The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam is the only foundational-level certification exam from Amazon Web Services and requires no hands-on experiences or pre-requisite certifications. It validates the prospect’s overall basic understanding of the AWS Cloud. It shows your employers that you understand what AWS does and how it works to provide cloud computing services to its customers. While it is in no way required, it is a recommended stepping stone before taking the associate or specialty-level certification tests. AWS recommends that a candidate has six months of experience with the AWS Cloud in any technical, managerial, sales, or financial position before taking the certification exam. A fundamental grasp of IT services and their uses in the AWS Cloud platform is suggested. The certification exam is 90 minutes long and can be taken online or at the testing center. It costs 100 US dollars per attempt and is available in English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. Unlike many other AWS certification exams, it has a hard pass score of 70% and is a multiple-choice exam. The cloud practitioner certification shows that you can define the AWS Cloud and the basic global infrastructure, describe basic AWS Cloud architectural principles and value proposition and explain essential services on AWS Cloud and everyday use cases. It also shows that you know the basic security and compliance aspects of AWS Cloud and can define the billing, account management, and pricing models. The exam proves that you can describe the core characteristics of deploying and operating your IT infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. Finally, it shows that you can identify sources of documentation and technical assistance, such as submitting support tickets and reading white papers.
Technology Domains
There are four domains in the AWS-certified Cloud Practitioner Exam. They are Cloud Concepts, Security, Technology, and Billing and Pricing. The Technology Domain has four parts: Define methods of deploying and operating in the AWS cloud, Define the AWS global infrastructure, Identify the core AWS services and Identify resources for technical support. With almost 200 services available in 24 categories today and ever-expanding, the technology section of the domain might seem highly daunting. However, many services will not be on the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam. A specific subset of services is often considered core services in AWS. And while dozens of services are announced yearly, these core services don’t change much. Generally, you do not have to worry about having to acquaint yourself with the newest product launch announcement from the AWS reInvent conference in Las Vegas every December.
What Is EC2
You can log into AWS and spin up a virtual server, called an instance, in seconds with the exact specifications required. And if their needs change, you can easily adjust the existing server or spin up a new one. This service is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, and it’s one of the most widely used services in the AWS Cloud. Amazon EC2 allows you to launch applications and servers when you need them without upfront financial commitments. It’s integrated with many other AWS services, is reliable and secure, and allows you or your company to quickly and inexpensively spin up instances of virtual servers for all of your different needs.
What Is Elastic Bean Stalk
Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use AWS service to help you deploy and scale web applications by simply uploading your code. Elastic Beanstalk handles the deployment process, including capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. You can upload services developed using JAVA, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker, and you retain complete control over the underlying resources at all times. It’s free to use, and you only pay for the AWS resources needed to store and run the web applications you’ve deployed. You never have to worry about outgrowing the resources Elastic Beanstalk provisioned for you because it automatically scales your applications up and down based on their specific needs. You also have complete freedom to select the AWS resources, such as the EC2 Instance type you want to use for your application. If you decide to take over the manual management of the infrastructure, you can do so at any time. Elastic Beanstalk provisions and operates the infrastructure for you to focus on coding. If you’re constantly frustrated by the time you spend managing and configuring servers, databases, firewalls, and networks, perhaps it’s time you give AWS Elastic Beanstalk a try.
What Is Elastic Load Balancing
Have you ever experienced a situation where suddenly, everyone around you at work seems to want something from you? And now you probably got completely overwhelmed and maybe found yourself unable to do any of the tasks requested, much less all of them. When a server is overloaded with requests, it reacts similarly. It becomes unable to send out the responses to the paralyzing amount of traffic. It becomes completely overwhelmed, and you might notice the website loading very slowly or going down completely. Let’s think about a T-shirt company A. T-shirt company A decided to have a sale to celebrate their first anniversary. All shirts are 50% off. Their marketing department did an amazing job; everyone is talking about it on social media. As soon as the sale starts, boom, their site goes down. The infrastructure team wasn’t prepared for the crushing traffic that suddenly flooded the company website server, quickly becoming overloaded. The whole company is running around trying to get the website back up and communicate with angry customers. How could T-shirt company A have prepared better for the sale so that their website didn’t go down from too many excited customers accessing it simultaneously? They could have utilized elastic load balancing to distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers automatically. This means that the infrastructure department could have set up multiple replicated servers, which means multiple servers with the same content, and placed the elastic load balancer in front of them to distribute the traffic to multiple servers. That way, each server only takes care of a fraction of the overall traffic. You can think of elastic load balancers like air traffic controllers telling incoming airplanes to go to different runways. They ensure that any runway doesn’t get overwhelmed with airplanes to cause delays by equally utilizing all available runways for landing. Elastic load balancers help your applications achieve fault tolerance by ensuring scalability, performance, and security. They can also monitor the health of your servers. If a server goes down, the load balancers can send the traffic to the remaining healthy servers. Elastic load balancers are highly available, secure, flexible, and monitorable, allowing you to glean robust information about your traffic and providing the confidence that your applications are up at all times.
What Is Lambda
You’ve created a mobile application that allows people to create profiles of cats and friends with other cats all over the internet. The first thing a new user does is upload their cat’s photo because what’s a cat social media without cat photos, right? You want the cat photo’s thumbnail to become available immediately after upload, so the user can choose which photos to feature on their profile. To make this happen, you must provision and manage servers to run your code and make your app function. As more cat lovers sign up, you must devote more time to maintaining and scaling your server infrastructure instead of writing code to improve your app and add new features. How can you focus on writing code for your cat’s social media instead of spending so much time on infrastructure upkeep? You can check out AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda runs code called a Lambda function in response to an event. An event could be anything from a user uploading an image into an S3 bucket to a user tapping a button on your mobile app to buy an item. You must upload your code, and AWS Lambda automatically runs your code and scales your application for you. You only pay for the time your code runs and each event trigger, which helps you keep your costs low. There are no servers to provision or manage and nothing to scale because Lambda takes care of all of that, so you can focus on writing code. You can have a Lambda function up and running with just a few clicks, saving you hours and hours of back-end provisioning work. More cats, less admin work.
What Is Lightsail
Love the idea of having your website, database, or application running on AWS but just don’t have the energy or technical know-how to get it done? Need a quick development or test environment spun up? AWS has a service that’ll do just the trick, Amazon Lightsail. Amazon Lightsail is perfect for simpler workloads, quick deployments, and getting started on AWS. It’s a snap to get going while still being designed to scale with you as you grow. You can use it to deploy simple web applications, create websites, run your business’s software, or spin up developer or test environments while maintaining cost-effective monthly fees. Many preconfigured and ready-to-use operating systems, web apps, and development stacks exist. WordPress, Windows OS, Ubuntu, and Node.js are the more popular resources available. They are one-click-to-launch services, so getting started is a breeze. You can quickly deploy projects ranging from creating your first WordPress blog to running a database with just a few clicks. If you’re considering using AWS to spin up projects or resources quickly but don’t have the time or engineering know-how to deploy full-on services, consider trying out Amazon Lightsail.
What is AWS Global Infrastructure
Amazon web services are global. Many companies and users worldwide rely on AWS cloud to help businesses succeed and grow. AWS has data centers around the world called Availability Zones. Each availability zone is independent of the other in network and power source. There are currently almost six dozen availability zones worldwide. A region comprises two or more availability zones, and there are currently two dozen AWS regions worldwide. Some regions have more AWS cloud services than others. When a brand new service is introduced, it’s generally first introduced in a few specific regions instead of the whole world. Some regions that receive new services earlier are US East North Virginia, US West North California, Asia Pacific regions like Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, and some areas in the European Union like Frankfurt and Ireland. This may influence which region you choose to host your infrastructure. Generally, you would choose a region closest to your physical location to host your AWS cloud infrastructure because you can reduce network latency for your end users. For example, if your company is based out of Washington D.C., you might pick the region US-East-1, which is based out of North Virginia in the United States.
Deploying to AWS
AWS users can manage and deploy resources in the AWS cloud in three ways, by utilizing AWS Management Console, Command-Line Interface, or CLI, and Software Development Kits, or SDKs. They all reference the AWS APIs to help you deploy and manage your AWS Cloud infrastructure. The AWS Management Console is a graphical interface that supports most AWS services. You can think of this as a web portal that you log into, as you would your social media account, to see everything that’s offered on that website. You can look at your billing statements, launch new services, and find out how your apps are doing, all while using an interface that feels like you’re browsing through another website. If you don’t have much familiarity with utilizing command lines or SDKs, the AWS Management Console is extremely user-friendly and easy to navigate. The AWS Command-Line Interface, or CLI, allows you to access services via the command line. The command line is a way to access and change resources with text-based command entries.
