AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Curriculum
1. Introduction to AWS
	•	Overview of cloud computing
	•	Benefits of AWS
	•	AWS global infrastructure: Regions and Availability Zones
	•	AWS Management Console and AWS CLI basics
2. Designing Resilient Architectures
	•	Principles of fault tolerance and high availability
	•	Designing multi-tier architectures
	•	Load balancing with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
	•	Implementing Auto Scaling for dynamic workloads
3. Designing High-Performing Architectures
	•	Selecting the appropriate instance types (EC2, ECS, Lambda)
	•	Optimizing performance through caching with Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator
	•	Storage solutions: EBS, EFS, S3, Glacier
	•	Database solutions: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift
4. Designing Secure Applications and Architectures
	•	AWS Shared Responsibility Model
	•	Identity and Access Management (IAM)
	•	Securing data at rest and in transit
	•	Implementing security groups and network ACLs
	•	Using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption
	•	AWS Security Services: Shield, WAF, Macie, GuardDuty
5. Designing Cost-Optimized Architectures
	•	Understanding AWS pricing models
	•	Cost-effective storage solutions
	•	Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances
	•	Cost management tools: AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets
	•	Monitoring costs with AWS CloudWatch and Trusted Advisor
6. Designing Operationally Excellent Architectures
	•	Best practices for operational excellence
	•	Using AWS CloudFormation for Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
	•	Monitoring and logging: AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail
	•	Automating deployments with AWS CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
7. Migration to AWS
	•	AWS Migration Hub and AWS Application Discovery Service
	•	Strategies for migrating applications and databases
	•	Using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
	•	Managing hybrid cloud architectures
8. Architecting for the Cloud
	•	AWS Well-Architected Framework
	•	Reliability, performance efficiency, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence
	•	Implementing disaster recovery strategies: RTO and RPO
	•	Backup and recovery solutions with AWS Backup and Storage Gateway
9. Advanced Networking Architectures
	•	VPC design and subnetting
	•	Implementing VPN and Direct Connect
	•	Route 53 for DNS management
	•	Using AWS Transit Gateway for large-scale network architectures
Hands-On Labs and Projects
	•	Deploying a multi-tier application using EC2, ELB, and RDS
	•	Setting up a serverless application with AWS Lambda and API Gateway
	•	Implementing a secure VPC architecture with public and private subnets
	•	Configuring Auto Scaling and Load Balancing for high availability