AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional

Achieving AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional certification validates that you have advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. It also confirms that you understand the concepts of:

• Designing and deploying dynamically scalable, highly available, fault-tolerant and reliable applications on AWS.
• Selecting appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements.
• Migrating complex, multitier applications on AWS.
• Designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS.
• Implementing cost control strategies.

Before attempting the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam, you should have the following required knowledge and skills:
AWS Knowledge and Experience

• AWS core services, including Compute and Networking, Storage and CDN, Database, Application Services, Deployment and Management.
• Security features that AWS provides and best practices.
• Ability to design and implement for elasticity and scalability.
• Network technologies as they relate to AWS networking, including DNS and load balancing, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Direct Connect.
• Storage and archival options.
• State management.
• Database and replication methodologies.
• Self-healing techniques and fault-tolerant services.
• Disaster recovery and failover strategies.
• Application migration plans to AWS.
• Network connectivity options.
• Deployment and management.
•  

General IT Knowledge and Experience

• Large-scale distributed systems architecture.
• Eventual consistency.
• Relational and non-relational databases.
• Multitier architectures: load balancers, caching, web servers, application servers, networking and databases.
• Loose coupling and stateless systems.
• Content delivery networks.
• System performance tuning.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam is ideal for individuals who have experience designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Achieving AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification validates your understanding of these concepts:

• Designing and deploying scalable, highly available and fault-tolerant systems on AWS.
• Lift and shift of an existing on-premises application to AWS.
• Ingress and egress of data to and from AWS.
• Selecting the appropriate AWS service based on data, compute, database or security requirements.
• Identifying appropriate use of AWS architectural best practices.
• Estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control mechanisms.
• Before attempting the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam, you should have the following required knowledge and skills:

AWS Knowledge

• Hands-on experience using computer, networking, storage, and database AWS services.
• Professional experience architecting large-scale distributed systems.
• Understanding of Elasticity and Scalability concepts.
• Understanding of network technologies as they relate to AWS.
• A good understanding of all security features and tools that AWS provides and how they relate to traditional services.
• A strong understanding of how to interact with AWS (AWS SDK, AWS API, Command Line Interface, AWS Cloud Formation).
• Hands-on experience with AWS deployment and management services.

General IT Knowledge

• Excellent understanding of typical multitier architectures: web servers (Apache, nginx, IIS), caching, application
• RDBMS (MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server), NoSQL.
• On servers, and load balancers.
• Knowledge of message queuing and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
• Familiarity with loose coupling and stateless systems.
• Understanding of different consistency models in distributed systems.
• Experience with CDN and performance concepts.
• Network experience with route tables, access control lists, firewalls, NAT, HTTP, DNS, IP and OSI Network.
• Knowledge of Restful Web Services, XML, JSON.
• Familiarity with the software development lifecycle.
• Work experience with information and application security, including public key encryption, SSH, access credentials and X.509 certificates.