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Dianna Dimambro
Dianna Dimambro

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AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification: Key Terms

#webdev #cloudcomputing #aws #cloudpractitioner

I'm currently studying for my AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification.
As someone who has been dipping my toes in the Cloud Computing Space, I have not actually dive into AWS and their web services.

From my research, this exam with the proper studying takes 1-3 weeks depending on your experience with using AWS.

This blog post defines all of the keywords i came across while studying for this exam

Key Terms

☁️ Compute and Architecture

  1. AWS Fargate is a serverless computer engine for containers.
  2. Instances are virtual servers.
  3. Elasticity in cloud computing is the ability to automatically scale up or down resources based on demand.
  4. AWS Well Architecture Tool is a service in the cloud to measure your architecture and make workloads more reliable and secure.
  5. Shared Responsibility Model is AWS + You. AWS = security of the cloud and You = security in the cloud
  6. Serverless - is a event-driven architecture with no infrastructure to maintain which can automatically scale.
  7. Micro services are ****architectural approach that structures applications as a collection of small, independent, and loosely coupled services, each performing a single business function.
  8. ECS - Elastic Container Service simplifies deployment, management and scaling of containerized services.
  9. AWS Global Accelerator improves availability and performance of applications by routing user traffic through the AWS global network.
  10. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs code without provisions or managing servers.
  11. ECS - Elastic Container Service simplifies deployment, management and scaling of containerized services.
  12. EFS - Elastic File System is a serverless, Network File System (NFS)
  13. Amazon EC2 takes virtual servers (IaaS) that you manage (OS, patches, etc.)
  14. Amazon Redshift is a managed cloud data warehouse and not for data that changes constantly. Optimized for analytics (OLAP), not transactional workloads (OLTP)
  15. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) - isolated virtual network in AWS
  16. A private cloud is operated solely for a single organization. It can be on-premises or hosted externally but offers more control at the cost of capital investment.
  17. A hybrid cloud connects on-premises or private cloud infrastructure with public cloud resources. AWS Direct Connect and VPN are commonly used to build hybrid architectures.

💾 Storage

  • Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, and fully managed graph database service designed for highly connected datasets. Use cases such as identity graphs, knowledge graphs, and fraud detection
  • Amazon S3 Glacier - is a low cost archive storage,used mainly for archiving and long term backups.
  • Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service that stores and retrieve unstructured data.
  • EBS - Elastic Block Store is a high performance persistent block storage service
  • Amazon Aurora is fully managed, high-performance relational database engine built for the cloud, compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL
  • AWS Snowball is a petabyte scale data transport solution.. is mainly for high size large scale data transfer
  • Amazon ElastiCache - is a managed in memory caching service supported by Redis and Memcached.

🧠 Database

  • AWS Snowball is a petabyte scale data transport solution.. is mainly for high size large scale data transfers.
  • Dynamo DB - Serverless NoSQL Database

🌐 Networking

  1. Amazon CloudWatch collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources.
  2. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available DNS web service offering domain registration, health checks, and traffic routing policies like latency-based and geolocation routing
  3. AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated private network connection..
  4. AWS CloudFormation - a service that helps you model your AWS services.
  5. Amazon GuardDuty uses machine learning to monitor CloudTrail events and DNS logs for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior.
  6. API Gateway is a fully managed service that acts as a secure "front door" for applications to access data and functionality from backend services.
  7. AWS DMS is a managed service that enables fast, secure migration and replication of databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) to AWS,

🛡️Security

  • AWS WAF is a Web Application Firewall that protects web applications from common hacking techniques like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
  • CloudTrail - records every API call in your AWS account.
  • AWS Shield - is a web service to prevent DDOS attacks
  • AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on demand access to compliance reports and help customers meet audit requirements.
  • AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

📊 Monitoring & Management

  1. AWS Config continuously monitors and records resource configurations, enabling you to assess compliance against desired states and track configuration changes over time.
  2. AWS Trusted Advisor - provides real-time recommendations to help you follow AWS best practices.
  3. CI/CD is Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery or Deployment) is a DevOps methodology that automates the building, testing, and deployment of code changes using a structured pipeline.
  4. AWS CloudFormation - a service that helps you model your AWS services.
  5. Amazon Kinesis is a web service to make it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data such as application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry.
  6. AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) most comprehensive billing dataset, published to S3.

🔄 Integration

  1. AWS SNS is a service that send notifications via email, SMS, and push notifications.
  2. Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service - a fully managed message queuing service that enables developers to decouple and scale micro-services, distributed systems, and serverless applications. 
  3. AWS Step Function is a serverless orchestration service that lets you sequence services into a visual workflow. (example: Pause a workflow to wait for human approval, coordinate the steps for building, training, and deploying a machine learning model using services like Amazon SageMaker)

🤖 AI/ML

  1. Amazon Polly - uses deep learning for text to speech service and can create nature-sounding human speech in many languages.
  2. Amazon Rekognition - uses deep learning to analyze images, videos, and capabilities like object detection, facial recognition, text detection, etc.
  3. Amazon Macie uses Machine Learning to discover and protect sensitive data
  4. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed ML platform covering the entire workflow

Pricing

  1. AWS Cost Explorer - Amazon Web Services is a interface to visualize, understand and manage AWS costs/usage over time.
  2. Reserved Instances (RI) - provide significant discounts (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing for Amazon EC2 instances in exchange for a 1- or 3-year commitment.
  3. Savings Plans can only be purchased for EC2, Fargate, and AWS Lambda usage,
  4. In contrast to Savings Plan -Reservation models are available for a greater range of services including EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, Redshift, and DynamoDB.
  5. Spot Instances -Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud and are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand.
  6. On Demand Instance has no upfront cost and charges per second (Linux) or per hour depending on OS.

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