DevOps Amazon AWS Syllabus

Amazon AWS syllabus — full chapter and topic list

Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics. This is the whole examinable outline for Amazon AWS in DevOps, not a summary of it.

1. 1

   Introduction to AWS

   3 topics

   • What is AWS?
     • Overview of Cloud Computing
     • History of AWS
     • Benefits of AWS
   • AWS Global Infrastructure
     • Regions and Availability Zones
     • Edge Locations
     • Data Centers
   • AWS Free Tier
     • Free Tier Services
     • Limitations and Usage
2. 2

   AWS Core Services

   4 topics

   • Compute Services
     • Amazon EC2
     • Amazon Lightsail
     • AWS Lambda
     • Amazon ECS
     • Amazon EKS
   • Storage Services
     • Amazon S3
     • Amazon EBS
     • Amazon EFS
     • Amazon Glacier
     • AWS Storage Gateway
   • Database Services
     • Amazon RDS
     • Amazon DynamoDB
     • Amazon Redshift
     • Amazon Aurora
     • Amazon Neptune
     • Amazon DocumentDB
   • Networking and Content Delivery
     • Amazon VPC
     • Amazon CloudFront
     • AWS Direct Connect
     • Elastic Load Balancing
     • Amazon Route 53
3. 3

   Security, Identity, and Compliance

   5 topics

   • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
     • Users and Groups
     • Roles and Policies
     • MFA and Security Best Practices
   • AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
     • Creating and Managing Keys
     • Encryption and Decryption
   • AWS CloudTrail
     • Logging and Monitoring
     • Compliance and Auditing
   • AWS Shield
     • DDoS Protection
     • AWS Shield Standard and Advanced
   • AWS WAF
     • Web Application Firewall
     • Creating and Managing Rules
4. 4

   Management and Governance

   4 topics

   • AWS CloudFormation
     • Infrastructure as Code
     • Templates and Stacks
   • AWS CloudWatch
     • Monitoring and Metrics
     • Alarms and Logs
   • AWS Systems Manager
     • Automation and Run Command
     • Patch Manager
   • AWS Config
     • Resource Inventory
     • Compliance and Change Management
5. 5

   Developer Tools

   4 topics

   • AWS CodeCommit
     • Version Control
     • Repositories
   • AWS CodeBuild
     • Continuous Integration
     • Build Projects
   • AWS CodeDeploy
     • Automated Deployments
     • Deployment Configurations
   • AWS CodePipeline
     • Continuous Delivery
     • Pipeline Stages
6. 6

   Analytics

   4 topics

   • Amazon Kinesis
     • Kinesis Data Streams
     • Kinesis Data Firehose
     • Kinesis Data Analytics
   • Amazon EMR
     • Hadoop Framework
     • Cluster Management
   • Amazon Athena
     • Querying S3 Data
     • SQL Queries
   • AWS Glue
     • Data Catalog
     • ETL Jobs
7. 7

   Machine Learning

   3 topics

   • Amazon SageMaker
     • Building and Training Models
     • Deploying Models
   • AWS Lambda
     • Serverless Machine Learning
     • Integration with Other Services
   • AWS Deep Learning AMIs
     • Pre-configured Environments
     • Frameworks and Tools
8. 8

   Migration and Transfer

   4 topics

   • AWS Migration Hub
     • Migration Tracking
     • Integration with Other Services
   • AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
     • Database Migrations
     • Replication Tasks
   • AWS Snowball
     • Data Transfer Appliance
     • Snowball Edge
   • AWS DataSync
     • Automated Data Transfer
     • On-Premises to AWS

Amazon AWS flashcards for DevOps

21 of 59 cards from the Amazon AWS deck — real questions with worked answers.

1. What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

   AWS is a comprehensive, on-demand cloud computing platform from Amazon that provides infrastructure (compute, storage, databases), platform, and software services on a pay-as-you-go basis over the internet, eliminating the need to own physical data centers.

2. Which three core cloud service models does AWS support, and what does each provide?

   IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - raw compute/storage/networking (e.g., EC2); PaaS (Platform as a Service) - managed runtime/platform (e.g., Elastic Beanstalk); SaaS (Software as a Service) - ready-to-use applications (e.g., Amazon WorkMail).

3. What are the three main components of the AWS Global Infrastructure hierarchy?

   Regions (geographic areas), Availability Zones (AZs - one or more discrete data centers within a Region), and Edge Locations / Points of Presence (used by CloudFront and Route 53 for content delivery and DNS).

4. What is an AWS Availability Zone (AZ)?

   An AZ is one or more physically separate data centers within a Region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking, interconnected by low-latency links. A Region typically has at least three AZs to enable high availability and fault tolerance.

5. What is an AWS Region, and why deploy across multiple Regions?

   A Region is a separate geographic area containing multiple isolated Availability Zones. Multiple Regions are used for lower latency to users, data sovereignty/compliance, and disaster recovery. Each Region is independent and isolated from others.

6. What is an AWS Edge Location, and how does it differ from an Availability Zone?

   An Edge Location is a site used to cache content closer to users for Amazon CloudFront (CDN) and Route 53 (DNS). Unlike AZs, edge locations do not run general workloads; they are far more numerous and focus on low-latency content delivery.

7. What are the three main components of the AWS Free Tier?

   1) Always Free - never expires (e.g., DynamoDB 25 GB, Lambda 1M requests/month); 2) 12-Months Free - free for 12 months after sign-up (e.g., EC2 750 hours/month of t2/t3.micro); 3) Trials - short-term free trials starting from service activation.

8. Under the AWS 12-month Free Tier, how many EC2 instance hours per month are included, and for which instance type?

   750 hours per month of a Linux or Windows t2.micro (or t3.micro where t2 is unavailable) instance for the first 12 months.

9. What is Amazon EC2?

   Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable virtual servers (instances) in the cloud, giving full control over the OS and configuration. You choose instance type, AMI, storage, and networking, and pay for compute capacity by the second/hour.

10. Compare the main EC2 pricing/purchasing options: On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, and Savings Plans.

    On-Demand - pay per use, no commitment, highest cost; Reserved Instances - 1- or 3-year commitment for up to ~72% discount; Spot Instances - bid on spare capacity for up to ~90% discount but can be interrupted; Savings Plans - commit to a $/hour usage for 1-3 years for discounts across compute.

11. What is AWS Lambda, and what pricing model does it use?

    AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs code in response to events without provisioning servers. You are billed based on the number of requests and the compute duration (GB-seconds), and you pay nothing when code is not running.

12. What is Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

    Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform-as-a-Service for quickly deploying and scaling web applications. You upload code and it automatically handles provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, and health monitoring, while you retain control of the underlying resources.

13. What is the difference between Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS?

    ECS (Elastic Container Service) is AWS's proprietary container orchestration service; EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is a managed Kubernetes service. Both run containers, but EKS provides the open-source Kubernetes API while ECS uses AWS-native orchestration.

14. What is AWS Fargate?

    Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers used with ECS and EKS. It runs containers without you having to provision or manage the underlying EC2 instances; you specify CPU/memory and pay only for the resources the containers use.

15. What is Amazon S3, and what is its storage model?

    Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is object storage that stores data as objects within buckets. It offers virtually unlimited capacity, 11 nines (99.999999999%) durability, and is accessed via a flat namespace using keys rather than a file hierarchy.

16. Name the main Amazon S3 storage classes and a key use case for each.

    S3 Standard (frequent access), S3 Intelligent-Tiering (auto-moves between tiers), S3 Standard-IA and One Zone-IA (infrequent access), S3 Glacier Instant/Flexible Retrieval and Glacier Deep Archive (long-term archival, lowest cost).

17. What is the durability and default availability of the S3 Standard storage class?

    S3 Standard is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability and 99.99% availability, storing data redundantly across at least three Availability Zones.

18. What is the difference between Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS?

    EBS (Elastic Block Store) provides block-level storage volumes attached to a single EC2 instance (like a virtual hard disk, single-AZ). EFS (Elastic File System) is a shared, elastic NFS file system mountable by many instances across multiple AZs simultaneously.

19. What is Amazon S3 Glacier used for?

    S3 Glacier (and Glacier Deep Archive) provides very low-cost storage for long-term data archiving and backup where retrieval times of minutes to hours are acceptable. Deep Archive is the lowest-cost class, ideal for data accessed once or twice a year.

20. What is Amazon RDS, and which database engines does it support?

    Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed relational database service that handles patching, backups, and scaling. Supported engines: Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

21. What is Amazon DynamoDB?

    DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL key-value and document database offering single-digit millisecond latency at any scale, automatic scaling, and built-in high availability with replication across multiple AZs.

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