AWS Certs Prep

A lot of the text is inspired/taken from Neal Davis’s amazing course on Udemy. I highly recommend taking it if you’re preparing for the exam. This note is not even close to being comprehensive. It just contains the things I personally tend to forget in the practice exams.

AWS Support Plans for Different Tiers

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/

Support Item	Developer	Business	Enterprise On-Ramp	Enterprise
Response Times	General Guidance < 24 hrs
System impaired < 12 hrs	General Guidance < 24 hrs
System impaired < 12 hrs
Production system impaired < 4 hrs
Production system down < 1 hr	General Guidance < 24 hrs
System impaired < 12 hrs
Production system impaired < 4 hrs
Production system down < 1 hr
Business-critical system down < 30 min	General Guidance < 24 hrs
System impaired < 12 hrs
Production system impaired < 4 hrs
Production system down < 1 hr
Business-critical system down < 15 min
Architectural Guidance	General	Contextual to your use case	Annual consultative review & guidance based on your use case	Same as On-Ramp
Proactive programs & Self service	Access to Support Automation Workflows	Access to Support Automation Workflows + AWS Countdown Premium for an additional fee	Same as Business + One free AWS Countdown each year + Annual proactive security review	Same as Business + AWS Countdown (Non-premium version) + Access to proactive reviews, workshops & deep dives
Technical Account Management (TAM)	Nope ❌	Nope ❌	A pool of TAMs available	Designated TAM
AWS Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks	Service quota & basic security checks	Full set of checks	Full set of checks	Full set of checks + prioritized recommendations curated by your AWS Account Team
Enhanced Technical Support	Business hours web access to Cloud Support Associates + Unlimited cases and unlimited contacts + Prioritized response on Repost	24/7 phone, web, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers + Access to AWS Support Slack App	Same as Business	Same as Business
Billing Assistance	Nope ❌	Nope ❌	White-glove (Concierge) access to billing issues	Proactive support in managing billing, including proactive cost optimization, FinOps support, cost analysis, and prioritized answers to billing questions
Programmatic Case Management	Nope ❌	AWS Support API	Same as Business	Same as Business
Third-Party Software Support	Nope ❌	Interoperability and config guidance and troubleshooting	Same as Business	Same as Business
AWS Incident Detection & Response	Nope ❌	Nope ❌	Nope ❌	Access to AWS Incident Detection and Response for an additional fee. AWS Incident Detection and Response provides custom Support for critical workloads.
AWS Managed Services	Nope ❌	Nope ❌	Access to AWS Managed Services for an additional fee. AMS augments your existing teams with cloud adavanced operation skills and capacity.
Includes

Baseline operations
Designated Cloud Service Delivery Manager (CSDM)
Cloud Architect (CA)
AMS Security Team access | Same as On-Ramp | | AWS re:Post Private | Nope ❌ | Nope ❌ | Access to re:Post private for an additional fee | Same as On-Ramp |

AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillars

Based on 6 pillars:

Operational Excellence

Perform operations as code
Make frequent, small, reversible changes
Refine operations procedures frequently
Anticipate failure
Learn from all operation failures

Security

Implement a strong identity foundation
Enable traceability
Apply security to all layers
Automate security best practices
Protect data in transit and at rest.
Prepare for security events

Reliability

Automate recovery from failure
Test recovery procedures
Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availbility
Stop guessing capacity
Manage change in automation

Performance Efficiency

Democratize advanced technologies
Go global in minutes
Use serverless architectures
Experiment more often
Consider mechanical sympathy

Cost Optimization Pillar

Implement Cloud Financial Management
Adopt a Consumption Model
Measure overall efficiency
Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy-lifting
Analyze and attribute expernditure

Sustainability

Environmental sustainability is a shared responsibilty between customer & AWS
Remove unnused or redundant data
Deploy services only where demand is
Remove unused resources
Use queue-driven architectures for stuff that don’t require synchronous responses

Some lesser-known services

Services	What it does
Amazon Kendra	Uses ML to enable natural language search capabilties in your apps.
CloudWatch Logs Insights	Enables you to interactively search and analyze your log data in CloudWatch logs.
AWS PrivateLink	Provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services and on-prem networks, without exposing your traffic to public internet.
AWS Application Discovery Service	Helps you plan your migration to AWS Cloud by collecting usage and configuration data abour your on-prem servers.
AWS Storage Gateway	Enables hybrid cloud storage between on-prem environments and the AWS Cloud. It seamlessly integrates on-prem enterprise apps and workflows with Amazon’s block and object cloud storage services through industry standard storage protocols.
Access Advisor	Mange access for any IAM user, group, role or policy.
AWS Audit Manager	Assists organizations in continuosly auditiing their AWS usage, facilitiating risk assessment and compliance with various industry standards. Automates evidence collection to make audit process more efficient and effective.
AWS Inspector	Automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Inspector automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices. Inspector uses an agent installed on EC2 instances.
AWS Systems Manager	Gives you visibility and control of your infrastructure on AWS. Systems Manager provides a unified interface so you can view operational data from multiple services and allows you to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources.
Amazon ElastiSearch	Involved with operational analytics such as application monitoring, log analytics and clickstream analytics. Amazon Elasticsearch Service allows you to search, explore, filter, aggregate, and visualize your data in near real-time.
AWS QuickSight	Provides a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service, that that makes it easy to build stunning visualizations and rich dashboards that can be accessed from any browser or mobile device.
AWS Simple Workflow Service (SWF)	Web service that makes it easy to coordinate work across distributed* application* components. SWF enables applications for a range of use cases, including media processing, web application back-ends, business process workflows, and analytics pipelines, to be designed as a coordination of tasks.
VPC Peering	A VPC peering connection helps you to facilitate the transfer of data. For example, if you have more than one AWS account, you can peer the VPCs across those accounts to create a file sharing network. You can also use a VPC peering connection to allow other VPCs to access resources you have in one of your VPCs.
AWS Step Functions	Coordinates AWS Services with a visual workflow. Order processing is a good use case.
AWS Concierge	Included as part of the Enterprise Support plan, the Support Concierge Team are AWS billing and account experts that specialize in working with enterprise accounts.
AWS Glue	Fully managed extract, transform, load (ETL) service.
AWS Athena	Queries data in SQL from S3. Can be connected to other data sources using Lambda.
AWS Simple Email Service (SES)	Designed to help users send transactional emails, marketing messages, and other types of content to their customers.
AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS)	Highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

Some Good-to-Know Facts

Unused Reserved Instances (RIs) for EC2 are applied across the groups of an organization so the org can utilize unused RIs instead of on-demand instances to reduce costs.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is an estimate of how much it would cost to run your services on-prem.
AWS RedShift provides Data Warehouse with SQL.
IAM is global and does not apply to any particular region.
Security Groups are stateful firewalls. NACLs are statelesss firewalls.
EC2 instances are billed by second, minimum being 60 seconds.
You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your most recent snapshot are saved.
You can use resource groups to organize your AWS resources. Resource groups make it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of resources at one time.
Resource groups make it easy to group resources using the tags that are assigned to them. You can group resources that share one or more tags.