AWS SAA – Section 1: Course Introduction

Phase Verbs / Action Phrases

Phrase	Meaning
prepare for	study and get ready for an exam
cover	teach / include a topic
pass (an exam)	score high enough to succeed
revisit	go back and review again
scale (easily)	grow capacity up or down as needed
rent (servers)	pay to use without owning
power (websites)	provide the infrastructure to run

Term	Definition
SAA-C03	The current version code of the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam
AWS (Amazon Web Services)	Amazon’s cloud computing platform providing on-demand servers and services
Cloud provider	Company that offers computing resources over the internet (AWS, Azure, GCP)
On demand	Available instantly, pay only when you use it
On premises	Infrastructure physically located in your own data center
Scale	Increase or decrease compute resources to match demand
Certification	Official credential proving knowledge of a specific technology area

Cloud provider — provides servers and services on demand, at scale
Major contrast with on-premises: no need to physically order/install servers
Powers major companies: Amazon, Netflix (Netflix owns zero servers — all rented from AWS)

AWS Fundamentals: IAM, EC2, ELB, ASG, EBS, EFS, Route 53, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront
Databases: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, DocumentDB, Neptune, Keyspaces, QLDB, Timestream
Analytics: Athena, EMR, Redshift, OpenSearch, Lake Formation, Kinesis, MSK, QuickSight, Glue
Machine Learning: Rekognition, Transcribe, Polly, Translate, Lex, Comprehend, SageMaker, Forecast
Monitoring: CloudWatch, CloudTrail, EventBridge, Config
Messaging: SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Amazon MQ
Serverless: Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, Step Functions
Containers: ECS, ECR, EKS, App Runner
Security: KMS, SSM, Secrets Manager, Cognito, Shield, WAF, GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie
Networking: VPC (deep dive)
Disaster Recovery: DMS, AWS Backup, Application Migration Service