Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Explore how millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

In November 2004, the first AWS service launched for public usage is Simple Queue Service (SQS). Thereafter Pinkham and lead developer Christopher Brown developed the Amazon EC2 service, with a team in Cape Town, South Africa. Amazon Web Services was officially re-launched on March 14, 2006, combining the three initial service offerings of Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2.

AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS has developed and created its highly available global infrastructure allowing users to deploy and manage their estates all across the world through the use of the region, Availability Zone and Edge Location geographical components.

The AWS Cloud Operates 61 Availability Zones within 20 geographic regions around the world, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Hong Kong SAR, and Milan.

Region: An AWS Region is a geographical location with a collection of availability zones mapped to physical data centers in that region. Each Amazon Region is designed to be completely isolated from the other Amazon Regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability.

Availability Zone: An Availability Zone is an isolated location inside a region.  This is the place where actual compute, Storage, network and database resources are hosted. Each Availability Zones belong to a single region. Each Availability Zones is isolated, but the AZs in a region are connected through low-latency links.

Edge Location: An edge location is where end users access services located at AWS. They are located in most of the major cities around the world and are specifically used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency. It is like frontend for the service we access which are located in AWS cloud.

Type Of Amazon Web Services

Each type of AWS service is categorized under a domain, the few domains which are widely used.

• Compute
• Storage
• Database
• Migration
• Network and Content Delivery
• Management Tools
• Security & Identity Compliance
• Messaging
• Analytics

Compute

The Compute domain includes services related to compute workloads, it includes the following services:

1. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
2. Lambda
3. Elastic Beanstalk
4. Auto Scaling
5. Elastic Load Balancing

Storage
The Storage domain includes services related data storage, it includes the following services:

1. S3 (Simple Storage Service)
2. EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store)
3. Amazon Glacier
4. AWS Snowball

Database

The Database domain is used for database related workloads, it includes the following services:

1. Amazon Aurora
2. Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
3. Amazon DynamoDB
4. Amazon RedShift

Migration

The Migration domain is used for transferring data to or from the AWS Infrastructure, it includes the following services:

1. AWS database Migration Service
2. AWS SnowBall

Networking and Content Delivery
The Networking and Content Delivery domain is used for isolating your network infrastructure, and content delivery is used for faster delivery of content. It includes the following services:

1. Amazon Route 53
2. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
3. AWS CloudFront
4. AWS Direct Connect

Management 
The Management Tools domain consists of services which are used to manage other services in AWS, it includes the following services:

1. AWS CloudWatch
2. AWS CloudFomation
3. AWS CloudTrail

Security
The Security & Identity, Compliance domain consist of services which are used to manage to authenticate and provide security to your AWS resources. It consists of the following services:

1. AWS IAM
2. Amazon Cognito

Messaging
The Messaging domain consists of services which are used for queuing, notifying or emailing messages. It consists of the following services:

1. Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service)
2. Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service)
3. Amazon SES (Simple Email Service)

Analytics 
The Analytics domain consists of services, which are used for quickly and easily build and manage a data lake for analytics. It consists of the following Services:

1. EMR (Amazon Elastic Map-Reduce)
2. Amazon Kinesis Streams
3. AWS Data Pipeline

How to Become AWS Certified

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner: This certification provides individuals in a larger variety of cloud and technology roles with a way to validate their AWS Cloud knowledge and enhance their professional credibility. This exam covers four domains, including cloud concepts, security, technology, and billing and pricing.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Associate: This certification validates your ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies. This exam is for anyone with at least one year of hands-on experience designing available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable and distributed systems on AWS.

AWS Certified Developer-Associate: This certification validates proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS. This exam is for anyone with one or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining an AWS-based application, plus in-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator-Associate: This certification validates your technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on the AWS platform. This exam is for anyone with one or more years of hands-on experience operating AWS-based applications.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Professional: This certification validates your advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. This exam is anyone two or more years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer-Professional: This certification validates your technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform. This exam is for anyone with two or more years of hands-on experience provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments.

AWS Certified Security-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in securing the AWS platform. This exam is for anyone in an experienced security role.

AWS Certified Big Data-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in designing and implementing AWS services to derive value from data. This exam is for anyone who performs complex Big Data analyses.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in designing and implementing AWS and hybrid IT architectures at scale. This exam is for anyone who performs complex networking tasks.

AWS Certified Machine Learning-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in building, training, tuning, and deploying machine learning (ML) models using AWS Cloud. This exam is for anyone who performs a development or data science role.

Prerequisite and Validity for Certification.

1. You will be required to update your certification (or recertify) every three years.
2. Candidates are no longer required to have an Associate-level certification before pursuing Professional-level certification, and they are no longer required to have Foundational or Associate certification before pursuing Specialty certification.
3. You can renew your certification by using your 50% off voucher code to take the current, full exam at 50% off.