other AWS services
  • Identify Redshift
    • Data warehouse
    • Connect to data storage and to analytics tools
    • Uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across multiple sources

Return to Exam Guide

Top comments (0)