Course Description
Bootcamp | 36 hours | 3.6 CEUs | $3,195
AWS Academy Cloud Architecting covers the fundamentals of building IT infrastructure on AWS. The course is designed to teach solutions architects how to optimize their use of the AWS Cloud by understanding AWS services and how they fit into cloud-based solutions. Although architectural solutions can differ depending on the industry, type of application, and size of the business, this course emphasizes best practices for the AWS Cloud that apply to all of them. It also recommends various design patterns to help you think through the process of architecting optimal IT solutions on AWS. Throughout the course, students will explore case studies that showcase how some AWS customers have designed their infrastructures and the strategies and services that they have implemented. Finally, this course provides opportunities for students to build a variety of infrastructures through a guided, hands-on approach.
AWS250 is the second course in the AWS Academy Solutions Architect Professional Certificate. To complete the certificate students will also enroll in AWS100. Click on each course link for more details and to add to cart.
Course Outline
- Module 0 – Review This module shares an overview of cloud concepts and Amazon Web Services.
- This module is optional depending on student’s key areas of interest, expectations, and level of experience.
- Module 1 - Welcome to AWS Academy Cloud Architecting
- This module provides an overview of the AWS Academy Cloud Architecting and reviews course objectives. It will walk students through the creation of their AWS accounts, used throughout the course to enhance the cloud learning journey.
- Module 2 - Designing Your Environment
- This module guides you through how architects design their Amazon Web Services, or AWS, environments. It also establishes guidelines and patterns for selecting AWS Regions, Availability Zones, Multi-Accounts, Multi-VPCs, and subnet structures. These concepts are conveyed through a mixture of recommendations, best practices, design patterns, and questions meant to be used by architects to determine the full requirements of their solution.
- Module 3 - Designing for High Availability - Section I
- This module builds on the Designing Your Environment content and explains the concepts of high availability and fault tolerance. Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 are discussed as options for implementing a single hostname that can communicate with multiple endpoints. Concepts are reinforced with an exercise to improve an architecture, along with a group discussion to forklift an existing application.
- Module 4 - Designing for High Availability - Section II
- This module builds on Module 3 and explores the best practices to “Avoid Single Points of Failure.” Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 are further discussed and concepts are reinforced with another exercise and a lab that uses Auto-Scaling with AWS Lambda.
- Module 5 - Automating Your Infrastructure
- This module provides an in-depth analysis of microservices and serverless architectures to explain how they can make the infrastructure more resilient and cost effective. The goal of this module is to teach the fundamental concepts of these non-traditional approaches to deploying applications.
- Module 6 - Decoupling Your Infrastructure
- This module teaches decoupling design patterns and the need for reducing interdependencies between tiers. Students will learn best practices for using microservices and designing solutions with components.
- Module 7 - Designing Web-Scale Media
- Answers the question “How do I make sure that I am using my storage in the most efficient and available way so that my applications run faster and my users have a better experience.” Students will perform a lab that implements a serverless architecture with AWS managed services.
- Module 8 - Is Your Infrastructure Well-Architected?
- The goal of this module is to introduce the Well-Architected Framework, and to provide a quick overview of each of its five pillars. A deeper explanation of each pillar will be included in the upcoming modules.
- Module 9 - Well-Architected Pillar 1: Operational Excellence
- This module focuses on the Operational Excellence pillar of the Well-Architected Framework. Operational excellence is challenging to achieve in traditional on-premises environments, where operations is perceived as a function that is isolated and distinct from the lines of business and development teams that it supports. By adopting these practices, you can build architectures that provide insight to their status, are enabled for effective and efficient operation and event response, and can continue to improve and support the goals of the business.
- Module 10 - Well-Architected Pillar 2: Security
- Focuses on the second pillar of the Well-Architected Framework: Security. Best practices are discussed, and you will learn how to secure data at every layer in the application. You’ll participate in an exercise to recommend security enhancements in accordance with the security pillar.
- Module 11 - Well-Architected Pillar 3: Reliability
- This module highlights the third pillar of the Well-Architected Framework: Reliability. Best practices are shared with AWS tools to improve system reliability. You will review example architectural patterns for implementing a reliable solution and perform a Lab: Multi-Region Failover with Amazon Route 53.
- Module 12 - Well-Architected Pillar 4: Performance Efficiency
- This module provides in-depth insight into the Performance Efficiency pillar of the Well-Architected Framework. While many best practices are discussed, this module focuses on how to tune or offload components of your system to improve performance. You will participate in an exercise to improve an architecture.
- Module 13 - Well-Architected Pillar 5: Cost-Optimization
- This module focuses on the Cost Optimization pillar of the Well-Architected Framework. Discover best practices, how to procure Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances for the lowest cost, and how to analyze or audit your resources for inefficient costs or budget overruns. Before finalizing, you’ll participate in an exercise to improve an architecture.
- Module 14 - Troubleshooting
- The goal of this module is to provide you with common troubleshooting errors with best practices in how to resolve. You’ll be introduced to services that provide you with direct access to an agent to help optimize costs in identifying underused resources, and guidance on getting the optimal performance and availability of your architecture based on your requirements.
- Module 15 - Design Patterns and Sample Architectures
- This module re-visits the architecture patterns with a re-cap of common design patterns. You’ll discover how to implement services to the design patterns and visualize an entire solution using AWS services.
Learner Outcomes
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Describe how cloud adoption transforms the way IT systems work
- Describe the benefits of cloud computing with Amazon Web Services
- Discuss how to design systems that are secure, reliable, high-performing, and cost efficient
- Describe principles to consider when migrating or designing new applications for the cloud
- Identify the design patterns and architectural options applied in a variety of use cases
- Define high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability
- Discuss how to avoid single points of failure
- List AWS services that have built-in fault tolerance or can be designed for fault tolerance
- Describe why load balancing is a key architectural component for AWS-powered applications
- Identify the benefits of Infrastructure as Code
- Describe how to leverage the capabilities of AWS to support automation
- Create, manage, provision, and update related resources using AWS CloudFormation
- Articulate the importance of making systems highly cohesive and loosely coupled
- Describe system coupling to support the distributed nature of applications built for the cloud
- Describe database services for storing and deploying web-accessible applications
- Compare structured query language (SQL) databases with NoSQL databases
- Describe how the AWS Well-Architected Framework improves cloud-based architectures
- Describe the business impact of design decisions
- Identify the design principles and best practices of the Operational Excellence pillar
- Describe how to secure data at every layer in the application
- Describe the appropriate tools and services to provide security-focused content
- Describe the design principles and best practices of the Reliability pillar.
- Select compute, storage, database, and networking resources to improve performance
- Evaluate the most important performance metrics for your applications
- Follow best practices to eliminate unneeded costs or suboptimal resources
Additional Information
This class prepares you for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification exam.
NOTE: Students will receive two Canvas invites for this course. One invite is for the SLU Workforce Center Canvas site and the other is for the AWS Academy Canvas site. Students should follow the instructions in their course reminder emails to access the SLU Workforce Center Canvas site prior to the first day/night of class. In the SLU Canvas site, students will find their Webex logins for each class session as well as other valuable information. Accessing and using the AWS Academy Canvas site will be discussed during the first day/night of class by the instructor and requires no action prior to class starting.
Prerequisites
To ensure success in this course, students should have:
- Completed AWS Academy Cloud Foundations (ACF) or have equivalent experience
- A working knowledge of distributed systems
- Familiarity with general networking concepts
- A working knowledge of multi-tier architectures
- Familiarity with cloud computing concepts
Duration
36 Hours | 6 Days or 12 Nights
Applies Towards the Following Certificates
- AWS Academy Solutions Architect Professional Certificate : 54 Hour Certificate
- Software Engineering Cloud Certificate : 60 Hour Certificate
*Academic Unit eligibility to be determined by college/university in which you are enrolled in a degree seeking program.