9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

SkullTech / aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes

Dismiss
Join GitHub today
GitHub is home to over 40 million developers working together to host and
review code, manage projects, and build software together.

Sign up

My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate. https://sumit-ghosh.com/articles/aws-…

# aws # aws-solution-architect-associate # notes # study-notes

32 commits 1 branch 0 releases 2 contributors

Branch: master New pull request Find File Clone or download

SkullTech Add tape gateway to storage gateway. Fixes #2 Latest commit 07ab571 on Aug 21

README.md Add tape gateway to storage gateway. Fixes #2 last month

README.md

Notice
This repo is getting pretty popular so I'm giving a little plug here. I'm looking for an internship for the summer of 2020. If
anyone is hiring or has any lead, please drop me a mail, that would be much appreciated. You can find my email on my
Github profile.

Notes for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

I recently got the AWS solutions architect associate certificate in July 2019, and wanted to share my notes with anyone who
might benefit from it. The path I followed was

Go through the ACloudGuru course.

Attempt the Whizlabs practice tests. After each test, note down the concepts I had difficulties with.
Attempt the practice tests by Jon Bonso at Udemy. Again, after each test, note down the concepts I had difficulties with.

So you should go through the notes only after you have done a course that explains the basics, such as the one from
ACloudGuru. Also, full disclosure, the links to the above courses are referral ones. So if these notes helped you and you're
planning to buy the courses or practices tests, please consider going through the links when you're buying.

Note — You can also check out this blog post where I describe my preparation strategy in detail.

Contents
Well-Architected Framework
Route 53
S3
RDS, Redshift and ElastiCache
EBS
EFS
ELB and Autoscaling
SQS
SNS

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 1/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

API Gateway
Lambda
VPC
DynamoDB
ECS
Elastic Beanstalk
Storage Gateway
IAM, Cognito and Directory Services
KMS and CloudHSM
Kinesis
EMR
Misc

Well-Architected Framework
The five pillars are —

1. Operational Excellence
2. Security
3. Reliability
4. Performance Efficiency
5. Cost Optimization

Operational Excellence

Design Principles
Perform operations as code
Annotate documents
Make frequent, small, reversible changes
Refine operations procedures frequently
Anticipate failure
Learn from all operational failures

Best Practices
Prepare
Operate
Evolve

Key AWS Service — AWS CloudFormation.

Security

Design Principles
Implement a strong identity foundations
Enable traceability
Apply security at all layers
Automate security best practices
Protect data in transit and at rest
Keep people away from data
Prepare for security events

Best Practices

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 2/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

Identity and Access Management

Detective Controls
Infrastructure Protection
Data Protection
Incident Response

Key AWS Service — AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Reliability

Design Principles
Test recovery procedures
Automatically recover from failure
Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
Stop guessing capacity
Manage change in automation

Best Practices
Foundations
Change Management
Failure Management

Key AWS Service — Amazon CloudWatch.

Performance Efficiency

Design Principles
Democratize advanced technologies
Go global in minutes
Use serverless architecture
Experiment more often
Mechanical sympathy

Best Practices
Selection
Compute
Storage
Database
Network
Review
Monitoring
Tradeoffs

Key AWS Service — Amazon CloudWatch.

Cost Optimization

Design Principles
Adopt a consumption model
Measure overall efficiency
Stop spending money on data center operations
Analyze and attribute expenditure
Use managed and application level services to reduce cost of ownership
https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 3/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

Best Practices
Expenditure Awareness
Cost-Effective Resources
Matching Supply and Demand
Optimizing Over Time

Key AWS Service — Cost Explorer.

Route53
Main functions of Route53 —

1. Register domain names.

2. Route internet traffic to the resources for your domain.
3. Check the health of your resources.

It's not used to distribute traffic.

CNAME vs ALIAS —

For routing to S3 bucket // Elastic load balancer use A record with ALIAS.
For routing to RDS instance use CNAME with NO ALIAS // without ALIAS.

ALIAS only supports the following services —

API Gateway
VPC interface endpoint
CloudFront distribution
Elastic Beanstalk environment
ELB load balancer
S3 bucket that is configured as a static website
Another Route 53 record in the same hosted zone

Route53 does not directly log to S3 bucket, we can forward that from Cloudwatch, but can't do it directly.

Types of Route53 health checks —

1. Health checks that monitor an endpoint. This can be on-premise too.

2. Health checks that monitor other health checks.
3. Health checks that monitor Cloudwatch alarms.

Multivalue answer routing policy responds with upto 8 healthy records selected at random.

Weighted routing policy is a good fit for blue-green deployments.

S3
In a newly created S3 bucket, everything // every additional option is turned off by default. Also, no bucket policy exists.

S3 bucket properties are —

1. Versioning
2. Server access logging
3. Static website hosting
4. Object level logging // Essentially CloudTrail
5. Transfer acceleration
6. Events

Object level properties—

Metadata and Storage class are object level properties. All object level properties are

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 4/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

1. Storage class
2. Encryption
3. Metadata
4. Tags
5. Object lock

DELETE operation does not keep a copy unless you have versioning enabled. From the docs

The DELETE operation removes the null version (if there is one) of an object and inserts a delete marker, which becomes
the current version of the object. If there isn't a null version, Amazon S3 does not remove any objects.

S3 is a managed service. It can't be part of a VPC.

S3 object metadata—

1. System metadata
2. User-defined metadata

User defined metadatas must start with x-amz-meta .

When you enable logging on a bucket, the console both enables logging on the source bucket and adds a grant in the target
bucket's access control list (ACL) granting write permission to the Log Delivery Group.

S3 bucket endpoints formats —

1. http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com
2. http://bucket.s3.aws-region.amazonaws.com
3. http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket
4. http://s3.aws-region.amazonaws.com/bucket

Object sizes — S3 can store objects of size 0 bytes to 5 TB. A single PUT can transfer 5 GB max. For files larger than 100MB,
multipart upload is recommended.

Cross-region replication requires that versioning be enabled on both the source bucket and the destination bucket.

AWS Glacier archive retrieval options —

Expedited: Costly, 1-5 minutes.

Standard: Default, 3-5 hours.
Bulk: Cheapest, 5-12 hours.

To increase performance, we can prefix each object name with a hash key along with the current date. But, according to the
new S3 performance announcement, this is not needed anymore.

Increasing performance in S3 —

If workload is mainly GET requests, integrate Cloudfront with S3.

If workload consists of PUT requests, use S3 transfer acceleration.

In the CORS configuration, the exact URLs must be added, with the correct protocol, i.e. http vs https.

S3 does not support OPTIONS , CONNECT and TRACE methods.

S3 encryptions —

SSE-S3: Data and master keys managed by S3.

SSE-C: The user manages the encryption keys.
SSE-KMS: AWS manages the data key, the user manages the master key.

To make sure that S3 objects are only accessible from Cloudfront, create an Origin Access Identity (OAI) for Cloudfront and
grant access to the objects to that OAI.

We can create event notification in S3 to invoke lambda function.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 5/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

Customer managed S3 encryption workflow —

Generate a data key using Customer managed CMK. Encrypt data using data key and delete data key. Store encrypted data
key and data in S3 buckets. For decryption, use CMK to decrypt data key into plain text and then decrypt data using plain
text data key.

AWS S3 performance —

3,500 requests per second to add data

5,500 requests per second to retrieve data

Provisioned capacity should be used when we want to guarantee the availability of fast expedited retrieval from S3 Glacier
within minutes.

For S3 static website hosting, the default provided URL is https://bucket-name.s3-website-aws-region.amazonaws.com.

S3 server side encryption uses AES 256.

S3 event notification targets —

SQS
SNS
Lambda

An 80 TB Snowball appliance and 100 TB Snowball Edge appliance only have 72 TB and 83 TB of usable capacity
respectively.

For static website hosting with S3, the name of the bucket must be the same as the domain or subdomain name.

Preventing accidental deletion of S3 objects —

Enable versioning
Enable MFA delete

RDS, Redshift and ElastiCache

Amazon Redshift Enhanced VPC Routing provides VPC resources the access to Redshift.

Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached.

Cross-region replication can be setup for Redshift Clusters.

Redshift encryption —

Using AWS KMS to encrypt the underlying data.

Using S3 and its encryption.

RDS data size limits —

Aurora: 64 TB
Others: 16 TB.

During automated backup, Amazon RDS performs a storage volume snapshot of entire Database instance. Also, it captures
transaction logs every 5 minutes.

AWS RDS is a service whereas AWS Aurora is a database engine.

For Redshift, spot instances are not an option.

Encryption of RDS — Have to enable it on database creation. Also, not all instance classes support encryption, we have to
choose one which supports it.

To enable multi-region replication of RDS, we have to use Read Replicas. Multi-AZ is not the solution here.

RDS Read Replicas are synced asynchronously, so it can have replication lag.

Redshift automated snapshot retention period — 1 day to 35 days.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 6/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

We can't use auto-scaling with RDS. To improve performance, we should look to sharding instead. Starting from June 20, we
can use auto-scaling with RDS instances.

We configure RDS engine configurations using parameter groups.

To use REDIS AUTH with ElastiCache, in-transit encryption must be enabled for clusters.

For RDS, Enhanced Monitoring gathers its metrics from an agent on the instance.

In case of a failover, Amazon RDS flips the canonical name record (CNAME) for your DB instance to point at the standby.

Aurora endpoints, by default —

A reader endpoint. It load balances all read traffic between instances.

A cluster endpoint. For write operations.

We can create additional custom endpoints that load balance based on specified criteria.

With Redshift Spectrum, we can run complex queries on data stored in S3.

We can use WLM in the parameter group configuration of Redshift to define number of query queues and how queries are
routed to those queues.

The memory and processor usage by each process in an RDS instance can not be monitored by Cloudwatch, we have to use
RDS Enhanced Monitoring for that. Because Cloudwatch monitors the hypervisor, not the individual instances.

IAM DB authentication can be used with MySQL and PostgreSQL. With this, you don't need to use a password when you
connect to a DB instance. Instead, you use an authentication token.

EC2 and EBS

Instance store — You cannot add instance store volume to an instance after it's launched. Not all EC2 instance types support
instance store volume.

Persistence — Instance store persists during reboots, but not stop or terminate. EBS volumes however persists accross
reboot, stop, and terminate.

EBS volume types —

1. General purpose SSD. For web applications // most use cases.

2. Provisioned IOPS SSD. For critical high performing databases.
3. Throughput optimized HDD. For Big Data.
4. Cold HDD. For infrequently accessed data.

Also, to note, HDDs cannot be boot volumes.

We can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automate taking backups // snapshots of EBS volumes, and protect them
from accidental or unwanted deletion.

EBS-optimized EC2 instances provide additional, dedicated capacity for EBS IO. Helps squeeze out the last ounce of
performance.

Encrypted EBS volumes are not supported on all instance types.

To get more performance out of EBS volumes —

1. Use a more modern Linux Kernel.

2. Use RAID 0.

VolumeRemainingSize is not an Cloudwatch metric for EBS volumes.

EBS volume types —

For throughput, Throughput optimized HDD.

For large number of transaction, i.e. IOPS, Provisioned IOPS SSD.

By default, EBS volumes are automatically replicated within their availability zone, and offers a significant high availability.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 7/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

AWS Cloudwatch Logs can be used to monitor and store logs from EC2 instances. The instance needs awslogs log driver
installed to be able to send logs to CloudWatch. We don't need any database or S3 for storage.

Cloudwatch logs agent is more efficient than AWS SSM Agent.

With EC2 dedicated hosts we have control over number of cores, not anywhere else.

Placement groups —

Cluster
Spread. Maximum number of instances in an AZ is 7.
Partitioned

The console does not support placement groups, have to do it from CLI.

Cluster Placement groups have very low inter-note latency.

Hibernation of EC2 instances —

When EC2 instance is hibernated and brought back up, the public IP4 address is renewed. All the other IP addresses are
retained.
When EC2 instance is in hibernate, you are only charged for elastic IP address and EBS storage space.

Default Cloudwatch metrics —

CPU utilization
Disk reads and writes
Network in and out

Custom metrics —

Memory utilization
Disk swap utilization
Disk space utilization
Page file utilization
Log collection

Reserved Instances that are terminated are still billed until the end of their term according to their payment option.

Upon stopping and starting an EC2 instance —

Elastic IP address is disassociated from the instance if it is an EC2-Classic instance. Otherwise, if it is an EC2-VPC instance,
the Elastic IP address remains associated.
The underlying physical host is possibly changed.

EBS is lower-latency than EFS.

The maximum ratio of provisioned IOPS to requested volume size (in GiB) is 50:1.

For new accounts, Amazon has a soft limit of 20 EC2 instances per region, which can be removed by contacting Amazon.

You can attach a network interface (ENI) to an EC2 instance in the following ways —

1. When it's running. Hot attach.

2. When it's stopped. Warm attach.
3. When the instance is being launched. Cold attach.

EBS snapshots are more efficient and cost-effective solution compared to disk mirroring using RAID1.

EBS volumes can only be attached to an EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone.

EBS snapshot creation — In usual scenarios EBS volume snapshots can be created at the same time it's in usage. But when
using RAID configuraions, there are additional complexities and we should stop every IO operation and flush the cache
before taking a snapshot.

Cloudwatch alarm actions can automatically start, stop or reboot EC2 instances based on alarms.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 8/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

With scheduled reserved instances, we can plan out our future usage and get reserved instances in those planned time-
frame only.

Throughput optimized HDD vs Cold HDD — Throughput optimized is used for frequently accessed data, whereas Cold HDD
is used for infrequently accessed data. Also the later is more cost-effective.

RAID0 vs RAID1 —

RAID1 is used for mirroring, high-availability and redundancy.

RAID0 is used for higher performance, it can combine multiple disk drives together.

Larger EC2 instances have higher disk data throughput. This can be used in conjunction with RAID 0 to improve EBS
performance.

EFS
EFS supports cross availability zone mounting, but it is not recommended. The recommended approach is creating a mount
point in each availability zone.

You can mount an EFS file system in only one VPC at a time. If you want to access it or mount it from another VPC, you have
to create a VPC peering connection. You should note that all of these must be within the same region.

NFS port 2049 for EFS.

Encryption

1. Encryption at rest must be specified at the creation of file system. If you want to modify it later on, create a new EFS file
system with encryption enabled and copy the data over.
2. Encryption at transit is supported by EFS // NFS, and must be enabled from the client side. It simply uses SSL to encrypt
the connection.

Performance mode

1. General purpose must be used for most purposes, it has low latency, so ideal for web applications.
2. Max IO is ideal for big data and parallel connection and processing from a large number of hosts. It has higher latency
but large throughput.

Throughput mode

1. Bursting is ideal for arbitrary large amount of data, because it scales properly.
2. But for cases with high throughput to storage ratio, such as common in web applications, provisioned mode is better.

ELB and Autoscaling

Patching an AMI for an auto scaling group, the procedure is —

1. Create an image out of the main patched EC2 instance

2. Create a new launch configuration with new AMI ID
3. Update auto scaling group with new launch configuration ID.

Note that AMI ID is set during creation of launch configuration and cannot be modified, so we have to create a new launch
configuration.

Default metric types for a load balancer —

1. Request count per target.

2. Average CPU utlization.
3. Network in.
4. Network out.

Monitoring Application Load Balancers —

1. Cloudwatch metrics
2. Access logs

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 9/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

3. Request tracing
4. Cloudtrail logs.

Adding lifecycle hooks to ASGs put instances in wait state before termination. During this wait state, we can perform custom
activities. Default wait period is 1 hour.

ASG Dynamic Scaling Policies —

Target tracking scaling. The preferred one to use, this should be the first one we should consider.
Step scaling
Simple scaling

If you are scaling based on a utilization metric that increases or decreases proportionally to the number of instances in an
Auto Scaling group, we recommend that you use target tracking scaling policies. Otherwise, we recommend that you use
step scaling policies.

The ELB service does not consume an IP address, it's the nodes that cosume one IP address each.

Auto-scaling ensures —

Fault tolerance
Availability

ELBs can manage traffic within a region and not between regions.

For unstable scaling behavior, that is scaling multiple times frequently, the following things can be done —

Increasing auto-scaling cooldown timer value would give scaling activity sufficient time to stabilize.
Modify the cloudwatch alarm period that triggers scaling activity.

Default cooldown period is 300 seconds.

Port based routing is supported by Application Load Balancer.

Network Load Balancer can be used to terminate TLS connections. For this, NLB uses a security policy which consists of
protocols and ciphers. The certificate used can be provided by AWS Certificate Manager.

Connection draining enables the load balancer to complete in-flight requests made to instances that are de-registering or
unhealthy.

ASG termination policy —

1. Oldest launch configuration.

2. Closest to next billing hour.
3. Random.

Load balancer does not create or terminate instances, that's done by auto scaling group.

SQS
Consumers must delete an SQS message manually after it has done processing the message. To delete a message, use the
ReceiptHandle of a message, not the MessageId.

Incoming messages can trigger a lambda function.

We can use dead letter queues to isolate messages that can't be processed right now.

SQS does not encrypt messages by default.

Default visibility timeout for SQS is 30 seconds.

Each FIFO Queue uses —

Message Deduplication ID
Message Group ID. Message Group ID helps preserve order.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 10/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

For application with identical message bodies, use unique deduplication ID, while for unique message bodies, use content-
based deduplication ID.

Both the default and maximum batch size for ReceiveMessage call of SQS is 10.

Reducing SQS API calls —

Use long polling.

Send DeleteMessage requests in batch using DeleteMessageBatch . Other batch actions are SendMessageBatch and
ChangeMessageVisibilityBatch .

Message retention period in SQS — 1 minute to 14 days. The default is 4 days.

Limit on number of inflight messages — 120,000 for standard queue and 20,000 for FIFO queue.

SNS
Available protocols for AWS SNS —

HTTP // HTTPS
Email
Email-JSON
SQS
Application
Lambda
SMS

We can add filter policies to individual subscribers in an SNS topic.

SNS message attributes are —

Name
Type
Value

With Amazon SNS, there is a possibility of the client receiving duplicate messages.

API Gateway
API Gateway can integrate with any HTTP based operations available on the public internet, as well as other AWS services.

Integration types —

Lambda function, can be from another AWS account as well.

HTTP
Mock
AWS Service
VPC Link

For connecting API Gateway to a set of services hosted in an on-premise network, we can use

1. DirectConnect to connect the private network to AWS directly.

2. Then use VPCLink to set up API Gateway connection.

API Gateway Throttling —

Burst limit refers to the first millisecond.

Steady-state limit refers to an one second interval.

Throttling behaviors —

If an user exceeds the burst limit but not the steady-state limit, the rest of the requests are throttled over the one
second steady-state interval.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 11/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

If an user exceeds the steady-state limit, AWS returns 429 Too Many Requests error.

When it comes to throttling settings, you can override stage settings on an individual method within the stage. That is,
there is an option for method level throttling to override stage level throttling.

Access control mechanisms for API Gateway —

Resource policies
AWS IAM roles and policies
CORS or Cross-origin resource sharing
Lambda authorizers
Amazon Cognito user pools
Client side SSL certs
Usage plans

API Gateway automatically protects the backend systems from DDoS attack.

Cache properties and settings —

Cache status
Flush entire cache
Enable API cache
Cache capacity
Encrypt cache data
Cache TTL
Require authorization
Handle unauthorized requests

Monitoring API Gateway usage — we can use CloudWatch or Access logging. Access logging logs who accessed the API
and how the caller accessed the API, CloudWatch does not include this data.

Protect backend systems behind API gateway from traffic spikes —

Enable throttling.
Enable result caching.

Lambda
Lambda functions can be run within a private VPC.

Lambda can read events from —

Amazon Kinesis
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon Simple Queue Service

Services that can invoke Lambda functions —

Elastic Load Balancing (Application Load Balancer)

Amazon Cognito
Amazon Lex
Amazon Alexa
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon CloudFront (Lambda@Edge)
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Amazon Simple Notification Service
Amazon Simple Email Service
AWS CloudFormation
Amazon CloudWatch Logs

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 12/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

Amazon CloudWatch Events

AWS CodeCommit
AWS Config

AWS CodePipeline and AWS OpsWorks can't invoke lambda functions.

For failures we can configure lambda to send non-processed payloads to SQS Dead letter queue. Then we can configure
SNS to send a notification if we want. Lambda does not have an in-built mechanism for notification upon failure.

A policy on a role defines which API actions can be made on the target, it does not define whether the source can access the
target or not.

Each lambda function has an ephemeral storage of 512 MB in the tmp directory.

AWS CloudWatch rule can be configured to trigger a lambda function. While configuration, the following can be used as
input to the target lambda function —

Matched event
Part of the matched event
Constant (JSON text)

The following CloudFront events can trigger lambda function —

Viewer request
Viewer response
Origin request
Origin response

Lambda function update has eventual consistency. Which means, for a brief window of less than a minute, it may execute
either the old version or the new version.

We can use alias versions to point to another version. This can enable easier upgradation from the viewpoint of a consumer.

Limits —

Function memory allocation: 128 MB to 3008 MB, in 64 MB increments.

Function timeout: 900 seconds.
Deployment package: 50 MB * 5 layers.
tmp directory storage: 512 MB.

To grant cross-account permission to a function, we have to modify the function policy, not the execution role policy.

The console doesn't support directly modifying permissions in a function policy. You have to do it from the CLI or SDK.

If we run lambda functions inside a VPN, they use subnet IPs or ENIs. There should be sufficient ones otherwise it will get
throttled.

ENI capacity = Projected peak concurrent executions * (Memory in GB / 3 GB).

The lambda console provides encryption and decryption helpers for encryption of environment variables.

By default, the a KMS default service key is used for encryption, which makes the information visible to anyone who has
access to the lambda console. For further restriction, create a custom KMS key and use that to encrypt.

CloudWatch metrics for Lambda —

Invocations
Errors
Dead Letter Error
Duration
Throttles
IteratorAge
ConcurrentExecutions
UnreservedConcurrentExecutions

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 13/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

We can get the function version within the function using —

getFunctionVersion from the Context object.

AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_VERSION environment variable.

Lambda Retry upon Failure Behavior —

Event sources that aren't stream-based

Synchronous invocation — Returns error with status code 200. Includes FunctionError field and X-Amz-Function-
Error header.
Asynchronous invocation — Retry twice, then sent to Dead Letter Queue.
Poll-based and stream-based event source (Kinesis or DynamoDB) — Lambda keeps retrying until the data expires. The
exception is blocking, this ensures the data are processed in order.
Poll-based but not stream-based event source (SQS) — On unsuccessful processing or if the function times out of the
message, it is returned to the queue, and ready for further reprocessing after the visibility timeout period. If the function
errors out, it is sent to Dead Letter Queue.

Lambda traffic shifting —

Canary
Linear
All at once

VPC
We cannot route traffic to a NAT gateway or VPC gateway endpoints through a VPC peering connection, a VPN connection,
or AWS Direct Connect. A NAT gateway or VPC gateway endpoints cannot be used by resources on the other side of these
connections. Conversely, a NAT gateway // VPC gateway endpoints cannot send traffic over VPC endpoints, AWS VPN
connections, Direct Connect or VPC Peering connections either.

Every route table contains a local route for communication within the VPC over IPv4. We cannot modify or delete these
routes.

VPC Endpoints always take precedence over NAT Gateways or Internet Gateways.

Network ACL rules are evaluated in order, starting with the lowest numbered rule. As soon as a rule matches, it is applied
regardless of any higher numbered rule that may contradict it.

SSH connections are between port 22 of the host and an ephemeral port of the client. In fact, this is true for any TCP service.

Security groups are stateful, this means any connection initiated successfully will be completed.

We can create S3 proxy server for enabling use cases where S3 has to be accessed privately through VPN connection, AWS
Direct Connect or VPC peering.

AWS reserves 5 IPs for every subnet, not for every VPC.

Instances in custom VPCs don't get public DNS hosts by default, we have to set the enableDnsHostnames attribute to true.
The enableDnsSupport is to be set to true too, but that is done by default.

We can set a custom route table as the main route table.

We can add secondary CIDR ranges to an existing VPC. When a secondary CIDR block is added to a VPC, a route for that
block with target as "local" is automatically added to the route table.

VPC peering connection route contains Target as pcx-xxxxxx . VPN connection // Direct Connect connection route contains
Target as vgw-xxxxxx .

VPN is established over a Virtual Private Gateway.

AWS VPC Endpoints support S3 and DynamoDB. For Amazon ECR, we have to use AWS PrivateLink.

Difference between DirectConnect and VPN — DirectConnect does not involve the Internet, while VPN does.

AWS Direct Connect doesn't encrypt in transit data, while VPN does.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 14/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

To establish a VPN connection, we need —

A public IP address on the customer gateway for the on-premise network.

A virtual private gateway attached to the VPC.

To setup AWS VPN CloudHub —

Each regional site should have non overlapping IP prefixes.

BGP ASN should be unique at each site.
If BGP ASN are not unique, additional ALLOW-INs will be required.

The allowed block size in VPC is between a /16 netmask (65,536 IP addresses) and /28 netmask (16 IP addresses).

The following VPC peering connection configurations are not supported —

1. Overlapping CIDR Blocks

2. Transitive Peering
3. Edge to Edge Routing Through a Gateway or Private Connection

We can move part of our on-premise address space to AWS. This is called BYOIP. For this, we have to acquire a ROA, Root
Origin Authorization from the the regional internet registry and submit it to Amazon.

DynamoDB
AWS DynamoDB is durable, ACID compliant, can go through multiple schema changes, and changes to the database does
not result in any database downtime.

DynamoDB Global Tables can be used to deploy a multi region, multi AZ, fully managed database solution.

We can create secondary indexes for DynamoDB tables. Always choose DynamoDB when possible.

DynamoDB streams can be used to monitor changes made to a database, and they can trigger lambda functions.

We can turn on autoscaling for DynamoDB.

For write heavy use cases in DynamoDB, use partition keys with large number of distinct values.

DynamoDB Accelerator, DAX is an in-memory cache for DynamoDB that reduces response time from milliseconds to
microseconds.

ECS
Launch types —

Fargate
EC2

All types of instances, i.e. on-demand, spot and reserved can be used with ECS.

Docker containers and ECS are particularly suited for batch job workloads as they can get embarassingly parallel.

Amazon ECS enables you to inject sensitive data into your containers by storing your sensitive data in either —

AWS Secrets Manager secrets

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store parameters

Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk can be used to create —

Web application using DB

Capacity provisioning and load balancing of websites
Long running worker process

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 15/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

Static website

It should not be used to create tasks which are run once or on a nightly basis, because the infrastructure is provisioned and
will be running 24/7.

Elastic Beanstalk can be used to host Docker containers.

Storage Gateway
AWS Storage Gateways—

1. File gateway
2. Volume gateway: Cached volumes
3. Volume gateway: Stored volumes
4. Tape gateway

IAM, Cognito and Directory Services

Amazon Cognito has two authentication methods, independent of one another —

Sign in via third party federation

Cognito user pools

AWS Directory Service options —

AWS Managed Microsoft AD

AD Connector
Simple AD
Amazon Cloud Directory
Amazon Cognito

There is no default policy ever, anywhere. When permissions are checked, roles and policies are considered together, and in
the default case there is no policy, so only the role is considered.

We can configure IAM policies that allows access to specific tags.

Connecting AWS SSO to On-Premise Active Directory —

Two-way trust relationship: Preferred. Users can do everything from both portals.
AD connector: SSO does not cache user credentials. Users can't reset password from SSO protal, have to do it from on-
premise portal.

For two-step verification, SSO sends code to registered email. It can set to be either —

Always-on
Context-aware

Cross-account IAM roles allow customers to securely grant access to AWS resources in their account to a third party.

If our identity store is not compatible with SAML, we can develop a custom application on-premise and use it with STS.

Microsoft Active Directory supports SAML.

KMS and CloudHSM

KMS master keys are region specific.

CloudHSM backup procedure — Ephemeral backup key (EBK) is used to encrypt data and Persistent backup key (PBK) is
used to encrypt EBK before saving it to an S3 bucket in the same region as that of AWS CloudHSM cluster.

With AWS CoudHSM, we can control the entire lifecycle around the keys.

AWS KMS API can be used to encrypt data.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 16/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

Kinesis
Kinesis stream data retention period — 24 hours (default) to 168 hours.

For Kinesis, we have to use VPC Interface Endpoint, powered by AWS PrivateLink.

Amazon Kinesis Scaling Utility is a less cost-effective solution compared to doing it with Cloudwatch alarms + API Gateway
+ Lambda function.

Kinesis data streams store the data, by default for 24 hours and upto 7 days. Whereas Kinesis Firehose stream the data
directly into either —

S3
Redshift
Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Splunk

Kinesis — If ShardIterator expires immediately and data is lost, we have to increase the write capacity assigned to the Shard
table.

EMR
AWS EMR — AWS Elastic MapReduce, Hadoop based big data analytics.

AWS EMR is preferred for processing log files.

EMR can use spot instances as underlying nodes.

We can access the underlying EC2 instances in AWS EMR cluster.

Misc
AWS STS — The policy of the temporary credentials generated by STS are defined by the intersection of your IAM user
policies and the policy that you pass as argument.

AWS VM Import // Export can be used to transfer virtual machines from local infrastructure to AWS and vice-versa.

AWS Trusted Advisor is a resource that helps users with cost management, performance and security.

We can create a CloudTrail log across all regions.

CloudFormation Drift Detection can be used to detect changes in the environment. Drift Detection only checks property
values which are explicitly set by stack templates or by specifying template parameters. It does not determine drift for
property values which are set by default.

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands
of on-premise workloads to AWS.

AWS Athena is a managed service which can be used to make interactive search queries to S3 data.

Amazon Inspector is a security assessment service, which helps improve security and compliance of applications.

AWS Opsworks is a configuration management service for Chef and Puppet. With Opsworks Stacks, we can model our
application as a stack containing different layers.

By default, CloudTrail logs are encrypted using S3 server-side encryption (SSE). We can also choose to encrypt with AWS
KMS.

Amazon ECS for Kubernetes (EKS) exists, it's a managed service.

Changes to CloudTrail global service event logs can only be done via the CLI or the SDKs, not the console.

For CloudFront query string forwarding, the parameter names and values used are case sensitive.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 17/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

AWS Polly — Lexicons are specific to a region. For a single text appearing multiple times, we can create alias using multiple
Lexicons.

Amazon Quicksight is a managed service for creating dashboards with data visualization.

AWS Athena pricing is based upon per query and amount of data scanned in each query. To reduce price —

Partition data based on different parameters so that amount of data scanned gets reduced.
Create separate workgroups based upon user groups.

AWS CloudSearch helps us add search to our website or application. Like Elasticsearch.

AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL service for data. It keeps a track of processed data using Job Bookmark. Enabling Job
Bookmark will help to scan only changes since last bookmark and prevent processing of whole data again.

AWS X-Ray — Helps debug and analyze microservices architecture.

Reducing cost with AWS X-Ray — Sampling at a lower rate.

Amazon WorkDocs has a poweruser facility, which on enabling restricts sharing of documents to that user only.

AWS Data Pipeline can automate the movement and transformation of data for data-driven workflows. For example,
transferring older data to S3 from DynamoDB.

Disaster recovery solutions —

Backup and Restore. Cheapest.

Pilot Light
Warm Standby
Multi-Site
Multiple AWS Regions. Costliest.

With AWS Config, we can get a snapshot of the current configuration of our AWS account.

For queue based processing, scaling EC2 instances based on the size of the queue is a preferred architecture.

It's best practice to launch Amazon RDS instance outside an Elastic Beanstalk environment.

AWS Athena is simpler and requires less effort to set up than AWS Quicksight.

RI Coverage Budget reports number of instances that are part of Reserved Instance. For an organisation using default IAM
policy, each member account owner needs to create a budget policy for individual accounts and not by master account.

Consolidated Billing in AWS Organisations combines usage from all accounts and billing is generated based upon total
usage. Services like EC2 and S3 have volume pricing tiers where with more usage volume the overall charge decreases.

To automatically trigger CodePipeline with changes in source S3 bucket, use CloudWatch Events rule and CloudTrail trail.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager can be used for creation, retention and deletion of EBS snapshots.

With AWS Organizations, we can centrally manage policies across multiple AWS accounts. With Service Control Policies
(SCPs), we can ensure security policies are in place.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall.

In AWS Managed Blockchain network, the format for resource endpoint is —

ResourceID.MemberID.NetworkID.managedblockchain.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:PortNumber .

When you want to keep your expenditure within a budget, use AWS Budgets, not AWS Cost Explorer.

Cloudwatch monitoring schemes —

Basic. 5 minutes.
Detailed. 1 minute.
Custom. Can be down to 1 second.

Transferring data from an EC2 instance to Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SES, Amazon SQS, or
Amazon SimpleDB in the same AWS Region has no cost at all.

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 18/19
9/29/2019 GitHub - SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes: My notes for AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

We can use signed URLs and signed cookies with Cloudfront to protect resources.

Amazon MQ is a message queue which supports industry standard messaging protocols.

Slower login time and 504 errors in front of Cloudfront can be optimized by —

Lambda @ Edge.
Setting up an Origin Failover Policy.

AWS Shield is a service that protects resources against DDoS attacks to EC2, ELB, Cloudfront and Route53.

AWS IoT Core is a managed service that lets IoT devices connect and interact with AWS applications and resources.

The following storage have encryption at rest by default —

AWS Glacier
Storage Gateway in S3

Perfect Forward Secrecy is supported by —

Cloudfront
Elastic Load Balancing

Enabling multiple domains to serve HTTPS over same IP address —- Generate an SSL cert with AWS Certificate Manager
and create a Cloudfront distribution. Associate cert with distribution and enable Server Name Indication (SNI).

Classic Load Balancer does not support SNI, we have to use Application Load Balancer or Cloudfront.

The following services enable us to run SQL queries directly against S3 data —

AWS Athena
Redshift Spectrum
S3 Select

By default, each workflow execution can run for a maximum of 1 year in Amazon SWF.

In AWS SWF, a decision task tells the decider the state of the workflow execution.

Third party SSL cert can be imported into —

AWS Certificate Manager

IAM Certificate Store

https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes#well-architected-framework 19/19