Cloud Concepts - 26%

• Security
• Reliability
• High Availability
• Elasticity
• Agility
• Pay-as-you go pricing
• Scalability
• Global Reach
• Economy of scale

- Explain how the AWS cloud allows users to focus on business value

• Shifting technical resources to revenue-generating activities as opposed to managing infrastructure

• Understand the role of operational expenses (OpEx)
• Understand the role of capital expenses (CapEx)
• Understand labor costs associated with on-premises operations
• Understand the impact of software licensing costs when moving to the cloud

- Identify which operations will reduce costs by moving to the cloud

• Right-sized infrastructure
• Benefits of automation
• Reduce compliance scope (for example, reporting)
• Managed services (for example, RDS, ECS, EKS, DynamoDB)

• Design for failure
• Decouple components versus monolithic architecture
• Implement elasticity in the cloud versus on-premises
• Think parallel

Security and Compliance - 25%

• Describe how the customer’s responsibilities may shift depending on the service used (for example with RDS, Lambda, or EC2)

- Describe AWS responsibilities

• Locations of lists of recognized available compliance controls (for example, HIPPA, SOCs)
• Recognize that compliance requirements vary among AWS services

- At a high level, describe how customers achieve compliance on AWS

• Identify different encryption options on AWS (for example, In transit, At rest)

- Describe who enables encryption on AWS for a given service
- Recognize there are services that will aid in auditing and reporting

• Recognize that logs exist for auditing and monitoring (do not have to understand the logs)
• Define Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail

- Explain the concept of least privileged access

• Access keys and password policies (rotation, complexity)
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  - Groups/users
  - Roles
  - Policies, managed policies compared to custom policies
• Tasks that require use of root accounts
• Protection of root accounts

• Native AWS services (for example, security groups, Network ACLs, AWS WAF)
• 3rd party security products from the AWS Marketplace

- Recognize there is documentation and where to find it (for example, best practices, whitepapers, official documents)

• AWS Knowledge Center, Security Center, security forum, and security blogs
• Partner Systems Integrators

- Know that security checks are a component of AWS Trusted Advisor

Technology - 33%

• Programmatic access, APIs, SDKs, AWS Management Console, CLI, Infrastructure as Code

- Identify different types of cloud deployment models

• All in with cloud/cloud native
• Hybrid
• On-premises

- Identify connectivity options

• VPN
• AWS Direct Connect
• Public internet

• Recall that high availability is achieved by using multiple Availability Zones
• Recognize that Availability Zones do not share single points of failure

- Describe when to consider the use of multiple AWS Regions

• Disaster recovery/business continuity
• Low latency for end-users
• Data sovereignty

- Describe at a high level the benefits of Edge Locations

• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS Global Accelerator

• Recognize there are different compute families
• Recognize the different services that provide compute (for example, AWS Lambda compared to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), or Amazon EC2, etc.)
• Recognize that elasticity is achieved through Auto Scaling
• Identify the purpose of load balancers

- Identify different AWS storage services

• Describe Amazon S3
• Describe Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Describe Amazon S3 Glacier
• Describe AWS Snowball
• Describe Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• Describe AWS Storage Gateway

- Identify AWS networking services

• Identify VPC
• Identify security groups
• Identify the purpose of Amazon Route 53
• Identify VPN, AWS Direct Connect

- Identify different AWS database services

• Install databases on Amazon EC2 compared to AWS managed databases
• Identify Amazon RDS
• Identify Amazon DynamoDB
• Identify Amazon Redshift

• AWS Abuse
• AWS support cases
• Premium support
• Technical Account Managers

- Recognize there is a partner network (marketplace, third-party) including Independent Software Vendors and System Integrators
- Identify sources of AWS technical assistance and knowledge including professional services, solution architects, training and certification, and the Amazon Partner Network
- Identify the benefits of using AWS Trusted Advisor

Billing and Pricing - 16%

• Describe Reserved-Instances flexibility
• Describe Reserved-Instances behavior in AWS Organizations

- Identify scenarios/best fit for Spot Instance pricing

• Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Amazon QuickSight, third-party partners, and AWS Marketplace tools
• Open a billing support case
• The role of the Concierge for AWS Enterprise Support Plan customers

- Identify where to find pricing information on AWS services

• AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
• AWS Services product pages
• AWS Pricing API

- Recognize that alarms/alerts exist
- Identify how tags are used in cost allocation