AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) Certification Course

The video is in Georgian.

Course Description:

Schedule: Tuesday, Friday 20:00–22:00 (Tbilisi time, GMT+4)

Course Objective:

To teach students the key concepts of how Amazon Web Services cloud services work and to develop their skills in applying them in practice. To prepare students to pass the international Solutions Architect certification exam, AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03).

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Course Concept:

• Students will study the essential theory behind AWS's key services in depth
• During lectures, the focus will be on the cases that arise when using each service, both in exam scenarios and in real-world projects
• The course will cover numerous practical examples of implementing the services
• As the various services are implemented hands-on, the architectural solutions will be worked through and explained with diagrams
• The course is logically structured around using the services in conjunction with one another

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Tools and Minimum Requirements:

To take the course, students will need a computer, a reliable internet connection and an active bank card to sign up for AWS. To work through the course material, students will mostly use the AWS Free Tier: new accounts get up to $200 in credits for 6 months, and 30+ services are always free within monthly limits.

Students should have basic knowledge of information technology, e.g. a general understanding of what a server and an operating system are, what IPv4 addressing means, what a subnet and a network mask are, etc.

Students should also know English at least at B1 level.

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Tests and Exam:

• Before every lecture, students take what we call “tactical tests” on the relevant service to check how well they understand its theoretical aspects (non-graded component, in English)
• At the end of the course, students take a “mock exam” whose questions mirror those of the real AWS SAA-C03 certification exam as closely as possible (graded component, in English)

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Course Curriculum:

1. Identity and Access Management (IAM)
2. Object Storage (S3)
3. Virtual Servers, Compute (EC2)
4. Block and File Storage (EBS, EFS, FSx, Lustre)
5. High-Availability (ELB)
6. Auto-Scaling (ASG)
7. Virtual Private Cloud/Networking (VPC)
8. DNS (Route 53)
9. Relational Databases (RDS + Aurora)
10. NoSQL Databases (DynamoDB, ElastiCache)
11. Data Analytics, Machine Learning (Redshift, Athena, Glue, OpenSearch)
12. Containerization (ECS, ECR, EKS )
13. Serverless Applications (Lambda, API Gateway)
14. Monitoring, Audit (CloudWatch, CloudTrail)
15. Caching & Performance (CloudFront, Global Accelerator)
16. Decoupling Applications (SNS, SQS, Kinesis)
17. Security & Encryption (KMS, SSM, WAF, Secrets Manager)
18. Disaster Recovery, Migration (DMS, AWS Backup)
19. Solution Architectures
20. Simulation Exam

Detailed syllabus (PDF, in Georgian)

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What Will You Know and Be Able to Do After the Course?

Practical, well-informed use of AWS's key cloud services, including:

• Creating virtual servers (Linux, Windows) and managing/scaling them automatically
• Creating cloud block and object storage and using it for various tasks, e.g. backups, replication, shared storage, etc.
• Defining access levels of varying complexity
• Building/configuring/migrating relational and non-relational database infrastructure and using it in practice
• Setting up caching solutions
• Configuring cloud container services
• Setting up distributed infrastructure
• Working with the cloud DNS service
• Using “Serverless” services at a basic level
• Implementing various architectural solutions for infrastructure
• Interconnecting the cloud services you have learned and “orchestrating” them
• Gaining the key, fundamental knowledge needed for the official certification exam
• Learning the concepts behind how additional cloud services work