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All the Clouds in AWS

Christina Gorton — Sun, 09 Aug 2020 20:10:28 +0000

Cloud Services

I often hear AWS users complain that there are too many services with "cloud" in the name. These services are usually completely different from one another which leads to even more confusion.

In this quick post I will list all of the current services with Cloud in their name and what they are used for.

Types of Services:

CloudFormation

CloudFormation: Is infrastructure as code. It gives you the ability to use a templating script like yaml or json to set up services.

How it works

Use yaml or json to code your infrastructure from scratch
upload your local code to a S3 bucket.
Use AWS CloudFormation to create a stack based on your template code.
AWS CloudFormation will provisdion and configure the stacks and resources for you.

CloudTrail

CloudTrail is a log of all actions that have taken place inside your AWS environment.

CloudTrail answers: "Who did what on AWS?"
It is a web service that records API activity in your AWS account
Logs information on:
- who made a request
- the services used
- the actions performed
- parameters for the actions
- the response elements returned

CloudFront

CloudFront is a Content Distribution Network. It creates a cached copy of your website and copies to servers located near people trying to download a website.

CloudWatch

CloudWatch focuses on the activity of AWS services and resources, reporting on their health and performance.

CloudWatch answers: "What is happening on AWS?"
monitors AWS resources and applications
collects and tracks metrics
collects and monitors log files
with CloudWatch you can set alarms

Cloud Watch is also a collection of multiple services.

CloudWatch Logs: any custom log data, memory usage, Rails logs or Nginx logs

CloudWatch Metrics: metrics that are based off of logs like memory usage

CloudWatch Events: trigger an event based on a condition like "Every hour take a snapshot of the server"

CloudWatch Alarms: triggers notifications based on metrics

CloudWatch Dashboard: create visualizations based on metrics

Cloud Search

CloudSearch is a search engine used for sites like an e-commerce website that you want to add a search input too.

How to Create an AWS Account

Christina Gorton — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 18:26:43 +0000

Introduction

This tutorial is a step by step walk-through on how to set up an AWS account.

To use any of the services available on AWS you must first create an account.

With an account you will have will be able to manage pricing, users, security, and can try the various services like the popular Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Step 1 - Navigating to create an acount

In this step, you will navigate to the
AWS Homepage and fill in the appropriate information to start creating your account.

To start navigate to the AWS Homepage
You can click any of the following buttons to create a new account:
Buttons:
- Create an AWS Account
- Create a Free Account
- Sign up for free

Next navigate to the Create an AWS account form and fill in the information with:
- Your Email
- Password
- AWS account name of your choosing
Click Continue.

Step 2- Contact Information

In this step you will fill in your contact information.

You can choose a Professional or Personal account type.

Fill in the Contact information form. Fill in:
- Your Full Name
- Valid Phone Number
- Country/Region
- Address, City, State/ Province or region, and Postal code where valid.
Agree to the terms of use.
Click the Create Account and Continue button.

Step 3- Filling Out Your Payment Information

In order to use AWS you must provide a credit or debt card number.

You need to fill out the Payment Information with a valid debit or credit card to use AWS.
Once the information is filled in hit the Verify and Add button.

Step 4- Confirming Your Identity

Add a valid phone number so you can confirm your identity.
Choose Text Message or Voice call
Fill in the Security check
Click the Send SMS button to continue.
Once the you receive the verification code fill it in and hit the Verify Code button.

Step 5- Choosing a Support Plan

Select a Support Plan

Choose the free Basic Plan ## Step 6- Signing In

Click the Sign in to the Console button.
Fill in your email and click Next
Fill in the password and sign in to the console.

You should now be at the AWS Management Console.

Conclusion

In this tutorial you followed the steps to create an individual AWS account.

Now you can explore other topics like creating an IAM user, password policy, or checking out all of the AWS services.

The above these topics are covered in ExamPro's Certified Cloud Practitioner Course.

AWS Billing and Pricing

Christina Gorton — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 21:48:08 +0000

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets is a service that helps you plan service usage, service costs, and instance reservations.

Note: First two budgets are free of charge.

Each budget is $0.02 per day with a 20,000 budget limit.

Key Points:

AWS Budgets give you the ability to setup alerts if you exceed or are approaching your defined budget
Types of budgets:

Cost
Usage
Reservation

Budgets can be tracked at the monthly, quarterly, or yearly levels with customizable start and end dates.
Alerts support EC2, RDS, Redshift, and ElastiCache reservations
Your budget can be based on a fixed cost or you can plan your upfront cost based on your chosen level.
Budgets can easily be managed from the AWS Budgets dashboard or via the Budgets API
You can get notified by providing an email or chatbot and give a threshold for how close to the current or forecasted budget you would like to spend before being alerted.

AWS Cost and Usage Report

The AWS Cost and Usage Reports tracks your AWS usage and provides estimated charges associated with your account.

Key Points:

You can generate a detailed spreadsheet, enabling you to better analyze and understand your AWS costs.
The reports are placed in to S3
You can use Athena to turn the report into a queryable database.
You can use QuickSight to visualize your billing data as graphs.

Athena: Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

QuickSight: Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in your organization.

Consolidated Billing

Consolidated billing allows you to have one bill for all of your accounts.

Key Points:

You can consolidate your billing and payment methods across multiple AWS accounts into one bill.
For billing, AWS treats all accounts in an organization as if they were one account.
You can designate one master account that pays the charges of all the other member accounts.
There is no extra cost to use consolidated billing.
You can use AWS Cost Explorer to visualize usage for consolidated billing.

Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.

Key Points:

Costs for multiple AWS accounts within an AWS Organization will be consolidated in a master account.
You can use default reports to help gain insight into your cost rivers and usage trends.
You can use forecasting to get an idea of future costs.
You can choose to view your data at a monthly or daily level of granularity.
You can use filter and grouping functionalities to dig deeper into your data.

TCO Calculator

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) allows you to estimate how much you would save moving to AWS from on-premise.

Key Points:

It provides you with a detailed set of reports that can be used in executive presentations.
The tool is built on underlying calculation models that generate fair assessments of value that you can achieve given the data provided.
Helps reduce the need to invest in large capital expenditures.
The tool is for approximation purposes only.

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor advises you on security, saving money, performance, service limits, and fault tolerance

Key Points:

All accounts receive 7 free Trusted Advisor Checks. Business and Enterprise accounts you receive all Trusted Advisor Checks.

The 5 areas Trusted Advisor will check you on:

Cost Optimization
Performance
Security
Fault Tolerance
Service Limits

Each category has the potential to check many different services.

Most common checks in each category:

Cost Optimization

Idle Load Balancers
Unassociated Elastic IP Addresses

Performance

High Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances

Security

MFA on Root Account
IAM Access Key Rotation

Fault Tolerance

Amazon RDS Backups

Service Limits

For the complete list you can visit this page.

AWS Free Services

Certain AWS services are free, but the resources they setup may cost you.

Free services:

Free Services with resources that cost money:

AWS Landing Zone

AWS Landing Zone helps Enterprises quickly set-up a secure, AWS multi-account.

Key Points:

Set up through AWS Account Vending Machine (AVM)

AVM allows customers to create new AWS accounts in Organizational Units (OUs) preconfigured with an account security baseline, and a predefined network.

AVM automatically provisions and configures new accounts via AWS Service Catalog
Uses Single Sign-on (SSO) for managing and accessing accounts
The environment is customizable to allow customers to implement their own account baselines through a Landing Zone configuration and update pipeline

The AWS Landing Zone solution includes four accounts:

AWS Organization account
Shared Services account
Log Archive account
Security account

AWS Quick Starts

AWS Quick Starts are prebuilt templates by AWS and AWS Partners to help you deploy popular stacks on AWS.

Key Points:

It can reduce hundreds of manual procedures into a few steps.

A Quick Start is composed of 3 parts:

A reference architecture for the deployment
AWS CloudFormation templates that automate and configure the deployment
A deployment guide explaining the architecture and implementation in detail

Most Quick Start reference deployments enable you to spin up a fully functional architecture in less than an hour.

AWS Support Plans

AWS Support offers a range of plans that provide access to tools and expertise that support the success and operational health of your AWS solutions.

Key Points:

There are 4 support plans available.

Basic Plan - Free
- Every AWS account has access to this free basic plan.
- It provides Email Support for Billing and Accounts.
Developer Plan- $20 USD month
- Great for learning how to use a lot of AWS services or for help configuring things while learning.
- Provides tech support via email -24hrs until reply
- Provides general support and help if your system is impaired
- Does not provide help with 3rd party products
Business Plan- $100 USD month
- Provides tech support via email -24hrs until reply
- Provides tech support via chat and phone 24 hours a day. Often can reach a support engineer within 10-15 minutes.
- Receive all Trusted Advisor Checks
- Will try to provide help with 3rd party products
Enterprise Plan- $15,000 USD month
- All of the services of the other plans included with this one
- Will respond within 15 minutes if there is a business critical system down
- Your account is given a Personal Concierge
- Your account is given a Technical Account Manager (TAM)

A TAM is a designated point of contact to all necessary AWS expertise

A Personal Concierge(Support Concierge) is a dedicated team of enterprise account specialist to help with billing and account subjects.

AWS Resource Groups and Tagging

Key Points:

Tags are words or phrases that act as metadata for organizing your AWS resources
Resource groups are a collection of resources that share one or more tags
Both help you organize and consolidate information based on your project and the resources that you use.

Resource Groups can display details about a group based on:

Metrics
Alarms
Configuration Settings
At any time you can modify the settings of your resource groups to change what resources appear

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalogue with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors.

Key Points:

You can easily find, buy, test, and deploy software that already runs on AWS
The product can be free to use or can have an associated charge. The charge becomes part of your AWS bill, and once you pay, AWS Marketplace pays the provider
The sales channel for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Consulting Partners allows you to sell your solutions to other AWS customers

Products can be offered as:

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
AWS CloudFormation templates
Software as a service (SaaS) offerings
AWS WAF rules

This material can be found on the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam. For more study material for the exam check out ExamPro's AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 2020 course.

Azure Fundamentals: Azure Portal

Christina Gorton — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 20:43:25 +0000

Azure Portal

The Azure portal is one of several management tools used in the Azure ecosystem. It is a web-based, unified console that provides an alternative to command-line tools.

It is available in every datacenter. This makes it designed for resiliency, low access latency, and high availability.

You can manage your Azure subscription with the Azure portal.

Within this tool you can build, manage, and track everything from simple web apps to complex cloud deployments.

The Azure portal's home page houses a menu with 4 main links:

Create a resource - allows you to create a new entity managed by Azure like a virtual machine or storage accounts.
Home- redirects you to the portal's main page.
Dashboard- Your dashboard is a place to manage all the major resources you use on Azure. You can also customize the dashboard.
All services

The predefined favorites are the most used resources in the Azure community.

You can customize these favorites to display the resources you and/or your team use most.

You can also view your subscriptions and notifications from the Azure portal homepage.

There are also predefined favorites of the most used resources by the Azure community.

You can customize these favorites to display the resources you and/or your team use most.

You can also view your subscriptions and any notifications from the Azure portal homepage.

From the portal you can navigate to other Azure management tools like Azure CLI and PowerShell.

Azure Preview Portal

The Azure preview portal is a web-based unified console that provides access to new features that are in:

Preview
Beta
Other pre-release

If you want to test preview features you should use preview.portal.azure.com

If you stable-release and production-ready features you should you use portal.azure.com

References:
Azure portal documentation

This is one of the topics covered in the Exam AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. To learn more about the management tools and other fundamentals needed for the exam, check out ExamPro's newest course Azure Fundamentals Certification (AZ-900) 2020

Free Youtube Channels I Recommend To Help You Pass AWS / Azure Certification ☁️

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 16:34:32 +0000

I'm Andrew Brown and I'm known for my free AWS Certification courses I publish on freeCodeCamp. I appreciate the community support but, I am not the only one working hard to help you change careers into the cloud. ☁️

I have 9 channels and I want to tell you Why I recommend them. Just so you know I have numbered them from 1-9 below but, it's to help you follow along and does not indicate a ranking.

Some of these channels deserve more subscribers then they currently have, so make a cloud content creator's day and hit that subscribe button.

So let us get to it:

1. Bart Castle 🇺🇸 (CloudBart)

Bart Castle is an AWS Instructor at CBT Nuggets. CBT Nuggets is generally known for Networking Certification training but they do have AWS Certification training. They run a monthly AWS free study group that is led by Bart.

If I only had three words to describe Bart it is:

⛺ Yurt
🦖 Dinos
🎷 Free-Style-Flute

To make sense of that you have to watch his channel.

Bart is great at face-to-face instruction. What I mean by that is that he can captivate and communicate Cloud information with no visual tools whatsoever. It's like he paints a picture in your head with just his face and words.

He does have props, draws on the screen like an interactive whiteboard, and has some visual effects to polish the learning experience but even if he didn't, he's still worth a watch.

A good place to start is with his AWS Identity And Access Management playlist which is essential knowledge for all AWS Certifications.

2. Gwyneth Peña S 🇺🇸

Gwyneth is a new up and coming channel that focuses on Microsoft Azure and so far has had an emphasis on Serverless and Azure Functions.

Her style of teaching is learn by doing, and you can see that since she jumps straight into Visual Studio Code editor.

She has one video in Spanish and one video about Cloud Engineering career advice. It will be interesting to see how her channel evolves the channel.

Her format is very well suited for Twitch live coding so it would not surprise me if we see live-streaming in the future and then posting on youtube, but we'll just have to wait and find out.

3. Neal Davis 🇦🇺 (Digital Cloud Training)

Neal creates full AWS certification courses and practice exams like myself. His teaching style format is similar to mine where he does lecture, labs and practice exam question walkthroughs

The key difference is pacing and depth. I am fast and shallow, Neal goes slow and deep. (Please no jokes).

If there is something that I don't cover in-depth, I point them to Neal's content.

If you like using Facebook he has a Facebook Study Group

Neal has more practice exam questions than me. I don't know what his secret is to produce so many but, if he wants to tell I'll be happy to listen 🙃

Here's an example of Neal going in greater depth than me in a topic. The Shared Responsibility Model is essential for all AWS Certifications.

4. Chirag Nayyar 🇸🇬

Chirag is ☁️ ⚡ the master of cross-cloud ⚡ ☁️. He has 20+ Cloud Certifications from AWS to Azure to GCP to Alibaba.

He is the best person to tell you how to study and to eliminate any blind spots in your cloud knowledge and, he has many videos on study habits and study strategy.

I had never considered going cross-cloud until Chirag. Although I focus on AWS going cross-cloud it made me better at AWS like using Active Directory.

He also has free lecture videos like me, and in fact, he has a full course on the AZ-900. You can pass the AZ-900 as Chirag has a 7-day course starting with this video here:

5. Sandip Das 🇮🇳

There's a new wave of hot, young and creative content creators that in a few years will make me look like I'm teaching QBasic in 1987. And yes, I know QBasic came out in 1991.

Sandip is an AWS Container Hero but he should really be called an AWS DevOps Hero. He is already blazing forward with modern teaching techniques with real-time engagement you'd only expect to find in gaming streams.

DevOps is one of the easiest entries in the Cloud industry, and Sandip is young enough to bridge that knowledge gap but old enough to get you in the industry knowledge to get the job.

If you're looking for a cloud mentor he has a pateron.

6. AWS Simplified 🇨🇦

AWS Simplified is a channel that produces deep-dives on very specific AWS topics in the context of practical application.

I said Neal's content goes deep, but AWS Simplified goes even deeper with a twist. That being said they only have around 100 videos at this time because lots of research has to go into contextualizing practical knowledge and into lecture content.

Also if you wondering who is AWS Simplified, well they are based in Toronto and that's all I can tell you.

I don't know why they are semi-anonymous and there could be a good reason. I do feel that this hinders the channel's growth.

The kind of content they make is very valuable but because it's not "packaged" as AWS Certification and Youtube it does not reward byte-size content in the first format. I bet the content creator doesn't make a lot of money.

So I urge you to donate to their pateron

7. Alejandra Quetzalli 🇺🇸 🇲🇽

Alejandra is a Cloud Developer Advocate for AWS who specializes in Robots, Newbies and Inclusion. She is the ideal role model in my opinion and is the future of cloud developer advocacy.

She has started her own personal project called "What The Cloud?" A youtube channel design to teach cloud concepts with inclusion and is the friendliest in mind.

Ale's co-instructor is the infamous Jonathan Dion, who is well known here in Canada for his live-instructions on hard topics like Amazon SageMaker.

Ale's videos take longer to produce because of careful consideration of how to best engineer them for the newbie market. She also is making efforts to make her content accessible by offering them in Spanish and French.

If you ever have any Cloud Fan Art I'm sure she'd love to receive some.

8. Namrata H Shah 🇺🇸

Namrata is an AWS Community and a Microsoft MVP. She has lots of videos on Cloud Computing. What I like about her content is that it's personal, practical and gets to the point.

She is not on Twitter 😱 and I think if she was present there you'd see her overall channel and she would have greater popularity.

You'll notice in my videos that I bold, highlight and mark things in red, Namrata was my inspiration for this because I realized doing this helps information stick.

Even though she is not on Twitter you can find her on LinkedIn

9. Marcia Villalba 🇫🇮 🇺🇾

Marcia was an AWS Serverless Hero turned AWS Developer Advocate which is an incredible achievement and shows her love and dedication to AWS and the cloud.

Her channel is FooBar Serverless. Though it has Serverless in the name, Marcia is one of those peoples that are good at everything.

When I need to implement something on the ExamPro platform I will be looking through her videos to find a how-to.

I used her videos to implement Cognito on ExamPro
I used her videos to use DynamoDB single-table design on ExamPro
I used her videos to implement API Gateway on ExamPro

Marcia has done a few videos on AWS Certification and I hope she continues to produce more because they were excellent.

P.S.
For future FREE Cloud Youtube Channel recommendations, I will keep them up-to-date on my ExamPro Channel Homepage

P.S.S.
If you believe in free cloud content and need help getting visibility or traction as a cloud content creator, my email is always open at andrew@exampro.co

AWS: EC2 Hibernation

Christina Gorton — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:02:26 +0000

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

What is EC2 Hibernation?

Have you ever put your computer to "sleep"?
When you close the computer your work is still saved and available as soon as you open the computer back up.

In the same way we can put our EC2 instances "to sleep" or hibernation.

Hibernation Flow:

Benefits

Hibernation saves the contents from the instance memory (RAM) to your Amazon EBS root volume.

This leads to a faster boot up time for your instances.

AWS persists the instance's Amazon EBS root volume and any attached Amazon EBS data volumes.

When an instances is started again:

Your Amazon EBS volume is restored to it's previous state. (Like when opening a computer that has been "put to sleep")
Your RAM contents are reloaded and the processes that previously were running on the instance are resumed.

Important Information

EC2 hibernation is available for On-Demand and Reserved Instances.

An Instance can only be put in to hibernation if it meets the hibernation prerequisites.

Examples of prerequisites include:

The root EBS volume must be encrypted.
Supported instance families include: C3, C4, C5, M3, M4, M5, R3, R4, and R5
Instance RAM size must be less than 150 GB
The Amazon Machine Images it currently supports are Amazon Linux 2, Linux AMI, Ubuntu and Windows

AWS does not charge for a hibernated instance when it is in a stopped state.

There are limitation and actions not supported for hibernation.

For a complete list of limitations check out the AWS documentation.

Use Cases for Hibernation:

Apps with long-running processing
To save RAM state for quicker boot-up
For services that take a lot of time to initialize

This topic is addressed in the new AWS Solutions Architect Exam[SAA-C02]

If you want to learn even more and prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam then check out our course on ExamPro.

FREE AWS Developer Associate Certification Course (250+ Videos) 😱

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 22:53:27 +0000

I'm Andrew Brown, I create free study courses, so everyone can learn the cloud.

This time I am bringing you a Study Course designed to help you pass the AWS Developer Associate Certification.

This AWS Certification is perfect for web-developers looking to make the switch to cloud engineer or add practical cloud skills to their résumé. 🚀

Most Videos are part of a Video Youtube Playlist

P.S. The easiest way for you to support free video content so I can release bigger and larger cloud and developer courses is to like, comment, follow and subscribe. I would say the most important being Youtube Subscriptions. 🙏 There is very little to no money in Youtube ads.

P.S.S. The best way to support more free video content is to
👉 Buy Access to the extra content for the AWS Developer Associate 👈
You get access to the videos as well as Quizzes and Flashcards on the videos and practice exams.

P.S.S.S.

There are 10 hours of new content specific to the AWS Developer Associate and there are 5 hours of video content that is shared from the AWS Solutions Architect Associate. Since its hard to mix videos from multiple playlists you may need to use the table of contents down below.

⭐Course Content ⭐

☁️ Introduction
🔁🎤 Exam Guide Overview
🔁🎤 Why get the AWS developer associate?

☁️ Elastic Beanstalk
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Supported Languages
🔁🎤 Web vs Worker Environment
🔁🎤 Web Environment Types
🔁🎤 Deployment Policies
🔁🎤 All At Once
🔁🎤 Rolling
🔁🎤 Rolling with Additional Batch
🔁🎤 Immutable
🔁🎤 Deployment Methods
🔁🎤 In-Place vs Blue/Green
🔁🎤 In-Place vs Blue/Green - Part 2
🔁🎤 Configuration Files
🔁🎤 Environment Manifest
🔁🎤 Server Configuration
🔁🎤 EB CLI
🔁🎤 Custom Image
🔁🎤 Configuring RDS
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ Elastic Beanstalk Follow-Along
🔁⌨️ Cloud Environment Setup
🔁⌨️ Open Cloud9 Security Group
🔁⌨️ Preview App in Cloud9
🔁⌨️ Initialize Git Repo
🔁⌨️ Setup EB CLI
🔁⌨️ Initialize EB Application
🔁⌨️ Configure EB Application
🔁⌨️ Create EB Environment
🔁⌨️ Immutable Deploys
🔁⌨️ Blue/Green Deploys
🔁⌨️ Single Container Dockerfile
🔁⌨️ Single Container with ECR
🔁⌨️ Cleanup

☁️ Elastic Container Service (ECS)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Creating a Cluster
🔁🎤 Task Definition
🔁🎤 Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
🔁⌨️ Follow-Along

☁️ Fargate
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Fargate Tasks
🔁🎤 Fargate vs Lambda
🔁⌨️ Follow-Along
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ X-Ray
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Anatomy of X-Ray
🔁🎤 Instrumentation
🔁🎤 X-Ray Daemon
🔁🎤 X-Ray Concepts
🔁🎤 Service Graph
🔁🎤 Segments
🔁🎤 Subsegments
🔁🎤 Traces
🔁🎤 Sampling
🔁🎤 Trace Header
🔁🎤 Filter Expressions
🔁🎤 Groups
🔁🎤 Annotations and Metadata
🔁🎤 Exceptions
🔁🎤 AWS Service Integration
🔁🎤 Supported Languages
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 SSL Termination

☁️ Route 53
🔁🎤 Route 53 Introduction
🔁🎤 Use Case
🔁🎤 Record Sets
🔁🎤 Routing Policies
🔁🎤 Simple Routing Policies
🔁🎤 Weighted Routing Policies
🔁🎤 Latency Based Routing
🔁🎤 Failover Routing Policies
🔁🎤 Geolocation Routing Policies
🔁🎤 Geoproximity Routing Policies
🔁🎤 Multi-Value Answer Policies
🔁🎤 Health Checks
🔁🎤 Resolver
🔁🎤 Route53 Cheat Sheet

☁️ AWS CLI & SDK
🔁🎤 Command Line Interface (CLI)
🔁🎤 Software Development Kit (SDK)
🔁🎤 Programmatic Access
🔁⌨️ Working with the CLI
🔁⌨️ Cloud9 Setup
🔁⌨️ Working with the SDK
🔁🎤 CLI & SDK Cheat Sheet

☁️ Key Management Service (KMS)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 CLI Commands
🔁🎤 Customer Master Keys (CMK)
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ Cognito
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Web Identity Federation
🔁🎤 User Pools
🔁🎤 Identity Pools
🔁🎤 Sync
🔁⌨️ Follow-Along
🔁🎤 Cognito Cheat Sheet

☁️ Simple Notification Service (SNS)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Topics
🔁🎤 Subscriptions
🔁🎤 Application As Subscriber
🔁🎤 SNS Cheat Sheet

☁️ Simple Queue Service (SQS)
🔁🎤 SQS Introduction
🔁🎤 Use Case
🔁🎤 Limits & Retention
🔁🎤 Queue Types
🔁🎤 Visibility Timeout
🔁🎤 Short vs Long Polling
🔁🎤 SQS Cheat Sheet

☁️ Kinesis
🔁🎤 Introduction to Kinesis
🔁🎤 Data Streams
🔁🎤 Data Analytics
🔁🎤 Video Streams
🔁🎤 Firehose
🔁🎤 Kinesis Cheat Sheet

☁️ Parameter Store
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Parameter Policies
🔁🎤 CLI Heirarchy

☁️ Secrets Manager
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Automatic Rotation
🔁🎤 CLI

☁️ DynamoDB
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Anatomy of a Table
🔁🎤 Read Consistency
🔁🎤 Partitions
🔁🎤 Primary Keys
🔁🎤 Simple Primary Key
🔁🎤 Composite Primary Key
🔁🎤 Primary Key Design
🔁🎤 Query & Scan
🔁🎤 Query
🔁🎤 Scans
🔁🎤 Provisioned Capacity
🔁🎤 On-Demand Capacity
🔁🎤 Calculating Reads
🔁🎤 Calculating Writes
🔁🎤 Global Tables
🔁🎤 Transactions
🔁🎤 Time to Live (TTL)
🔁🎤 Streams
🔁🎤 Errors
🔁🎤 Indexes
🔁🎤 Local Secondary Indexes (LSI)
🔁🎤 Global Secondary Indexes (GSI)
🔁🎤 LSI vs GSI
🔁🎤 DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ DynamoDB Follow-Along
🔁⌨️ Getting Started
🔁⌨️ Query
🔁⌨️ Batch Get Item
🔁⌨️ Batch Write Item
🔁⌨️ Get Item
🔁⌨️ Delete Table
🔁⌨️ Create Table
🔁⌨️ Transact

☁️ EC2
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Instance Types
🔁🎤 Instance Sizes
🔁🎤 Instance Profile
🔁🎤 Placement Groups
🔁🎤 Userdata
🔁🎤 Metadata
🔁🎤 EC2 Cheat Sheet

☁️ VPC
🔁🎤 VPC Introduction
🔁🎤 Core Components
🔁🎤 Key Features
🔁🎤 Default VPC
🔁🎤 Default Everywhere IP
🔁🎤 Peering
🔁🎤 Route Tables
🔁🎤 Internet Gateway (IGW)
🔁🎤 Bastions / Jumpbox
🔁🎤 Direct Connect

☁️ Auto Scaling Groups (ASG)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Capacity Settings
🔁🎤 Health Check Replacements
🔁🎤 Scaling Policies
🔁🎤 ELB Integration
🔁🎤 Use Case
🔁🎤 Launch Configuration
🔁🎤 Autoscaling Groups Cheat Sheet

☁️ VPC Endpoints
🔁🎤 VPC Endpoint Introduction
🔁🎤 Interface Endpoints
🔁🎤 Gateway Endpoints
🔁🎤 VPC Endpoint Cheat Sheet

☁️ Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Rules of Traffic
🔁🎤 Application Load Balancer (ALB)
🔁🎤 Network Load Balancer (NLB)
🔁🎤 Classic Load Balancer (CLB)
🔁🎤 Sticky Sessions
🔁🎤 X-Forwarded-For Header
🔁🎤 Health Checks
🔁🎤 Cross-Zone Load Balancing
🔁🎤 Request Routing
🔁🎤 ELB Cheat Sheet

☁️ Security Groups
🔁🎤 Security Groups Introduction
🔁🎤 Use Case
🔁🎤 Limits
🔁🎤 Security Groups Cheat Sheet

☁️ NACL
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Use Case
🔁🎤 NACL Cheat Sheet

☁️ VPC Follow-Along
🔁⌨️ Creating a VPC
🔁⌨️ Create Instances
🔁⌨️ Security Groups and NACLs
🔁⌨️ NAT
🔁⌨️ VPC Endpoints
🔁⌨️ VPC Flow Logs
🔁⌨️ Cleaning Up

☁️ Identity and Access Management - IAM
🔁🎤 Introduction to IAM
🔁🎤 Core Components
🔁🎤 Types of Policies
🔁🎤 Policy Structure
🔁🎤 Password Policy
🔁🎤 Access Keys
🔁🎤 Multi-factor Authentication
🔁🎤 Cross Account Roles
🔁🎤 Security Token Service (STS)
🔁🎤 Identity Federation
🔁🎤 AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
🔁⌨️ Follow Along
🔁🎤 IAM Cheat Sheet

☁️ CloudFront
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Core Components
🔁🎤 Distributions
🔁🎤 Lambda Edge
🔁🎤 Protection
🔁⌨️ Create a Distribution
🔁⌨️ Publish an Image
🔁⌨️ Create an Invalidation
🔁🎤 CloudFront Cheat Sheet

☁️ CloudTrail
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Event History
🔁🎤 Trail Options
🔁🎤 CloudTrail to CloudWatch
🔁🎤 Management vs Data Events
🔁⌨️ CloudTrail Overview
🔁⌨️ Create a Trail
🔁⌨️ CloudTrail to CloudWatch
🔁⌨️ Athena
🔁🎤 CloudTrail Cheat Sheet

☁️ CloudFormation
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Template Formats
🔁🎤 Template Anatomy
🔁🎤 QuickStarts
🔁🎤 Stack Updates
🔁🎤 Prevent Stack Updates
🔁🎤 Nested Stacks
🔁🎤 Rollbacks
🔁🎤 Drift Detection
🔁🎤 Pseudo Parameters
🔁🎤 Resource Attributes
🔁🎤 Intrinsic Functions
🔁🎤 Ref and Get Attr
🔁🎤 Wait Conditions
🔁🎤 Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
🔁⌨️ Follow Along
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ Serverless Application Model (SAM)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 SAM vs Cloudformation
🔁🎤 SAM CLI Commands

☁️ Continuous Integration / Deployment (CI/CD)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Continuous Integration
🔁🎤 Continuous Delivery
🔁🎤 Continuous Deployment
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ CodeCommit
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Key Features

☁️ Docker
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Dockerfile
🔁🎤 Docker Commands

☁️ CodeBuild
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Workflow
🔁🎤 Build Environments
🔁🎤 Buildspec.yml
🔁🎤 Use Cases
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ CodeDeploy
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Core Components
🔁🎤 In-Place Deployments
🔁🎤 Blue/Green Deployments
🔁🎤 Appspec.yml
🔁🎤 Lifecycle Hooks
🔁🎤 Agent & Service Role
🔁⌨️ Follow-Along
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ CodePipeline
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Anatomy of CodePipeline
🔁🎤 Actions
🔁🎤 Example
🔁🎤 Use Cases
🔁🎤 Codestar
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

☁️ Relational Database Service (RDS)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Encryption
🔁🎤 Backups
🔁🎤 Restoring Backups
🔁🎤 Multi-AZ
🔁🎤 Read Replicas
🔁🎤 Multi AZ vs Read Replicas
🔁⌨️ Create an Instance
🔁⌨️ Performance Insights
🔁⌨️ Reserved Instances
🔁⌨️ Working with Snapshots
🔁⌨️ Aurora Serverless
🔁🎤 RDS Cheat Sheet

☁️ Simple Storage Service (S3)
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Storage Classes
🔁🎤 Storage Class Comparison
🔁🎤 Security
🔁🎤 Encryption
🔁🎤 Data Consistency
🔁🎤 Cross-Region Replication
🔁🎤 Versioning
🔁🎤 Lifecycle Management
🔁🎤 Transfer Acceleration
🔁🎤 Presigned URLs
🔁🎤 MFA Delete
🔁⌨️ Create & Delete a Bucket
🔁⌨️ Upload Files & Make Public
🔁⌨️ Versioning
🔁⌨️ Encryption
🔁⌨️ CLI
🔁⌨️ Lifecycle Policies
🔁⌨️ Cross-Region Replication
🔁⌨️ Bucket Policies
🔁🎤 S3 Cheat Sheet

☁️ ElastiCache
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Caching Comparison
🔁🎤 ElastiCache Cheat Sheet

☁️ Lambda
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Use Cases
🔁🎤 Pricing
🔁🎤 Interface
🔁🎤 Triggers
🔁🎤 Defaults and Limits
🔁🎤 Cold Starts
🔁🎤 Function Versions
🔁🎤 Aliases
🔁🎤 Layers
🔁🎤 Lambda Cheat Sheet

☁️ API Gateway
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 Key Features
🔁🎤 Configuration
🔁🎤 Configuration - Part 2
🔁🎤 Configuration - Part 3
🔁🎤 Caching
🔁🎤 Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
🔁🎤 Same Origin Policy
🔁🎤 API Gateway Cheatsheet

☁️ Step Functions
🔁🎤 Introduction
🔁🎤 States
🔁🎤 Use Cases
🔁⌨️ Follow-Along
🔁📓 Cheat Sheet

FREE 3 Hour Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Certification Course (100+ Videos!) 😱

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 17:31:14 +0000

I'm Andrew Brown, I create free study courses, so everyone can learn the cloud.

This time I am bringing you a Study Course designed to help you pass the AZ-900. The AZ-900 is the entry-level certification to Microsoft Azure.

Most Videos are part of a Video Youtube Playlist

P.S.S. The best way to support more free video content is to
👉 Buy Access to the extra content for the Azure Fundamentals 👈
You get access to the videos as well as Quizzes and Flashcards on the videos and practice exams.

☁️ Introduction
🎤 Why should I get the AZ-900?
🎤 Exam Guide Walkthrough

☁️ Cloud Concepts
🎤 What is Cloud Computing?
🎤 Common Cloud Services
🎤 What is Microsoft and Azure?
🎤 Benefits of Cloud Computing
🎤 Types of Cloud Computing
🎤 Types of Cloud Computing Responsibilities
🎤 Cloud Deployment Models
🎤 Total Cost of Ownership
🎤 CAPEX vs OPEX
🎤 Cloud Architecture Terminologies
🎤 High Availability
🎤 High Scalability
🎤 High Elasticity
🎤 Fault Tolerance
🎤 High Durability

☁️ Evolution of Compute
🎤 Dedicated Servers
🎤 Virtual Machines
🎤 Containers
🎤 Functions

☁️ Global Infrastructure
🎤 Regions and Geographies
🎤 Paired Regions
🎤 Region Types and Service Availability
🎤 Special Regions
🎤 Availability Zones
🎤 AZ Supported Regions
🎤 Availability Sets Fault and Update Domains

☁️ Getting Started Follow Along
⌨️ Creating an Azure Account

☁️ Technology Overview
🎤 Computing Services
🎤 Storage Services
🎤 Database Services
🎤 Application Integration
🎤 Developer and Mobile Tools
🎤 Azure DevOps Services
🎤 Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
🎤 Azure Quickstart Templates
🎤 vNets and Subnets
🎤 Cloud-Native Networking Services
🎤 Enterprise/Hybrid Networking Services
🎤 Azure Traffic Manager
🎤 Azure DNS
🎤 Azure Load Balancer
🎤 Scale Sets
🎤 IoT Services
🎤 Big Data and Analytics Services
🎤 AI/ML Services Introduction
🎤 AI/ML Services
🎤 Serverless Services

☁️ Azure Management Tools
🎤 Azure Portal
🎤 PowerShell
🎤 Visual Studio Code
🎤 Cloud Shell
🎤 Azure CLI

☁️ Follow Alongs
⌨️ Create a Resource Group
⌨️ Create a vNet
⌨️ Launching a Server
⌨️ Creating a Azure Function
⌨️ Storing files in Blob Storage
⌨️ Exploring Azure Cloud Shell

☁️ Security
🎤 Azure Trust Center
🎤 Compliance Programs
🎤 Azure Active Directory
🎤 MFA
🎤 Azure Security Center
🎤 Key Vault
🎤 Azure DDoS Protection
🎤 Azure Firewall
🎤 Azure Information Protection
🎤 Application Gateway
🎤 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
🎤 Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)
🎤 Azure Policies
🎤 Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
🎤 Lock resources
🎤 Management Groups
🎤 Azure Monitor
🎤 Service Health
🎤 Azure Advisor

☁️ Billing and Pricing
🎤 Service Level Agreements
🎤 Service Credits
🎤 Composite SLAs
🎤 TCO Calculator
🎤 Azure Marketplace
🎤 Azure Support
🎤 Azure Hybrid Benefit
🎤 Azure Subscriptions
🎤 Pricing Calculator
🎤 Azure Cost Management

☁️ Summary
⌨️ Booking Your Exam

DynamoDB Cheatsheet – Everything you need to know about Dynamo DB for the 2020 AWS Certified Developer Associate Certification

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 19:24:20 +0000

The emergence of cloud services has changed the way we build web-applications. This in turn has changed the responsibilities of a Web Developer.

We used to build everything into a single web-application on a single server. This encompassed multiple responsibilities such as storage, databases, authentication, background jobs, caching, and more.

Cloud services allows us to reduce the complexity of our web-app and web-servers by pushing the responsibilities to these highly available, scalable, and durable cloud services.

A Web Developer who knows how to deploy and integrate cloud services with a web-application is what we call a Cloud Engineer.

If you want to fast-track your career as a Web Developer in 2020 then the AWS Developer Associate Certification can help you achieve that end goal.

The most important AWS service you need to study to pass that AWS Developer Associate exam is DynamoDB. So I have released to you for free what I call The Ultimate DynamoDB Cheatsheet. You can print this out on the day of your exam to increase your chances of passing.

It was Nader the AWS Developer Advocate for AWS Amplify who suggested I release my entire cheatsheet for free. You would not have this resource if it wasn't for him.

It was Kirk the AWS Senior Technologist specializing in DynamoDB who volunteered his time to ensure the accuracy of this Cheatsheet. This turned it from 5 pages to 8 pages long! 📄📄📄📄📄📄📄📄

If you have Twitter, please do me the favour of thanking them by tweeting at @dabit3 and @NoSQLKnowHow with the #AWSCertified hashtag.

So lets move on to the Cheatsheet:

The Basics of DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL key/value and document database.

DynamoDB is suited for workloads with any amount of data that require predictable read and write performance and automatic scaling from large to small and everywhere in between.

DynamoDB scales up and down to support whatever read and write capacity you specify per second in provisioned capacity mode. Or you can set it to On-Demand mode and there is little to no capacity planning.

DynamoDB stores 3 copies of data on SSD drives across 3 AZs in a region.
DynamoDB's most common datatypes are B (Binary), N (Number), and S (String)
Tables consist of Items (rows) and Items consist of Attributes (columns)

Reads and Writes Consistency

DynamoDB can be set to support Eventually Consistent Reads (default) and Strongly Consistent Reads on a per-call basis.

Eventually consistent reads data is returned immediately but data can be inconsistent. Copies of data will be generally consistent in 1 second.

Strongly Consistent Reads will always read from the leader partition since it always has an up-to-date copy. Data will never be inconsistent but latency may be higher. Copies of data will be consistent with a guarantee of 1 second.

Partitions
A Partition is when DynamoDB slices your table up into smaller chunks of data. This speeds up reads for very large tables.

DynamoDB automatically creates Partitions for:

Every 10 GB of Data or
When you exceed RCUs (3000) or WCUs (1000) limits for a single partition
When DynamoDB sees a pattern of a hot partition, it will split that partition in an attempt to fix the issue.
DynamoDB will try to evenly split the RCUs and WCUs across Partitions

Primary Key Design

Primary keys define where and how your data will be stored in partitions

The Key schema can be made up of two keys:

Partition Key (PK) is also known as **HASH*

The Sort Key (SK) is also known as RANGE

When using the AWS DynamoDB API eg. CLI, SDK they refer to the PK and SK by their alternative names due to legacy reasons.
Primary key comes in two types:

Simple Primary Key (Using only a Partition Key)
Composite Primary Key (Using both a Partition and Sort Key)
Key Uniqueness is as follows:
When creating a Simple Primary Key the PK value may be unique
When creating a Composite Primary Key the combined PK and SK must be unique

When using a Sort key, records on the partition are logically grouped together in Ascending order.

Secondary Indexes

DynamoDB has two types of Indexes:

LSI - Local Secondary index
GSI - Global Secondary Index

LSI - Local Secondary index

Supports strongly or eventual consistency reads
Can only be created with initial table (cannot be modified or and cannot deleted unless also deleting the table)
Only Composite
10GB or less per partition
Share capacity units with base table
Must share Partition Key (PK) with base table.

GSI - Global Secondary Index

Only eventual consistency reads (cannot provide strong consistency)
Can create, modify, or delete at anytime
Simple and Composite
Can have whatever attributes as Primary Key (PK) or Secondary Key (SK)
No size restriction per partition
Has its own capacity settings (does not share with base table)

Scan

Your table(s) should be designed in such a way that your workload primary access patterns do not use Scans. Overall, scans should be needed sparingly, for example for an infrequent report.

Scans through all items in a table and then returns one or more items through filters
By default returns all attributes for every item (use ProjectExpression to limit)
Scans are sequential, and you can speed up a scan through parallel scans using Segments and Total Segments
Scans can be slow, especially with very large tables and can easily consume your provisioned throughput.
Scans are one of the most expensive ways to access data in DynamoDB.

Query

Find items based on primary key values
Table must have a composite key in order to be able to query
By default queries are Eventually Consistent (use ConsistentRead True to change Strongly Consistent)
By default returns all attributes for each item found by a query (use ProjectExpression to limit)
By default is sorted ascending (use ScanIndexForward to False to reverse order to descending)

Capacity Modes

DynamoDB has two capacity modes, Provisioned and On-Demand. You can switch between these modes once every 24 hours.

Provisioned

Provisioned Throughput Capacity is the maximum amount of capacity your application is allowed to read or write per second from a table or index

Provisioned is suited for predictable or steady state workloads
RCUs is Read Capacity Unit
WCUs is Write Capacity Unit

You should enable Auto Scaling with Provisioned capacity mode. In this mode, you set a floor and ceiling for the capacity you wish the table to support. DynamoDB will automatically add and remove capacity to between these values on your behalf and throttle calls that go above the ceiling for too long.

If you go beyond your provisioned capacity, you’ll get an Exception: ProvisionedThroughputExceededException (throttling)

Throttling is when requests are blocked due to read or write frequency higher than set thresholds. E.g. exceeding set provisioned capacity, partitions splitting, table/index capacity mismatch.

On-Demand

On-Demand Capacity is pay per request. So you pay only for what you use.

On-Demand is suited for new or unpredictable workloads
The throughput is only limited by the default upper limits for a table (40K RCUs and 40K WCUs)
Throttling can occur if you exceed double your previous peak capacity (high water mark) within 30 minutes. For example, if you previously peaked to a maximum of 30,000 ops/sec, you could not peak immediately to 90,000 ops/sec, but you could to 60,000 ops/sec.
Since there is no hard limit, On-Demand could become very expensive based on emerging scenarios

Calculating Reads and Writes

Calculating Reads (RCU)

A read capacity unit represents:

one strongly consistent read per second,
or two eventually consistent reads per second,
for an item up to 4 KB in size.

How to calculate RCUs for strong

Round data up to nearest 4.
Divide data by 4
Times by number of reads

Here's an example:

50 reads at 40KB per item. (40/4) x 50 = 500 RCUs
10 reads at 6KB per item. (8/4) x 10 = 20 RCUs
33 reads at 17KB per item. (20/4) x 33 = 132 RCUs

How to calculate RCUs for eventual

Round data up to nearest 4.
Divide data by 4
Times by number of reads
Divide final number by 2
Round up to the nearest whole number

Here's an example:

50 reads at 40KB per item. (40/4) x 50 / 2 = 250 RCUs
11 reads at 9KB per item. (12/4) x 11 / 2 = 17 RCUs
14 reads at 24KB per item. (24/4) x 14 / 2 = 35 RCUs

Calculating Writes (Writes)

A write capacity unit represents:

one write per second,
for an item up to 1 KB

How to calculate Writes

Round data up to nearest 1.
Times by number of writes

Here's an example:

50 writes at 40KB per item. 40 x 50 = 2000 WCUs
11 writes at 1KB per item. 1 x 11 = 11 WCUs
18 writes at 500 BYTES per item. 1 x 18 = 18 WCUs

DynamoDB Accelerator

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed in-memory write-through cache for DynamoDB that runs in a cluster

Reads are eventually consistent
Incoming requests are evenly distributed across all of the nodes in the cluster.
DAX can reduce read response times to microseconds

DAX is ideal for:

fastest response times possible
apps that read a small number of items more frequently
apps that are read intensive

DAX is not ideal for:

Apps that require strongly consistent reads
Apps that do not require microsecond read response times
Apps that are write intensive, or that do not perform much read activity
If you don’t need DAX consider using ElastiCache

DynamoDB Transactions

DynamoDB supports transactions via the TransactWriteItems and TransactGetItems API calls.

Transactions let you query multiple tables at once and are an all-or-nothing approach (all API calls must succeed).

Global tables

DynamoDB Global tables provide a fully managed solution for deploying multi-region, multi-master databases.

Streams

DynamoDB Streams allows you to setup a Lambda function triggered every time data is modified in a table to react to changes. Streams do not consume RCUs.

DynamoDB API

DynamoDB API's most notable commands via CLI: aws dynamodb

aws dynamodb get-item returns a set of attributes for the item with the given primary key. If no matching item, then it does not return any data and there will be no Item element in the response.

aws dynamodb put-item Creates a new item, or replaces an old item with a new item. If an item that has the same primary key as the new item already exists in the specified table, the new item completely replaces the existing item.

aws dynamodb update-item Edits an existing item's attributes, or adds a new item to the table if it does not already exist.

aws dynamodb batch-get-item returns the attributes of one or more items from one or more tables. You identify requested items by primary key. A single operation can retrieve up to 16 MB of data, which can contain as many as 100 items.

aws dynamodb batch-write-item puts or deletes multiple items in one or more tables. Can write up to 16 MB of data, which can comprise as many as 25 put or delete requests. Individual items to be written can be as large as 400 KB.

aws dynamodb create-table adds a new table to your account. Table names must be unique within each Region.

aws dynamodb update-table Modifies the provisioned throughput settings, global secondary indexes, or DynamoDB Streams settings for a given table.

aws dynamodb delete-table operation deletes a table and all of its items.

aws dynamodb transact-get-items is a synchronous operation that atomically retrieves multiple items from one or more tables (but not from indexes) in a single account and Region. Call can contain up to 25 objects. The aggregate size of the items in the transaction cannot exceed 4 MB.

aws dynamodb transact-write-items a synchronous write operation that groups up to 25 action requests. These actions can target items in different tables, but not in different AWS accounts or Regions, and no two actions can target the same item.

aws dynamodb query finds items based on primary key values. You can query table or secondary index that has a composite primary key.

aws dynamodb scan returns one or more items and item attributes by accessing every item in a table or a secondary index.

🚀 #rocketsToMars

I want to help you enter the web and cloud industry. That is why I am releasing my free AWS Developer Associate Certification 2020 course on the freeCodeCamp YouTube channel with 10+ hours of additional content I have never released previously.

This free course will be released in a few days as I apply the final touches.

I believe in making tech education accessible to the world because in-turn the more we upskill, the sooner we can lift people out of poverty, the sooner we can engineer sustainable solutions to keep our planet green and healthy, and the sooner we can launch rockets to Mars.

Upcoming Change to the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam SAA-C01 to SAA-C02

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 17:06:20 +0000

If I have yet to start studying for the exam should I wait a few months?

No, Changes are not dramatic enough for you to delay your study. If you look at the changes in the exam guidelines not much has changed.

I’m already studying will I have to restudy?

Study Material – No, keep studying, We may see amendments / additions from content creators who's content is a year out of date. Mine is very current so its minimal changes for me.
Practice Exams – Maybe, Watch out for what people are reporting on Reddit and other social places. I have a strong feeling we're going to see more serverless architectures and services as this was severely lacking in the previous exam.

Can I still use the freeCodeCamp/ExamPro Solutions Architect Associate free course to study?

Yes, I knew this exam change was coming so I packed in some additional content and I filmed my free AWS Solutions Architect course at the end of 2019.

I probably will end up reshooting the entire course post-March because I would like to improve the video quality and make minor corrections.

What changes are occurring?

The last time the SAA when through a change it was dramatic since they changed the way they wrote the questions from being factoid-driven to concept-driven. We are going to see such a dramatic change and we are seeing is fine-tuning of the exam.

So they have dropped one of the domains, which was worth the least percentage. I welcome this change.

We can see the new exam guide has the exact same domains but the Operational-Excellence has been dropped

Performant has changed to Highly-Performant which in honest is just semantics. Reworking of subdomains but they to me equates to being the exam same content as before.

What is really great is the domains are more evenly-weighted. I think will improve people's ability to pass.

Final-Thoughts

Don't stress out, you're still on the right path, just keep doing what you're doing.

I had to build my own Markdown Editor because no tool was fast enough for me.

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:46:44 +0000

TL;DR

I built an open-source markdown editor called Fast Author to improve my productivity when creating written articles specific for tech tutorials involving lots screenshots.

👉 https://github.com/ExamProCo/fast-author

P.S I wrote this article in this editor.

The Pain Point

I've been working on a new version of my AWS Certified Developer course which I am publishing free-to-watch on freeCodeCamp and I had finished recording all my lecture videos with only the follow alongs remaining.

Follow Alongs (some may call them labs) is where I make a video where you follow along with me to get hands-on skills with AWS.

However, producing these videos has been a bottleneck on my production because I have to back-track as I discover things on the fly which could result in me re-recording 3-4 video sections back.

So it makes sense for me to tutorialize them along the way in written format which is easier to modify.

I have to create written versions anyway since on my paid platform we offer the written versions as plus to our the free-to-watch videos.

I am feeling the pain hard here because the Developer Associate is heavy hands-on and these follow alongs need more attention and complexity than any other Certification.

Existing Editors and My Use Case

There are many markdown editors out there, but none are designed for power-users or optimized for my use case which are:

What did I build it in and how long did it take?

I built in 3 days. 2 days building, and 1 day QA with my co-founder Bayko. Today I am using it for its intended use and I already know I am going to get a 500% increase in productivity.

Electron

I already build an open-source video game called Swap-N-Pop so it was a simple as reviewing what I had done before.

Coffeescript

Typescript would have been a better choice if I had multiple collaborators but I wanted to get this done as fast as possible and Coffeescript gives speed like no other.

This was the same path as Swap-N-Pop where when I needed test code, and more collabs I converted it from Coffeescript from Typescript.

MithrilJS

I was going to use Svelte but I wanted to get this done, so I just rolled back to leveraging Mithril where I have solved lots of javascript *hard parts and I didn't want to tack on two extra days to development.

SharpJS

I hate working with ImageMagick so I opted for SharpJS which is much easier to install, but we had considerable pain getting this work with Electron. I had to find the right version of both Electron and SharpJS.

The Editor

The editor should use a mono-spaced font to easily align text which will render in code elements.
Should be to quickly toggle into a publisher preview mode
Design should be optimized for side by side preview
Need hotkeys for custom tags for Highting, underling and marking text red.

The Images

Should be able to drag in images into the editor
Should be able to quickly edit images to resize, crop, border and draw rectangle and markers
Should store the original images in the project for future reference or modifications

The Preview and Export

Should be able to load custom css for publisher preview so I can see what it would like on DEV, Medium, freeCodeCamp, HashNode or etc
Should rename the files in order of appearance as they are being moved around on export

Added Bonsues

Since this is an Electron app I should be able to add my Grammarly extension to better improve my writing.

A Project of Distraction or Procrastination?

So far its been worth the detour. If I worked for another company and I proposed I could try to build a tool in a few days to save weeks they probably wouldn't let me do it since most people would see it as a distraction.

I could have completed my course in the days I built this but it's so easy to focus on the short term, and knowing when to put the time, in the long run, is a skill that requires lots of attempts at failed distractions.

Interesting Code

I thought I pull out some code which was interesting:

I borrowed the online function to get the relative coordinates for a Canvas.



function relMouseCoords(event){
    var totalOffsetX = 0;
    var totalOffsetY = 0;
    var canvasX = 0;
    var canvasY = 0;
    var currentElement = this;

    do{
        totalOffsetX += currentElement.offsetLeft - currentElement.scrollLeft;
        totalOffsetY += currentElement.offsetTop - currentElement.scrollTop;
    }
    while(currentElement = currentElement.offsetParent)

    canvasX = event.pageX - totalOffsetX;
    canvasY = event.pageY - totalOffsetY;

    return {x:canvasX, y:canvasY}
}

I would overlay a canvas on an image. Then I can capture the canvas as an image using the toDataURL() and the replacing the start of the string replace(/^data:image\/png;base64,/, "")



function save(){
  console.log('saving')
  let path = "/tmp/save-drawing-overlay.png"
  const el = document.getElementById('draw')
  fs.writeFile(path, el.toDataURL().replace(/^data:image\/png;base64,/, ""), 'base64', function(err){
    console.log(err)
    ipc.send('sharp-draw',{overlay: path, source: asset.path})
  })
}

SharpJS can composite two files on top of each other which is how I am saving images.



sharp(opts.source).composite([{input: opts.overlay}]).toFile(new_asset)

I set global hotkeys and just watch on keydown.



# global hotkeys
document.addEventListener 'keydown', (e)=>
  meta =
  if os.platform() is 'darwin'
    'Meta'
  else
    'Control'
  Data.meta(true)  if e.key is meta
  Data.shift(true) if e.key is 'Shift'
  if Data.meta()
    if e.key is 'f'
      ipc.send('toggle-fullscreen')
    else if e.key is 'p'
      Data.publisher_preview !Data.publisher_preview()
      m.redraw(true)
    else if e.key is 'n'
      ipc.send('prompt-new')
    else if e.key is 's' && Data.shift()
      Data.splitview !Data.splitview()
      m.redraw(true)
    else if e.key is 'w' && Data.shift()
      Data.line_wrap !Data.line_wrap()
      m.redraw(true)
document.addEventListener 'keyup', (e)=>
  Data.meta(false)
  Data.shift(false)

All the data is stored in a Singleton. No reactive nonsense.



import stream from 'mithril/stream'

class Data
  constructor:->
    # The root directory where all the markdown files are stored
    # eg. ~/fast-author/
    @home = stream('')

    # When the current file was last saved
    @last_saved = stream('')

    # the file that shows selecte in the right hand column
    @active_file = stream(null)

    # files that appear in the right hand column
    @files  = stream([])

    # assets that appear in the right hand column
    # assets only for the current markdown file that is active
    @assets  = stream([])

    # The currently selected image in the markdown to apply editing
    @active_asset = stream null

    # the contents of the markdown file
    @document = stream('')

    # whether the meta key is being held eg. Command on Mac
    @meta = stream(false)

    # whether the shift key is behind held
    @shift = stream(false)

    # whether to wrap or not wrap lines in textarea
    @line_wrap = stream(false)
    #
    # whether to split the view (show both editor or preview, or just editor)
    @splitview = stream(true)

    # when true will hide editor and center preview.
    @publisher_preview = stream(false)

    # the start and end select for markdown textarea
    @selectionStart = stream false
    @selectionEnd   = stream false

    # current selections for infobar
    @_selectionStart = stream 0
    @_selectionEnd   = stream 0
  markdown_path:(name)=>
    path = "#{@home()}/#{name}/index.md"
    console.log path
    path
  # select can be loss after certain updates to textarea.
  # This ensures our old selection remains
  keep_selection:=>
    @selectionStart @_selectionStart()
    @selectionEnd @_selectionEnd()
  get_asset:=>
    asset = null
    for a in @assets()
      if a.path is @active_asset().replace('file://','')
        asset = a
        break
    asset
export default new Data()

AWS for Startups (FREE 4hrs Video Course)

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 19:33:30 +0000

Another free AWS course coming your way. I really wanted to make a course for early startups or just people who want a practical way to apply AWS, instead of just AWS Certification so I made some time and here it is!

I get to cover some AWS Services I would normally overlook but are incredibly useful.

Learn how to get started with AWS. This is a practical guide for early-stage startups interested in using AWS. You will learn how to create an AWS account, deploy an application, budget scaling applications, and more!

⭐️Course Contents ⭐️

The entire playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3VSJhaC4kc&t=18s

☁ Getting Started

(0:00:18) 🎤 Meet Your Instructor
(0:01:04) Setting Up Your AWS Account
(0:05:17) Avoid Overbilling by Creating AWS Budgets and Billing Alarm
(0:13:17) Securing Root Account and Create an Administrative User
(0:21:42) Setting up Multi-Account and Creating a Cross-Account Role
(0:34:38) Crash Course on AWS Security Services
(0:52:20) Reviewing The Best Free-Tier AWS Services
(1:02:49) AWS Activate and Keeping Track of AWS Credits

☁ Architectures

(1:17:14) 🎤 Evolution of Servers
(1:25:30) 🎤 Technical Architectures and Technical Responsibility

☁ Let’s Get Building

(1:38:29) ⌨ Registering a Domain Name with Route53
(1:42:36) ⌨ Setting up A Development Environment on Cloud9
(1:46:56) ⌨ Setting up Your Marketing Website on S3 and CloudFront
(2:07:40) ⌨ How do I deploy my web-application to Elastic Beanstalk?
(2:20:35) ⌨ Sending Emails Via Your Web-Application using SES
(2:30:23) ⌨ Creating a Business Email Using Amazon WorkMail
(2:36:56) ⌨ Setting Up A Wordpress with using LightSail or EC2
(2:47:57) ⌨ Sending Campaign Emails using PinPoint
(2:56:01) ⌨ Launching a Sample Mobile Application Using AWS Amplify

☁ Tips

(3:08:48) ⌨ Why you should consider paying for AWS Support
(3:18:02) 🎤 Why you should use these AWS Services To Get Better Technical Positioning
(3:36:56) ⌨ Why you should avoid using EC2 Key Pairs and Instead Use Sessions Manager
(3:47:20) 🎤 Why you should try to run your Web-Application in at Least 3 AZs
(3:51:29) ⌨ Why you should avoid assigning users Administrative Access and use these Policies Instead
(3:58:49) 🎤 Why you should use decentralized authentication such as Cognito

Bon Voyage

(4:02:37) 🛳 Thank You and Additional AWS Resources