Certified AWS Associate Developer Notes

My notes in preparation for the 2020 AWS developer associate exam

Table of contents

• AWS Fundamentals

  • IAM: Identity Access & Management
  • EC2: Virtual Machines
  • Security Groups
  • ELB: Elastic Load Balancers
  • ASG: Auto Scaling Group
  • EBS Volumes
  • RDS: Relational Database Service
  • Route 53
  • ElastiCache
  • VPC: Virtual Private Cloud
  • S3 Buckets

• AWS Deep Dive

  • CLI: Command Line Interface
  • SDK: Software Development Kit
  • Elastic Beanstalk
  • CICD: Continuous Integration and Deployment
    • CodeCommit
    • CodePipeline
    • CodeBuild
    • CodeDeploy
  • CloudFormation
  • CloudWatch
  • Integration and Messaging
    • SQS
    • SNS
    • Kinesis

• YAML

• AWS Serverless

  • Lambda
  • DynamoDB
  • API Gateway
  • Cognito

• Docker based AWS services

  • ECS: Elastic Container Service
  • Elastic Container Registry
  • Fargate

• Exam Preperation

Exam Preparation

• Exam details

  • Two question types:

    • Multiple Choice
    • Multiple response

  • Minimum passing score: 720/1000

  • Domains:

    • Deployment: CICD, Beanstalk, Serverless
    • Security: each service deep-dive + dedicated section
    • Development with AWS Services: Serverless, API, SDK, & CLI
    • Refactoring: Understand all the AWS services for the best migration
    • Monitoring and Troubleshooting: CloudWAtch, CloudTrail, X-Ray

  • Exam Guide:

    • Certified Developer - Associate Exam PDF

• EC2 + IAM Exam Checklist

  • Know how to SSH into EC2 (and change .pem file permissions)
  • Know how to properly use security groups
  • Know the fundamental differences between private vs public vs elastic IP
  • Know how to use User Data to customize your instance at boot time
  • Know that you can build custom AMI to enhance your OS
  • EC2 instances are billed by the second and can be easily created and thrown away, welcome to the cloud! 
 Maybe on Exam:
  • Availability zones are in geographically isolated data centers
  • IAM users are NOT defined on a per-region basis
  • If you are getting a permission error exception when trying to SSH into your linux instance, then the key is missing chmod 400 permissions
  • If you are getting a network timeout when trying to SSH into your EC2 instance, then your security groups are misconfigured
  • Security groups reference IP address, CIDR block, Security group, but NOT DNS name