A curated list of AWS resources to prepare for the AWS Certifications A curated list of awesome AWS resources you need to prepare for the all 5 AWS Certifications. This gist will include: open source repos, blogs & blogposts, ebooks, PDF, whitepapers, video courses, free lecture, slides, sample test and many other resources. ---- Index:
  1. Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam (Published ☑)
  2. Passing the AWS solutions architect - Professional exam (Published ☑)
  3. Passing the AWS SysOps Administrator Certification (Coming soon...)
  4. Passing the AWS DevOps Engineer Certification(Coming soon...)
  5. Passing the AWS Developer Certification (TBD)
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Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam > Exam Overview

You will find you make less errors when you don’t feel rushed on time. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam is intended for individuals with experience designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include: 1. Designing and deploying scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS 2. Lift and shift of an existing on-premises application to AWS 3. Ingress and egress of data to and from AWS 4. Selecting the appropriate AWS service based on data, compute, database, or security requirements 5. Identifying appropriate use of AWS architectural best practices 6. Estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control mechanisms

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam > Prerequisites & Requirements

Candidate Overview description provided by the AWS documentation Eligible candidates for this exam have: - One or more years of hands-on experience designing available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS - In-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language - Ability to identify and define requirements for an AWS-based application - Experience with deploying hybrid systems with on-premises and AWS components - Capability to provide best practices for building secure and reliable applications on the AWS platform AWS Knowledge required for the Exam: Key items you should know before you take the exam: 1. How to configure and troubleshoot a VPC inside and out, including basic IP subnetting. VPC is arguably one of the more complex components of AWS and you cannot pass this exam without a thorough understanding of it. 2. The difference in use cases between Simple Workflow (SWF), Simple Queue Services (SQS), and Simple Notification Services (SNS). 3. How an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) interacts with auto-scaling groups in a high-availability deployment. 4. How to properly secure a S3 bucket in different usage scenarios 5. When it would be appropriate to use either EBS-backed or ephemeral instances. 5. A basic understanding of CloudFormation. 6. How to properly use various EBS volume configurations and snapshots to optimize I/O performance and data durability. General IT Knowledge preferred for the Exam:

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam > General Learning Material

1. Solutions Architect—Associate Certification for AWS (2016) 2. A Guide to AWS Certification Exams 3. AWS Solutions Architect Certification 4. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam 5. AWS Certification Exams: What to expect 6. Preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam - Webinar 6. AWS CLI: 10 Useful Commands You May Not Know 7. How I Got 5 AWS Certifications: continuous learning with AWS 8. Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect: What to Study, Tips and Resources 9. AWS re:Invent 2015 | (ARC301) Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users 10. AWS re:Invent 2015 | (CMP302) Amazon ECS: Distributed Applications at Scale 11. AWS re:Invent 2014 | (SDD413) Amazon S3 Deep Dive and Best Practices 12. AWS re:Invent 2015 | (DVO203) A Day in the Life of a Netflix Engineer 13. Study guide for AWS Certification - GitHub Repo 14. An app to track white AWS white papers I have read in preparation for architect certification. 15. Prepare for AWS Certifications - Webinar 16. AWS Certifications for Teams - Webinar 17. Proper Setup pf a new AWS Account

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam > Blueprints exam

In this AWS whitepaper you'll find a sample exam. Here's a preview:


In this amazing post Markos Rendell gave a deep explanation to every single AWS question.

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam > Direct experience from AWS Certified members

Here are some general observations by Miha Kralj in this great post. -- In this other write-up on LinkedIn Wong Chun Yin explained how to get all 5 AWS Certifications in Asia. Below, a couple of great hints for the SA - Associate. First of all, associate certifications are not hard, and if you have a chance to take the AWS training, then you just need to concentrate on reading the training slides is more than enough! Remember to read the details explanation under the slides. Good understanding of VPC and IAM is important for all associate exams. -- Dan-Claudiu Dragos shared his experience here on how he prepared for the AWS Solutions Architect Certifications in 7 days and succesfully passed it. I'd like to share my experience of getting AWS CSA(A) certified with Cloud Academy: The background:

The process:

On the exam itself:

That's it. I'm the number 16.891, not sure if this is small or big, or even if it matters.

A redditor on r/aws gave awesome tips about the exam day

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Associate exam > The Exam

Exam Registration fee is USD 150
You have 80 minutes to complete a 40 quizzes exam. Most of the questions are up to 3 lines long in the multiple choice format. You should consider no more than 1.5/2 minutes per question if you want to read each question carefully and answer to all of them correctly.
It's possible to set a question for review and skip, you can get back to what you marked in this way at the end.

Now you're ready to go. Here's where you book your exam!

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Professional Exam > Exam Overview

This is a curated list of hands-on material to help you passing this AWS Certification! This advanced list of selected points are especially for students who already have a working knowledge of AWS and who have passed the Solutions Architect - Associate Certification for AWS exam (prerequisite for sitting the Solutions Architect - Professional Certification for AWS exam). This should be helpful to build and develop your skills as an AWS professional.

Exam Overview

1. Multiple choice and multiple answer questions 2. 170 minutes to complete the exam. It's all multiple choice on a PC 3. Exam available in English and Japanese 4. Practice Exam Registration fee is USD 40 5. The exam blueprint specified that there would be 100+ questions given in a 180 minute period and did not specify a pass grade. 6. The exam will test your knowledge with 180 questions 7. In terms of question complexity, it requires a good understanding of all available AWS services 8. AWS Certification passing scores are set by using statistical analysis and are subject to change. AWS does not publish exam passing scores because exam questions and passing scores are subject to change without notice 9. Exam Registration fee is USD 300 10. Recommend taking Advanced Architecting on AWS 11. Sample questions for the exam are available here.

What should I bring to an AWS Certification exam?

- Candidates must show two forms of personal identification (ID). Primary form must be a valid, government-issued ID containing both a photo and signature. The secondary form of ID needs to be valid and contain a signature.
Acceptable Forms of Primary ID (name, photograph, signature, valid/current): Note: Irish natives may use a Public Services Card as a primary form of identification, in Ireland only.
Note: In Japan, the blue colored (not pink) Health Insurance Card is an acceptable form of secondary identification.
However, the paper form of the Health Insurance is not acceptable.
You can NOT bring food, laptops, backpacks, notepads, or other personal equipment to the test area. For all exams, you can request a whiteboard and marker (some centers may hand out paper and pencil), which must be returned before you leave. During check in you’ll be asked to turn out your pockets (on jackets, pants, etc.) to verify they’re empty and free of prohibited items. Eyewear will also be inspected to ensure that it’s not technology-enabled.

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Professional exam > Prerequisites & Requirements


To be eligible for this exam, you must already be certified at the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level. You should have multiple years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS, along with the ability to evaluate cloud application requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementation, deployment, and provisioning applications on AWS. Additionally, you should have the experience and the capability to provide best practices guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications, projects, or the enterprise. Note that in the event that you fail to pass an AWS certification exam, you may retake the exam subject to the following conditions: a. You must wait 14 days from the day you fail to take the exam again
b. You can take an exam up to three times in one year from the date of your first attempt This is valid for any AWS Certifiation Exam. To pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam, you have to master advanced and technical skills, not to mention the experience in designing distributed applications and systems using AWS. Check the short list below to understand you need to master in order to pass the exam.

Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:

1. Designing and deploying dynamically scalable, highly available, fault tolerant, and reliable applications on AWS 2. Selecting appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements 3. Migrating complex, multi-tier applications on AWS 4. Designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS 5. Implementing cost control strategies

Candidate Overview

This exam tests your knowledge of advanced AWS use cases. Eligible candidates for this exam have:

1. Achieved AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 2. 2+ years hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS. 3. Abilities to evaluate cloud application requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementation, deployment, and provisioning applications on AWS. 4. Capabilities to provide best practices guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications, projects, or the enterprise.

Key Points to pass the Exam:

Demonstrate ability to architect the appropriate level of availability based on stakeholder requirements

1. Stakeholder requirements is key phrase here – look at what the requirements are first before deciding the best way to architect the solution 2. What is availability? Basically up time. Does the customer need 99.99% up time or less? Which products may need to be used to meet this requirement? 3. Look at products which are single AZ, multi AZ and multi region. It may be the case that a couple of instances in a single AZ will suffice if cost is a factor 4. CloudWatch can be used to perform EC2 or auto scaling actions when status checks fail or metrics are exceeded (alarms, etc)

Demonstrate ability to implement DR for systems based on RPO and RTO

1. What is DR? It is the recovery of systems, services and applications after an unplanned period of downtime. 2. What is RPO? Recovery Point Objective. At which point in time do we need to get back to when DR processes are invoked? 3. 3. This would come from a customer requirement – when systems are recovered, data is consistent from 30 minutes prior to the outage, or 1 hour, or 4 hours etc. What is acceptable to the stakeholder? 4. What is RTO? Recovery Time Objective. How quickly must systems and services be recovered after invoking DR processes? It may be that all critical systems must be back online within a maximum of four hours. 5. RTO and RPO are often paired together to provide an SLA to end users as to when services will be fully restored and how much data may be lost. For example, an RTO of 2 hours and an RPO of 15 minutes would mean all systems would be recovered in two hours or less and consistent to within 15 minutes of the failure. 6. How can low RTO be achieved? This can be done by using elastic scaling, for example or using monitoring scripts to power up new instances using the AWS API. You may also use multi AZ services such as EBS and RDS to provide additional resilience 7. How can low RPO be achieved? This can be done by using application aware and consistent backup tools, usually native ones such as VSS aware ones from Microsoft or RMAN for Oracle, for example. Databases and real time systems may need to be acquiesced to obtain a crash consistent backup. Standard snapshot tools may not provide this. RMAN can backup to S3 or use point in time snapshots using RDS. RMAN is supported on EC2. Use data dump to move large databases. 8. AWS has multi AZ, multi region and services like S3 which has 11 nines of durability with cross region replication 9. Glacier – long term archive storage. Cheap but not appropriate for fast recovery (several hours retrieval SLA) 19. Storage Gateway is a software appliance that sits on premises that can operate in three modes – gateway cached (hot data kept locally but most data stored in S3), gateway stored (all data kept locally but also replicated to S3) and VTL-Tape Library (virtual disk tapes stored in S3, virtual tape shelf stored in Glacier) 11. You should use gateway cached when the requirement is for low cost primary storage with hot data stored locally 12. Gateway stored keeps all data locally but takes asynchronous snapshots to S3 13. Gateway cached volumes can store 32TB of data, 32 volumes are supported (32 x 32, 1PB) 14. Gateway stored volumes are 16TB in size, 12 volumes are supported (16 x 12, 192TB) 15. Virtual tape library supports 1500 virtual tapes in S3 (150 TB total) 16. Virtual tape shelf is unlimited tapes (uses Glacier) 17. Storage Gateway can be on premises or EC2. Can also schedule snapshots, supports Direct Connect and also bandwidth throttling. 18. Storage Gateway supports ESXi or Hyper-V, 7.5GB RAM, 75GB storage, 4 or 8 vCPU for installation. To use the Marketplace appliance, you must choose xlarge instance or bigger and m3, i2, c3, c4, r3, d2, or m4 instance types 19. Gateway cached requires a separate volume as a buffer upload area and caching area 20. Gateway stored requires enough space to hold your full data set and also an upload buffer VTL also requires an upload buffer and cache area 21. Ports required for Storage Gateway include 443 (HTTPS) to AWS, port 80 for initial activation only, port 3260 for iSCSI internally and port 53 for DNS (internal) 22. Gateway stored snapshots are stored in S3 and can be used to recover data quickly. EBS snapshots can also be used to create a volume to attach to new EC2 instances 23. Can also use gateway snapshots to create a new volume on the gateway itself 24. Snapshots can also be used to migrate cached volumes into stored volumes, stored volumes into cached volumes and also snapshot a volume to create a new EBS volume to attach to an instance 25. Use System Resource Check from the appliance menu to ensure the appliance has enough virtual resources to run (RAM, vCPU, etc.) 26. VTL virtual tape retrieval is instantaneous, whereas Tape Shelf (Glacier) can take up to 24 hours 27. VTL supports Backup Exec 2012-15, Veeam 7 and 8, NetBackup 7, System Center Data Protection 2012, Dell NetVault 10 28. Snapshots can either be scheduled or done ad hoc 29. Writes to S3 get throttled as the write buffer gets close to capacity – you can monitor this with CloudWatch 30. EBS – Elastic Block Store – block based storage replicated across hosts in a single AZ in a region 31. Direct Connect – connection directly into AWS’s data centre via a trusted third party. This can be backed up with standby Direct Connect links or even software VPN 32. Route53 also has 100% uptime SLA, Elastic Load Balancing and VPC can also provide a level of resilience if required 32. DynamoDB has three copies per region and also can perform multi-region replication 33. RDS also supports multi-AZ deployments and read only replicas of data. 5 read only replicas for MySQL, MariaDB and PostGres, 15 for Aurora 34. There are four DR models in the AWS white paper:- 35. Import/Export can import data sets into S3, EBS or Glacier. You can only export from S3 36. Import/Export makes sense for large datasets that cannot be moved or copied into AWS over the internet in an efficient manner (time, cost, etc) 37. AWS will export data back to you encrypted with TrueCrypt 38. AWS will wipe devices after import if specified 39. If exporting from an S3 bucket with versioning enabled, only the most recent version is exported 40. Encryption for imports is optional, mandatory for exports 41. Some services have automated backup:- 42. EC2 does not have automated backup. You can use either EBS snapshots or create an AMI Image from a running or stopped instance. The latter option is especially useful if you have an instance storage on the host which is ephemeral and will get deleted when the instance is stopped (Bundle Instance). You can “copy” the host storage for the instance by creating an AMI, which can then be copied to another region 43. To restore a file on a server for example, take regular snapshots of the EBS volume, create a volume from the snapshot, mount the volume to the instance, browse and recover the files as necessary 44. MySQL requires InnoDB for automated backups, if you delete an instance then all automated backups are deleted, manual DB snapshots stored in S3 are not deleted 45. All backups are stored in S3 When you do an RDS restore, you can change the engine type (SQL Standard to Enterprise, for example), assuming you have enough storage space. 46. Elasticache automated backups snapshot the whole cluster, so there will be performance degradation whilst this takes place. Backups are stored on S3. 46. Redshift backups are stored on S3 and have a 1 day retention period by default and only backs up delta changes to keep storage consumption to a minimum 47. EC2 snapshots are stored in S3 and are incremental and each snapshot still contains the base snapshot data. You are only charged for the incremental snapshot storage

Determine appropriate use of multi-Availability Zones vs. multi-Region architectures

1. Multi-AZ services examples are S3, RDS, DynamoDB. Using multi-AZ can mitigate against the loss of up to two AZs (data centres, assuming there are three. Some regions only have two). This can provide a good balance between cost, complexity and reliability 2. Multi-region services can mitigate failures in AZs or individual regions, but may cost more and introduce more infrastructure and complexity. Use ELB for multi-region failover and resilience, CloudFront 3. DynamoDB offers cross region replication, RDS offers the ability to snapshot from one region to another to have read only replicas. Code Pipeline has a built in template for replicating DynamoDB elsewhere for DR 4. Redshift can snapshot within the same region and also replicate to another region

Demonstrate ability to implement self-healing capabilities

1. HA available already for most popular databases:- 2. SQL Server Availability Groups, SQL Mirroring, log shipping. Read replicas in other AZs not supported 3. MySQL – Asynchronous mirroring 4. Oracle – Data Guard, RAC (RAC not supported on AWS but can run on EC2 by using VPN and Placement Groups as multicast is not supported) 5. RDS has multi-AZ automatic failover to protect against 6. Loss of availability in primary AZ 7. Loss of connectivity to primary DB 8. Storage or host failure of primary DB 9. Software patching (done by AWS, remember) 10. Rebooting of primary DB 11. Uses master and slave model 12. MySQL, Oracle and Postgres use physical layer replication to keep data consistent on the standby instance 13. SQL Server uses application layer mirroring but achieves the same result 14. Multi-AZ uses synchronous replication (consistent read/write), asynchronous (potential data loss) is only used for read replicas 15. DB backups are taken from the secondary to reduce I/O load on the primary 16. DB restores are taken from the secondary to avoid I/O suspension on the primary 17. AZ failover can be forced by rebooting your instance either via the console or via the RebootDBInstance API call 18. Multi-AZ databases are used for DR, not as a scaling solution. Scale can be achieved by using read replicas, this can be done via the AWS console or by using the CreateDBInstanceReadReplica API call 19. Amazon Aurora employs a highly durable, SSD-backed virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads. 20. Amazon Aurora automatically replicates your volume six ways, across three Availability Zones. Amazon Aurora storage is fault-tolerant, transparently handling the loss of up to two copies of data without affecting database write availability and up to three copies without affecting read availability. Amazon Aurora storage is also self-healing. Data blocks and disks are continuously scanned for errors and replaced automatically. 21. Creating a read replica means a snapshot of your primary DB instance, this may result in a pause of about a minute in non multi-AZ deployments 22. Multi-AZ deployments will use a secondary for a snapshot 23. A new DNS endpoint address is given for the read only replica, you need to update the app 24. You can promote a read only replica to be a standalone, but this breaks replication 25. MySQL and Postgres can have up to 5 replicas 26. Read replicas in different regions for MySQL only 26. Replication is asynchronous only 27. Read replicas can be built off Multi-AZ databases 28. Read replicas are not multi-AZ 29. MySQL can have read replicas of read replicas, but this increases latency 30. DB Snapshots and automated backups cannot be taken of read replicas 31. Consider using DynamoDB instead of RDS if your database does not require:- 32. Transaction support 33. Atomicity 34. Consistency 35. Isolation 36. Durability 37. ACID (durability) compliance 38. Joins 39. SQL Credits to Chris Beckett @ BlueClouds

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Professional exam > General Learning Material

To prepare at best for the exam you should start with an overview of the concepts and knowledge areas covered on the exam and walks you through the exam structure and question formats. Get an hands-on practice with advanced use cases, while practice exam questions test your understanding of key architectural concepts. 1. Solutions Architect— Professional Certification for AWS (2016) 2. A Guide to AWS Certification Exams 3. AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency 4. Amazon Kinesis Streams FAQs 5. Amazon Kinesis Streams: Developer Guide 6. AWS Identity and Access Management User Guide 6. Amazon CloudFront - Dynamic Content Delivery 7. Amazon Redshift FAQs 8. Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect: What to Study, Tips and Resources 9. VPC Migration: NATs & Bandwidth Bottleneck 10. Amazon Simple Notification Service Developer Guide 11. Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide 12. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud User Guide 13. Best Practices for Migrating from RDBMS to Amazon DynamoDB 14. AWS Certification Exams: What to expect at the Exam 15. Enabling Federation to AWS Using Windows Active Directory, ADFS, and SAML 2.0 16. AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Level Sample Exam Questions 17. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Blueprint 18. Cloud Architectures with AWS Direct Connect (ARC304) | AWS re:Invent 2013 19. AWS re: Invent STG 204: Using AWS Storage Gateway 20. Storage TCO using AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier (STG202) | AWS re:Invent 2013 21. AWS re:Invent 2014 | (ARC206) Architecting Reactive Applications on AWS (Playlist) 22. AWS June Webinar Series - Deep dive: Hybrid Architectures 23. AWS January 2016 Webinar Series - Managing your Infrastructure as Code 24. Complete AWS IAM Reference 25. Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation 26. How to study for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certification (Webinar) 27. Interview with 5 AWS Certified Greg Cockburn (Podcast) 28. Interview with 5 AWS Certified Stephen Wilding (Podcast)

Passing the AWS solutions architect - Professional Exam > Blueprints Exam

In this AWS whitepaper you'll find a sample exam. Here's a preview:

> Which AWS based disaster recovery strategy will give you the best RTO? A) Deploy the Oracle database and the JBoss app server on EC2. Restore the RMAN Oracle backups from Amazon S3. Generate an EBS volume of static content from the Storage Gateway and attach it to the JBoss EC2 server.
B) Deploy the Oracle database on RDS. Deploy the JBoss app server on EC2. Restore the RMAN Oracle backups from Amazon Glacier. Generate an EBS volume of static content from the Storage Gateway and attach it to the JBoss EC2 server.
C) Deploy the Oracle database and the JBoss app server on EC2. Restore the RMAN Oracle backups from Amazon S3. Restore the static content by attaching an AWS Storage Gateway running on Amazon EC2 as an iSCSI volume to the JBoss EC2 server.
D) Deploy the Oracle database and the JBoss app server on EC2. Restore the RMAN Oracle backups from Amazon S3. Restore the static content from an AWS Storage Gateway-VTL running on Amazon EC2
> An ERP application is deployed in multiple Availability Zones in a single region. In the event of failure, the RTO must be less than 3 hours, and the RPO is 15 minutes. The customer realizes that data corruption occurred roughly 1.5 hours ago. Which DR strategy can be used to achieve this RTO and RPO in the event of this kind of failure? A) Take 15-minute DB backups stored in Amazon Glacier, with transaction logs stored in Amazon S3 every 5 minutes.
B) Use synchronous database master-slave replication between two Availability Zones.
C) Take hourly DB backups to Amazon S3, with transaction logs stored in S3 every 5 minutes.
D) Take hourly DB backups to an Amazon EC2 instance store volume, with transaction logs stored in Amazon S3 every 5 minutes.
> The Marketing Director in your company asked you to create a mobile app that lets users post sightings of good deeds known as random acts of kindness in 80-character summaries. You decided to write the application in JavaScript so that it would run on the broadest range of phones, browsers, and tablets. Your application should provide access to Amazon DynamoDB to store the good deed summaries. Initial testing of a prototype shows that there aren’t large spikes in usage. Which option provides the most costeffective and scalable architecture for this application? A) Provide the JavaScript client with temporary credentials from the Security Token Service using a Token Vending Machine (TVM) on an EC2 instance to provide signed credentials mapped to an Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) user allowing DynamoDB puts and S3 gets. You serve your mobile application out of an S3 bucket enabled as a web site. Your client updates DynamoDB.
B) Register the application with a Web Identity Provider like Amazon, Google, or Facebook, create an IAM role for that provider, and set up permissions for the IAM role to allow S3 gets and DynamoDB puts. You serve your mobile application out of an S3 bucket enabled as a web site. Your client updates DynamoDB.
C) Provide the JavaScript client with temporary credentials from the Security Token Service using a Token Vending Machine (TVM) to provide signed credentials mapped to an IAM user allowing DynamoDB puts. You serve your mobile application out of Apache EC2 instances that are load-balanced and autoscaled. Your EC2 instances are configured with an IAM role that allows DynamoDB puts. Your server updates DynamoDB.
D) Register the JavaScript application with a Web Identity Provider like Amazon, Google, or Facebook, create an IAM role for that provider, and set up permissions for the IAM role to allow DynamoDB puts. You serve your mobile application out of Apache EC2 instances that are load-balanced and autoscaled. Your EC2 instances are configured with an IAM role that allows DynamoDB puts. Your server updates DynamoDB.
> You are building a website that will retrieve and display highly sensitive information to users. The amount of traffic the site will receive is known and not expected to fluctuate. The site will leverage SSL to protect the communication between the clients and the web servers. Due to the nature of the site you are very concerned about the security of your SSL private key and want to ensure that the key cannot be accidentally or intentionally moved outside your environment. Additionally, while the data the site will display is stored on an encrypted EBS volume, you are also concerned that the web servers’ logs might contain some sensitive information; therefore, the logs must be stored so that they can only be decrypted by employees of your company. Which of these architectures meets all of the requirements? A) Use Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic to a set of web servers. To protect the SSL private key, upload the key to the load balancer and configure the load balancer to offload the SSL traffic. Write your web server logs to an ephemeral volume that has been encrypted using a randomly generated AES key.
B) Use Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic to a set of web servers. Use TCP load balancing on the load balancer and configure your web servers to retrieve the private key from a private Amazon S3 bucket on boot. Write your web server logs to a private Amazon S3 bucket using Amazon S3 server-side encryption.
C) Use Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic to a set of web servers, configure the load balancer to perform TCP load balancing, use an AWS CloudHSM to perform the SSL transactions, and write your web server logs to a private Amazon S3 bucket using Amazon S3 server-side encryption.
D) Use Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic to a set of web servers. Configure the load balancer to perform TCP load balancing, use an AWS CloudHSM to perform the SSL transactions, and write your web server logs to an ephemeral volume that has been encrypted using a randomly generated AES key.
> You are designing network connectivity for your fat client application. The application is designed for business travelers who must be able to connect to it from their hotel rooms, cafes, public Wi-Fi hotspots, and elsewhere on the Internet. You do not want to publish the application on the Internet. Which network design meets the above requirements while minimizing deployment and operational costs? A) Implement AWS Direct Connect, and create a private interface to your VPC. Create a public subnet and place your application servers in it.
B) Implement Elastic Load Balancing with an SSL listener that terminates the back-end connection to the application.
C) Configure an IPsec VPN connection, and provide the users with the configuration details. Create a public subnet in your VPC, and place your application servers in it.
D) Configure an SSL VPN solution in a public subnet of your VPC, then install and configure SSL VPN client software on all user computers. Create a private subnet in your VPC and place your application servers in it.
> Your company hosts an on-premises legacy engineering application with 900GB of data shared via a central file server. The engineering data consists of thousands of individual files ranging in size from megabytes to multiple gigabytes. Engineers typically modify 5-10 percent of the files a day. Your CTO would like to migrate this application to AWS, but only if the application can be migrated over the weekend to minimize user downtime. You calculate that it will take a minimum of 48 hours to transfer 900GB of data using your company’s existing 45-Mbps Internet connection. After replicating the application’s environment in AWS, which option will allow you to move the application’s data to AWS without losing any data and within the given timeframe? A) Copy the data to Amazon S3 using multiple threads and multi-part upload for large files over the weekend, and work in parallel with your developers to reconfigure the replicated application environment to leverage Amazon S3 to serve the engineering files.
B) Sync the application data to Amazon S3 starting a week before the migration, on Friday morning perform a final sync, and copy the entire data set to your AWS file server after the sync completes.
C) Copy the application data to a 1-TB USB drive on Friday and immediately send overnight, with Saturday delivery, the USB drive to AWS Import/Export to be imported as an EBS volume, mount the resulting EBS volume to your AWS file server on Sunday.
D) Leverage the AWS Storage Gateway to create a Gateway-Stored volume. On Friday copy the application data to the Storage Gateway volume. After the data has been copied, perform a snapshot of the volume and restore the volume as an EBS volume to be attached to your AWS file server on Sunday.
Good Luck!