AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Curriculum

1. Introduction to AWS

• Overview of cloud computing

• Benefits of AWS

• AWS global infrastructure: Regions and Availability Zones

• AWS Management Console and AWS CLI basics

2. Designing Resilient Architectures

• Principles of fault tolerance and high availability

• Designing multi-tier architectures

• Load balancing with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

• Implementing Auto Scaling for dynamic workloads

3. Designing High-Performing Architectures

• Selecting the appropriate instance types (EC2, ECS, Lambda)

• Optimizing performance through caching with Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator

• Storage solutions: EBS, EFS, S3, Glacier

• Database solutions: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift

4. Designing Secure Applications and Architectures

• AWS Shared Responsibility Model

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• Securing data at rest and in transit

• Implementing security groups and network ACLs

• Using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption

• AWS Security Services: Shield, WAF, Macie, GuardDuty

5. Designing Cost-Optimized Architectures

• Understanding AWS pricing models

• Cost-effective storage solutions

• Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances

• Cost management tools: AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets

• Monitoring costs with AWS CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor

6. Designing Operationally Excellent Architectures

• Best practices for operational excellence

• Using AWS CloudFormation for Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Monitoring and logging: AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail

• Automating deployments with AWS CodeDeploy, CodePipeline

7. Migration to AWS

• AWS Migration Hub and AWS Application Discovery Service

• Strategies for migrating applications and databases

• Using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

• Managing hybrid cloud architectures

8. Architecting for the Cloud

• AWS Well-Architected Framework

• Reliability, performance efficiency, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence

• Implementing disaster recovery strategies: RTO and RPO

• Backup and recovery solutions with AWS Backup and Storage Gateway

9. Advanced Networking Architectures

• VPC design and subnetting

• Implementing VPN and Direct Connect

• Route 53 for DNS management

• Using AWS Transit Gateway for large-scale network architectures

Hands-On Labs and Projects

• Deploying a multi-tier application using EC2, ELB, and RDS

• Setting up a serverless application with AWS Lambda and API Gateway

• Implementing a secure VPC architecture with public and private subnets

• Configuring Auto Scaling and Load Balancing for high availability