AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Course Overview
Welcome to Pluralsight. My name's Elias Khnaser, and I'd like to welcome you to my course, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate. AWS is the world's leading cloud platform provider. It has revolutionized and modernized the way we do IT. Today, AWS certifications are the hottest and most sought after in the industry, especially for individuals interested in the role of cloud architect and cloud engineer. Some of the major topics that we will cover in this course include Virtual Private Cloud, Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon Storage Services, Route 53, Direct Connect, and much, much more. By the end of this course, you'll be well prepared to sit and pass the certification exam, and you'll have the knowledge needed to design AWS deployments. However, before beginning this course, you should have essential knowledge of AWS. A great first step to acquiring this knowledge is to complete the Amazon Web Services AWS Fundamentals for System Administrators course offered on Pluralsight. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn how to design AWS environments with the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate course, at Pluralsight.

Course Introduction
Five years ago, if I would've told you that you'd be watching an Amazon Web Services certification course, you would've looked at me with that skeptical look on your face, yeah, Eli, not too sure about this whole public cloud thing, yet so much can change in five years, right? And our industry changes so rapidly that Amazon Web Services has grown into the premier hyperscale public cloud provider, and here you are, watching an Amazon Web Services certification course. Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching the Course Introduction for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate.

Understanding and Configuring Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
When you're building a house, the first thing that you have to do is pour the foundation, right? Well the same is true when you're building a datacenter, the same is true for when you're building a virtual private cloud. There has to be a foundation that you put together first that you can layer everything else on top of. Virtual private cloud happens to be that foundation. It's the first thing that you have to create, it creates that logical, isolated entity, your space on the AWS cloud that then allows you to create instances and services within that virtual private cloud. Welcome to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding and Configuring Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Understanding and Configuring NAT Instances, Gateways, and VPC Endpoints
Now that we've built a VPC, it's now time to continue to layer services in order to configure it further, so in this lesson what we're going to do is we're going to focus on how to give private instances access to the internet, and we're going to accomplish that with the use of NAT instances, NAT gateways, we're going to talk about what the differences are between the two, and then we're going to talk about VPC endpoints. How do you avoid going out to the internet and then back in in order to access certain services that AWS offers like Amazon S3? Welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding and Configuring NAT Instances, Gateways, and VPC Endpoints.

Understanding and Configuring VPC Peering, VPN, and Direct Connect
Building a VPC is cool, configuring a VPC is awesome, but after that comes the task of connecting to a VPC and there are several different methods by which you can connect to a VPC. You can use VPC peering which allows you to connect two or more VPCs in the same region, you can maybe connect to a different VPC in a different region using VPN or Direct Connect, and how do you use VPN what are the different types of VPNs, what is Direct Connect? All of those we're going to cover in this lesson. Welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser and you're watching Understanding and Configuring VPC Peering, VPN and Direct Connect.

Understanding and Using Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
At the heart of the Amazon Web Services cloud, and the most popular service that it has from an infrastructure as a service perspective, actually from all services as a service perspective, is EC2, or Elastic Cloud Compute. In this lesson, we're going to explore what it is and how to use it. So welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser and you're watching Understanding and Using Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

Understanding and Configuring Load Balancers
I don't know about you guys, but load balancers are to me a cool device, I've always liked load balancers, but if you've liked load balancers in the past, just wait and see how cool it is to configure and use load balancers on AWS, and this is exactly what we're going to do in this lesson, we're going to talk about load balancers on the AWS platform. Welcome back to Pluralsight, my name's Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding and Configuring Load Balancers.

Understanding and Configuring Auto Scaling
Nothing says cloud more than auto scaling. It is the concept of elasticity, it is that notion, that idea of being able to scale on-demand infinitely. That is probably the premier selling value of the cloud, that is what the cloud is known for, that is what you probably think of the first time you think of cloud. Well guess what? In this module, we're going to talk all about auto scaling with AWS. Welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding and Configuring Auto Scaling.

Understanding Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Elastic File System (EFS)
We've talked about EC2 instances, we've talked about load balancers, we've talked about auto scaling groups, we've talked about a lot things, but we haven't yet talked about storage as it pertains to EC2. Well, in this module what we're going to focus on is all of the storage tiers that you can attach to an instance. Welcome back to Pluralsight, my name is Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Elastic File System (EFS).

Understanding and Configuring Amazon S3 and CloudFront
One of the earliest AWS services together with EC2, it has always been Amazon S3, so storage is very exciting when it comes to Amazon Web Services, there's a lot of features, there's a lot of functionality. In this module, we're going to talk about Amazon S3, the object-based storage, and we're also going to talk about CloudFront. It's a content delivery network that allows you to accelerate, for example, Amazon S3 access. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding and Configuring Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

Understanding AWS Relational Database Services (RDS)
If you're looking to migrate any kind of workload to the AWS cloud, or if you're looking to deploy a new native workload to develop a new workload against the AWS cloud, at some point you're going to have to understand what your options are from a database perspective. In this module, we're going to talk about the different aspects of AWS' Relational Database Services. Welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding AWS Relational Database Services (RDS).

Understanding Amazon DynamoDB and Redshift
We've talked about Amazon's relational database service, or RDS, and I talked about the fact that it's kind of IaaS and it's kind of PaaS. Now I want to talk about Amazon's DynamoDB and Redshift options as well. DynamoDB is a noSQL large database that's completely managed, completely platform as a service, database as a service essentially offering, and I also want to talk about Redshift. So, welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding Amazon DynamoDB and Redshift.

Understanding AWS Security
Man, this used to be one of the most feared topics to talk about when it came to cloud, security. It was a barrier to entry, it was a barrier to adoption. It has since softened. A lot of organizations have come to the realization that AWS is actually probably more secure than what you have on-premises. Now in this module, we're going to talk about AWS security. We're going to understand AWS security as much as we can. AWS security is very large and vast, and as you can imagine, security is a very wide topic that deserves an entire course on its own, but we're going to do our best to introduce you to all of the concepts and capabilities of the AWS security for the test and for your knowledge. So welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding AWS Security.

Understanding Amazon Route 53
DNS is one of the most important and crucial infrastructure services in any environment. And Amazon has an impressive 100% SLA guarantee on Amazon Route 53, its proprietary DNS service. This module we're going to focus all on Amazon Route 53. Welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding Amazon Route 53.

Understanding AWS Monitoring
You can't run an enterprise environment without monitoring. You and I both know this, this module is dedicated to monitoring in its entirety. We're going to talk about monitoring from a metrics perspective, we're also going to talk about it from a logging perspective. Welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding AWS Monitoring.

Additional AWS Services
Do you guys like the title of this module, Additional AWS Services? Well, I have to pack some additional AWS services that are going to be needed, especially for the exam. These aren't things that we're going to go in-depth on, but I want to give you an idea of them so that you'd be prepared for the exam. So this was the best title I could find. We're going to talk about Kinesis Streams, about OpsWorks, CloudFormation, we're going to talk about a lot of cool things from an analytics platform, from an automation platform, from a configuration management platform, that AWS offers. So welcome back to Pluralsight, I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Additional AWS Services.