AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

AWS Cloud Overview – Regions & Availability Zones

AWS global infrastructure: regions, availability zones, and points of presence.

IAM Introduction – Users, Groups, Policies

IAM is the AWS identity service for managing users, groups, and permissions via policies.

IAM Policies Deep Dive

IAM policy structure: Version, ID, Statement, Sid, Effect, Principal, Action, Resource, and Condition.

IAM MFA Overview

Protecting AWS accounts with password policies and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) devices.

AWS Access Keys, CLI and SDK

Three ways to access AWS: Management Console, CLI (with access keys), and SDK (programmatic API calls).

IAM Roles for AWS Services

IAM Roles grant permissions to AWS services (like EC2) to perform actions on your behalf.

IAM Security Tools

IAM Credentials Report and IAM Access Advisor help audit and enforce least-privilege permissions.

IAM Best Practices

General IAM guidelines to keep your AWS account secure and well-organized.

IAM Summary

Concise summary of all IAM concepts: users, groups, policies, roles, MFA, CLI/SDK, and audit tools.

EC2 Basics

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) lets you rent virtual machines on AWS with configurable compute, storage, and networking.

EC2 Instance Types Basics

EC2 instance type naming convention and the 5 main families: General Purpose, Compute, Memory, Storage, and Accelerated.

Security Groups & Classic Ports Overview

Security groups act as EC2 virtual firewalls, controlling inbound and outbound traffic by port, protocol, and source.

EC2 Instance Purchasing Options

Seven EC2 purchasing models: On-Demand, Reserved, Convertible Reserved, Savings Plans, Spot, Dedicated Host, Dedicated Instance, Capacity Reservation.

Spot Instances & Spot Fleet

Deep dive into Spot Instance pricing mechanics, spot request types, termination order, and Spot Fleet allocation strategies.

Private vs Public vs Elastic IP

Differences between private, public, and Elastic IPs in AWS EC2: assignment, persistence, and best practices.

EC2 Placement Groups

Four EC2 placement group strategies: Cluster (low latency), Spread (isolated hardware), Partition (rack isolation), and Precision Time.

Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI) Overview

ENIs are virtual network cards in a VPC; they can be created independently and moved between EC2 instances for failover.

EC2 Hibernate

EC2 Hibernate preserves in-memory RAM state to the encrypted EBS root volume, enabling faster restarts without re-initializing applications.

EBS Overview

EBS (Elastic Block Store) is a network-attached persistent drive for EC2 instances, bound to a specific AZ and billed by provisioned capacity.

EBS Snapshots

EBS Snapshots are point-in-time backups that can be copied across AZs and regions, with archive, recycle bin, and fast restore features.

AMI Overview

AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are EC2 instance templates that include OS, software, and configuration; they can be custom-built or purchased from the Marketplace.

EC2 Instance Store

EC2 Instance Store provides high-performance ephemeral disk storage physically attached to the host server.

EBS Volume Types

Six EBS volume types across SSD and HDD families: gp2/gp3 (general), io1/io2 (provisioned IOPS), st1 (throughput HDD), sc1 (cold HDD).

EBS Multi-Attach

EBS Multi-Attach allows attaching one io1/io2 volume to up to 16 EC2 instances simultaneously within the same AZ.

EBS Encryption

EBS encryption uses KMS AES-256 keys to transparently encrypt data at rest, in-flight, and in snapshots; how to encrypt an existing unencrypted volume via snapshot copy.

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)

EFS is a managed NFS that mounts to multiple EC2 instances across AZs simultaneously; Linux-only, pay-per-use, with performance modes and storage tiers.

EFS vs EBS vs Instance Store

Comparison of all three EC2 storage types: EBS (block, single AZ), EFS (network file system, multi-AZ Linux), and Instance Store (ephemeral, hardware-attached).