AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional

Course Overview
Welcome to Pluralsight. My name is Elias Khnaser, and I'd like to welcome you to my course, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional. AWS is the world's leading cloud platform provider. It has revolutionized and modernized the way we do IT. Today, AWS's certifications are the hottest and most sought after in the industry, especially for individuals interesting in the role of cloud architect and cloud engineering. Some of the major topics that we'll cover in this course include Consolidated Billing, Cross Account Access, AWS Directory Service, CloudHSM, Distributed Denial of Service, IPS and IDS, 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 advanced AWS deployment. However, before beginning this course, you should have a solid working knowledge of AWS. A great first step to acquiring this knowledge is to complete the other AWS courses offered on Pluralsight, namely Amazon Web Services Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fundamentals for System Administrators. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn how to design advanced AWS environments with the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional course at Pluralsight.

Course Introduction
Welcome to Pluralsight. This is Elias Khnaser, and you're watching the course introduction for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional course.

Designing AWS Networking Services: Elastic Load Balancer
The Elastic Load Balancer, or ELB, is a crucial service that you'll find very useful regardless of the type of application that you're deploying on AWS. At some point, you're going to find that your design is going to require an ELB or a load balancer of some sort. So it's very important to understand Elastic Load Balancer and understand how it works. It's also very important for the exam as this is probably worth a few points on the exam as well. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Designing AWS Networking Services: Elastic Load Balancer.

Designing AWS Networking Services: VPC and Direct Connect
Networking is crucial in pretty much any technology environment. But it is especially crucial with AWS. And connectivity to the AWS cloud is of particular importance. So in this lesson, what we're going to talk about is designing VPC and Direct Connect and other methods of connecting to the AWS cloud. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and in this lesson, we're going to be covering Designing AWS Networking Services: VPC and Direct Connect.

Designing AWS Networking Services: NAT Instances and NAT Gateways
NAT instances and NAT gateways. Which one to use when. So this is kind of the similar conversation with Elastic Load Balancer versus a traditional load balancer like an F5 or a Citrix NetScaler or the do-it-yourself type of load balancer. You'll find that a lot of the pros and cons are very similar. Again, a NAT gateway offers you the same thing as a NAT instance except it's an as-a-service, whereby AWS is responsible for the high availability, for the scalability, for the software updates, functionality, etc. , all you have to do is basically configure it through the platform, whereas a NAT instance you're, again, deploying it. You're responsible for high availability. You're responsible for scalability. You're responsible for making sure that that instance can support the traffic that you're running through it. Really cool stuff! Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Designing AWS Networking Services: NAT Instances and NAT Gateways.

Designing AWS Networking Services: Domain Name System
AWS gives you so many different options. And one of these options is DNS or domain name system. It allows you, again, to get a DNS system as a service using Route 53. But the question is, Is it the right system for you? Does it check all the boxes that you're looking for? Does it make management easier? Is it something that you should consider? Is it something that you should consider all the time? What do you do about your on-premises environment? Do you extend on-premises into Route 53? Do you extend Route 53 onto on-premises? Can you extend Route 53 back to on-premises? Which one do you use? How do you use it? , etc. In this lesson, we're going to answer all of these questions. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Designing AWS Networking Services: Domain Name System.

Designing AWS Networking Services: High Performance Computing
Today the world is all about data, how fast you can crunch data. High performance computing in particular is responsible for a lot of scientific breakthroughs, breakthroughs in weather modelling, enhancements to the way we live. A lot of that comes from high performance computing and that ability to, again, be able to crunch all of these numbers, all of this data, and then give us some actionable advice. In this lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to focus on how the cloud helps enable high performance computing. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Designing AWS Networking Services: High Performance Computing.

Designing and Optimizing AWS Data Storage Services
Storage has always been and continues to be one of my favorite topics. And with AWS, there are so many things you can do with storage from Amazon S3 to EBS to Glacier to Storage Gateway. There're just so many services that offer so much cool stuff. We're going to talk about how to optimize S3 for PUTs and GETs, how to secure it. We're going to do a lot of cool things, and I think you're going to love this lesson. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Designing and Optimizing AWS Data Storage Services.

Understanding AWS Database Services
Building any kind of application whether it's for web use or enterprise use, internal use or production use will require some form of database. There is no conceivable scenario where you're not using a database for any globally deployed application or production-level application. AWS offers a variety of database services that are instrumental for the deployment, the development of your applications. In this module, we're going to focus on two--AWS's Relational Database Services (RDS) and DynamoDB. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding AWS Database Services.

Managing AWS Security Strategies: Directory Service
If you've worked with directory services for any amount of time, you probably have an appreciation for what it takes to create, to build, to maintain, to upgrade, to patch directory services at scale. It starts from all the way to how many domain controllers do I want? Where do I place the domain controllers? Worrying about synchronization. Worrying about FSMO rules, high availability, security patching, patching in general, upgrading when it comes time to upgrade, and so on and so forth. It can be a very daunting task. In this lesson, we're going to focus on how we can simplify that task and what AWS offers from that perspective. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Managing AWS Security Strategies: Directory Service.

Managing AWS Security Strategies: STS and Cross Account Access
Have you ever wanted to assume the role of somebody else like a James Bond for example? That would be really dangerous without training. Maybe not. It's probably just cool to watch but not assume. But in this module what we're going to do is talk about security token services and cross account access and how we can use them in conjunction with one another to have users in one AWS account assume a role with permissions, with limited permissions in a different AWS account. It's going to be very, very fun. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Managing AWS Security Strategies: Security Token Service and Cross Account Access.

Managing AWS Security Strategies: CloudTrail and CloudWatch
Oh, if I had a penny for every time someone said that the cloud was insecure, I'd be a millionaire. The cloud I will actually venture out to say is more secure than on-premises. And it's the tools that are available to you, it's how secure you want to make your cloud, that's how much it will be secure. And how insecure you make your cloud, that's how insecure it's going to be. But if you take a look at all of the breaches that have happened so far, they've all been against on-premises data centers or they've been against faulty misconfigured cloud environments. Now what we're going to focus on in this lesson in this module is logs. How are we going to generate these logs? How do we access these logs? How do we monitor these logs? How do we take action against these logs? Where do we store these logs? That's a fundamental security principle whenever you're dealing with security in any kind of infrastructure. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Managing AWS Security Strategies: CloudTrail and CloudWatch.

Managing AWS Security Strategies: CloudHSM, DDoS, and IDS/IPS
A hardware security module, distributed denial-of-service attacks, intrusion detection, and improvement prevention are all systems, are all things and tools that we need to be aware of that we already know about in the data center. But we have to figure out how to apply them on the AWS infrastructure. Some of them can have a negative performance impact if we don't apply them properly. For example, if your hardware security module was on-premises, and you're trying to decrypt and encrypt the keys, for example, for traffic that's going to the cloud, that will automatically introduce latency. What are the things that are available to mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks? How do I configure intrusion detection and intrusion prevention? In this module, we're going to attempt to cover all of these. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Managing AWS Security Strategies: CloudHSM, DDoS, IDS, and IPS.

Managing Billing Strategies: EC2 Standard and Reserved Instances
Understanding EC2 standard and reserved instances will have a significant impact on the way you design your billing strategies, and also on the way you continuously do cost optimization. This is both helpful for your day-to-day management of the environment but also for the exam as you will be presented with different scenarios on cost optimization. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Managing Billing Strategies: EC2 Standard and Reserved Instances.

Managing Billing Strategies: Consolidated Billing and Resource Groups
We all strive to design perfect environments. However, circumstances are in most cases out of our control. Our organization will either grow organically, grow by acquisition. Things happen where these designs, they'll never stay as clean in the long run. Understanding what are the tools and capabilities that you have at your disposal to simplify things as the environment is getting more and more complex will go a significant way. One of these specifically to AWS is consolidated billing. Maybe you've laid out a strategy on how you want to design the different AWS accounts that you're going to have in the organization. But maybe an acquisition messes that up. Consolidated billing helps you consolidate all of these bills in one to help you take advantage of volume discounts. Resource groups are also a really cool thing to be able to have a customized Management Console with all the resources that you frequently use. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Managing Billing Strategies: Consolidated Billing and Resource Groups.

Understanding CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, and OpsWorks
As you start to use AWS for more and more production workloads, you'll find that your dependency on deployment services will also grow. Now for the large majority of these deployment services, they tend to be skewed in favor of developers and developments. For example, take something like Elastic Beanstalk. The entire service was conceived for developers so they don't have to worry about standing up infrastructure or managing that infrastructure. CloudFormation and OpsWorks, on the other hand, they lean a little more towards developers, but you'll find that ops people will also use them from time to time. Now it's good to have a good understanding of the differentiation between all of these services for your own knowledge but also for the exam. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, and OpsWorks.

Understanding CloudFront, Kinesis Streams, & SNS Mobile Push Notifications
Content delivery networks like CloudFront are fascinating technologies. They significantly enhance the performance by caching, by having different objects cached around the world for fast and easy access. In this lesson, we're going to talk about CloudFront, and we're going to talk about other technologies that are not necessarily CDN but are also advanced capabilities within AWS like Kinesis Streams and SNS mobile push notifications and how they can be used. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding CloudFront, Kinesis Streams, and SNS Mobile Push Notifications.

Understanding AWS High Availability and BC/DR Options
One of the most popular use cases for AWS and for cloud in general is high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery. But that aside, you cannot run a production environment on the AWS platform without understanding the high availability capabilities and how you would do BC/DR. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding AWS High Availability and BC/DR Options.

Understanding AWS Data Pipeline and Integration with VMware
It's time to talk about some hybrid services. We're going to talk about AWS Data Pipeline, which helps you move and process data from on-premises to AWS compute and storage services or between AWS compute and storage services. So it can be used for both. And we're also going to talk about the integration with VMware. Welcome back to Pluralsight. I'm Elias Khnaser, and you're watching Understanding AWS Data Pipeline and Integration with VMware.