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🇺🇸 AWS Certified Solutions Architect · subject

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures Syllabus

The Design High-Performing Architectures syllabus for AWS Certified Solutions Architect in full: 3 chapters, 9 topics and 26 sub-topics, every one listed below, plus 51 Design High-Performing Architectures flashcards with answers.

3Chapters
9Topics
26Sub-topics
51Flashcards

Design High-Performing Architectures syllabus: all 3 chapters

Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics.

  1. High-Performing Compute

     3 topics
    • Selecting Compute Options
      • EC2 instance families and right-sizing
      • Graviton (ARM) and accelerated computing
      • Placement groups for latency and throughput
    • Serverless and Container Compute
      • AWS Lambda concurrency and provisioned concurrency
      • ECS and EKS, EC2 vs Fargate launch types
      • Scaling event-driven serverless workloads
    • Elastic Scaling for Performance
      • Target tracking and predictive scaling
      • Spot, On-Demand, and mixed instance fleets

  2. High-Performing Storage and Databases

     3 topics
    • Performance-Optimized Storage
      • Provisioned IOPS (io2) and throughput-optimized volumes
      • S3 request rate and multipart upload optimization
      • FSx for Lustre with HPC and ML workloads
    • Database Performance Tuning
      • RDS read replicas for read scaling
      • Aurora replicas and cluster endpoints
      • DynamoDB partition keys, capacity modes, and DAX
    • Purpose-Built Databases
      • ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached) caching strategies
      • Amazon Redshift for analytics workloads
      • Specialized engines (Neptune, Timestream, DocumentDB)

  3. High-Performing Networking and Content Delivery

     3 topics
    • Edge Acceleration
      • CloudFront caching behaviors and origins
      • AWS Global Accelerator anycast routing
      • Edge functions (Lambda@Edge, CloudFront Functions)
    • Network Connectivity Options
      • VPC peering and Transit Gateway
      • Direct Connect vs Site-to-Site VPN
      • PrivateLink and interface endpoints
    • Data Ingestion and Transfer at Scale
      • Kinesis Data Streams and Firehose
      • AWS DataSync and Storage Gateway
      • Snow Family for offline bulk transfer

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures flashcards — 51 questions with answers

  1. Which EC2 instance family is optimized for compute-intensive workloads like batch processing, media transcoding, and high-performance web servers?

    Compute optimized (C family, e.g., C5, C6g, C7g) — high ratio of vCPU to memory.

  2. Which EC2 instance family suits in-memory databases, real-time big-data analytics, and high-performance caches (e.g., SAP HANA, Redis)?

    Memory optimized (R family, plus X1/X2 and High Memory 'u-' instances).

  3. What does the AWS Graviton processor (e.g., on C7g, M7g, R7g) provide for performance architecture?

    Arm-based AWS-custom silicon offering up to ~40% better price-performance and lower energy use than comparable x86 instances.

  4. What is the difference between EC2 On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved pricing for a high-performance fleet?

    On-Demand = pay per second, no commitment; Spot = up to 90% off spare capacity but can be interrupted; Reserved/Savings Plans = up to ~72% off for a 1- or 3-year commitment.

  5. Which storage option gives an EC2 instance the highest-performance, lowest-latency block storage, and what is its tradeoff?

    Instance store (ephemeral local NVMe/SSD) — extremely fast but data is lost when the instance stops or terminates.

  6. What are EC2 Placement Group types and their performance purpose?

    Cluster (low-latency, high-throughput in one AZ), Spread (each instance on distinct hardware for availability), Partition (groups on separate racks for big distributed workloads like Hadoop/Cassandra).

  7. What feature enables EC2 instances to achieve very high packet-per-second network performance with low, consistent latency for HPC?

    Enhanced Networking (ENA / Elastic Network Adapter) and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for tightly coupled HPC/ML workloads.

  8. When should you choose AWS Lambda over EC2 for compute?

    For event-driven, short-running (≤15 min), bursty, or unpredictable workloads where you want no server management and automatic scaling, paying only per request and GB-seconds.

  9. What is the maximum execution timeout and memory range for an AWS Lambda function?

    Max timeout = 15 minutes; memory configurable from 128 MB to 10,240 MB (10 GB), with CPU scaling proportionally to memory.

  10. How does Lambda concurrency scaling work, and what is provisioned concurrency?

    Lambda scales by adding concurrent execution environments automatically; provisioned concurrency pre-initializes a set number of environments to eliminate cold-start latency.

  11. What is a Lambda cold start and how can you reduce it?

    The latency added when a new execution environment is initialized; reduce it with provisioned concurrency, smaller packages, lighter runtimes, and keeping functions warm.

  12. Compare Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.

    ECS = AWS-native container orchestration, simpler, tightly integrated; EKS = managed Kubernetes, portable and standards-based but more complex to operate.

  13. What is AWS Fargate and what problem does it solve?

    A serverless compute engine for containers (works with ECS and EKS) that runs containers without provisioning or managing EC2 host instances — you pay per vCPU/memory used by the task.

  14. When would you use ECS on EC2 launch type instead of Fargate?

    When you need control over the host (GPU access, specific instance types, larger/persistent workloads, custom AMIs) or more cost efficiency at high steady utilization.

  15. What AWS service lets you run containers, batch jobs, or web apps with minimal config and is good for developers new to AWS?

    AWS App Runner (for containerized web apps/APIs) — fully managed, auto-scaling; Elastic Beanstalk is a similar PaaS for traditional apps.

  16. What is the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling?

    Horizontal scaling = adding/removing instances (scale out/in); vertical scaling = increasing/decreasing the size/power of a single instance (scale up/down).

  17. What are the four EC2 Auto Scaling policy types?

    Target tracking (keep a metric at a target), Step scaling (adjust by steps based on alarm size), Simple scaling (single adjustment per alarm), and Scheduled scaling (scale at known times).

  18. What is a target tracking scaling policy and give a common example metric.

    A policy that adds/removes capacity to keep a chosen metric near a target value — e.g., keep Average CPU Utilization at 50% or ALBRequestCountPerTarget at a set value.

  19. What is predictive scaling in EC2 Auto Scaling?

    A policy that uses machine learning on historical load patterns to forecast demand and provision capacity in advance of expected spikes.

  20. What is the role of a launch template in an Auto Scaling group?

    It defines the configuration (AMI, instance type, key pair, security groups, user data) used to launch new instances; supports versioning, unlike the older launch configuration.

Show the other 31 Design High-Performing Architectures flashcards

  1. How do warm pools improve Auto Scaling performance?

    They keep pre-initialized, stopped instances ready so the group can scale out faster by skipping lengthy boot/initialization at demand time.

  2. What is the difference between Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Network Load Balancer (NLB)?

    ALB = Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS), content/path/host routing; NLB = Layer 4 (TCP/UDP/TLS), ultra-low latency, millions of requests/sec, static/Elastic IP support.

  3. Which load balancer should you choose for extreme performance, low latency, and static IP addresses?

    Network Load Balancer (NLB).

  4. What is Amazon EBS and what are its main volume types?

    Elastic Block Store = network block storage for EC2; types: gp3/gp2 (general SSD), io2 Block Express/io1 (provisioned IOPS SSD), st1 (throughput HDD), sc1 (cold HDD).

  5. What advantage does EBS gp3 have over gp2?

    gp3 lets you provision IOPS and throughput independently of volume size (baseline 3,000 IOPS / 125 MB/s) at ~20% lower cost, instead of IOPS scaling with size as in gp2.

  6. Which EBS volume type provides the highest IOPS and durability for mission-critical databases?

    io2 Block Express — up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MB/s throughput, and 99.999% durability.

  7. What is EBS Multi-Attach and which volumes support it?

    It lets a single Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2) volume be attached to up to 16 Nitro EC2 instances in the same AZ for clustered applications.

  8. What is Amazon EFS and when do you use it?

    Elastic File System = fully managed, elastic NFS shared file storage accessible by many EC2 instances/Lambda concurrently across AZs; use for shared, scalable POSIX file workloads.

  9. What is Amazon FSx for Lustre used for?

    A high-performance parallel file system for HPC, machine learning, and media processing; delivers sub-millisecond latency and hundreds of GB/s throughput, integrable with S3.

  10. How do S3 storage classes affect performance and cost (Standard vs Intelligent-Tiering vs Glacier)?

    S3 Standard = high throughput, low latency for frequent access; Intelligent-Tiering auto-moves objects between tiers to save cost; Glacier classes = low-cost archival with retrieval latency from minutes to hours.

  11. What is the current S3 request performance per prefix?

    At least 3,500 PUT/COPY/POST/DELETE and 5,500 GET/HEAD requests per second per prefix, scaling horizontally by using more prefixes.

  12. What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?

    A feature that speeds long-distance uploads/downloads to S3 by routing data over the CloudFront edge network to the bucket's Region.

  13. How do read replicas improve database performance in Amazon RDS?

    They provide read scaling by offloading read-only queries to up to 15 asynchronous replicas, reducing load on the primary instance (replicas can also be cross-Region).

  14. What is the difference between RDS Multi-AZ and read replicas?

    Multi-AZ = synchronous standby for high availability/failover (not for reads, except newer Multi-AZ cluster); read replicas = asynchronous copies for read scaling/performance.

  15. What is Amazon RDS Proxy and how does it boost performance?

    A managed connection pooler that sits between apps and RDS/Aurora, pooling and reusing DB connections to reduce overhead, improve scalability, and handle failovers faster.

  16. How does Amazon Aurora improve performance over standard RDS engines?

    It uses a distributed, log-structured storage layer across 3 AZs (6 copies), auto-scaling up to 128 TiB, offers up to 15 low-latency read replicas, and delivers up to 5x MySQL / 3x PostgreSQL throughput.

  17. What is Amazon ElastiCache and what two engines does it offer?

    A managed in-memory caching service to offload databases and reduce latency; engines are Redis (and Valkey) and Memcached.

  18. When choose ElastiCache for Redis vs Memcached?

    Redis = persistence, replication, pub/sub, sorted sets, Multi-AZ failover, complex data types; Memcached = simple, multi-threaded, easy horizontal scaling for plain key-value caching.

  19. What are the lazy loading and write-through caching strategies?

    Lazy loading = load data into cache only on a cache miss (cache can be stale); write-through = update the cache whenever the database is written (always fresh but extra writes).

  20. What purpose-built database is best for key-value workloads needing single-digit millisecond latency at any scale?

    Amazon DynamoDB.

  21. What is DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)?

    A fully managed, in-memory write-through cache for DynamoDB that delivers microsecond read latency without application code changes.

  22. Compare DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned capacity modes.

    On-demand = pay-per-request, auto-scales instantly for unpredictable traffic; provisioned = you set RCUs/WCUs (with optional auto scaling) for predictable, cost-efficient workloads.

  23. Which AWS purpose-built database fits time-series data like IoT and operational metrics?

    Amazon Timestream.

  24. Which AWS database is purpose-built for highly connected graph data and relationship queries?

    Amazon Neptune.

  25. Which AWS database is a managed in-memory database delivering microsecond reads and single-digit-ms durable writes?

    Amazon MemoryDB for Redis.

  26. Which AWS service is the purpose-built petabyte-scale data warehouse for analytics (OLAP)?

    Amazon Redshift — columnar, massively parallel processing (MPP); Redshift Spectrum queries data directly in S3.

  27. What is Amazon CloudFront and how does it accelerate performance?

    A global CDN that caches content at edge locations close to users, reducing latency and origin load; supports static and dynamic content, and runs Lambda@Edge/CloudFront Functions.

  28. What is AWS Global Accelerator and how does it differ from CloudFront?

    It uses 2 static anycast IPs and the AWS global network to route TCP/UDP traffic to the nearest healthy regional endpoint; unlike CloudFront it doesn't cache — it optimizes routing for non-HTTP and dynamic traffic.

  29. What is the difference between AWS Direct Connect and a Site-to-Site VPN?

    Direct Connect = dedicated private physical link with consistent low latency/high bandwidth; VPN = encrypted tunnel over the public internet, cheaper/faster to set up but with variable performance.

  30. What is VPC Peering vs AWS Transit Gateway for connecting networks?

    VPC Peering = one-to-one, non-transitive connection between two VPCs; Transit Gateway = hub-and-spoke that connects thousands of VPCs and on-prem networks at scale with transitive routing.

  31. Which AWS services move large data sets at scale: Snowball, DataSync, and Kinesis Data Streams — what is each for?

    Snow Family (Snowball/Snowcone) = physical offline transfer of TB–PB; DataSync = fast online transfer between on-prem and AWS storage; Kinesis Data Streams = real-time streaming ingestion of high-volume event data.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures FAQ

What is in the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures syllabus?

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures is split into 3 chapters: High-Performing Compute, High-Performing Storage and Databases and High-Performing Networking and Content Delivery. Together they contain 9 topics and 26 sub-topics.

How many chapters are in AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures?

3 chapters, containing 9 topics and 26 sub-topics. The largest chapter is High-Performing Compute, with 3 topics.

Are there flashcards for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures?

Yes — a 51-card Design High-Performing Architectures deck, printed in full in the flashcards section of this page and available in the Examius app with spaced repetition. The free plan covers one exam of your choice, including its flashcards; Examius Pro, a one-time purchase, unlocks every other exam and deck.