AWS Certified SysOps Administrator

Overview

This section gives the information about Amazon Web Services Certified SysOps Administrator (ACSA) certification. It is designed for professionals responsible for supporting deployments running in the AWS cloud. It covers topics such as managing cloud based database instances, implementing security in the cloud and supporting virtual servers.

AWS Security

This section explores security in Amazon Web Services. It explains what AWS implements to keep the environment secure as well as what the customer is responsible for. It shows AWS security measures, specifically infrastructure security like, power redundancy, cooling, and proper data disposal. AWS also provides hardware redundancy, hypervisor isolation, and firewalling.

IAM Components

This section explores what is Identity and Access Management(IAM) and the different components therein. It explains the different types of credentials that can be used with IAM such as passwords, access keys, key pairs, and x.509 certificates, users, groups, roles and policies. It discusses when to use a form of access over the others and when NOT to use an access type.

IAM Credentials

This section explains different Identity and Access Management(IAM) components, specifically access methods. It covers access methods such as Root Keys, User Keys, and Multi-Factor authentication or MFA which adds security by increasing the number of authentication methods that must be satisfied before granting access.

IAM Groups and Roles

This section dives into the identity and Access Management groups and roles. It explains how access is granted to user accounts, how Roles allow you to grant access to users outside of your AWS systems. It also covers the Security Token Service (STS) to integrate federation services using Security Assertion Markup Language compatible systems like Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services and Shibboleth.

IAM Security Policies

This section explains Identity and Access Management(IAM) security policies. It defines IAM security policies, explains what they are and how they are implemented for granting access. It shows how to implement prebuilt security polices or create custom IAM security policies that are better suited for the environment.

Additional Security Tools

This section explores some of the additional security tools and practices available in Amazon Web Services. It discusses the AWS Trusted Advisor tool which scans your system testing for best practices which helps to verify IAM configuration and security. It also explains regulatory compliance (e.g. HIPPA/SOX) aspect of AWS systems.

Virtual Private Cloud

This section covers cloud networking with AWS Virtual Private Cloud(VPC). It explains what VPC is and how it works. It shows how to create and configure a VPC and how to get it connected to the internet.

EC2 Disk Storage

This section takes a look at disk storage in EC2. It describes Volume types. It shows Storage types in AWS such as Instance Store, also known as Ephemeral storage, and Elastic Block Storage(EBS). It also covers EC2 Storage Media which can be standard magnetic storage, General Purpose SSD, or Provisioned IOPS SSD and their attributes.

Monitoring EC2 Performance

This section shows how to monitor your EC2 Instance performance. It shows CloudWatch to enable monitoring and explain how to interpret the data being displayed in CloudWatch. It also shows you how to configure system and instance status checks. It covers metrics available for Instances and EBS Volumes as well as Roles, which are used to assign access to CloudWatch.

Monitoring Custom Metrics

This section describes how to perform advanced monitoring with custom metrics in AWS CloudWatch. It defines what a custom metric is and covers creating custom metrics that will be viewable in CloudWatch. It also shows how to create an Identity and Access Management(IAM) role.

High Availability

This section takes a look at leveraging AWS services to provide an environment with high availability. It defines the term high availability and concepts for safeguarding against outages, specifically backup redundancy, elasticity, and scalability. It shows how to orchestrate services like Elastic Load Balancers and Auto-Scaling to ensure a highly available system or service at all times.

Elastic Load Balancing

This section dives into Amazon’s fault tolerance service known as Elastic Load Balancing. It covers the basics of ELB, its abilities and limitations. It discusses different types of ELB available (Public and Private types) and how to implement Health-checks with ELB.

Monitoring ELB

This section explores the monitoring services available for AWS users that are employing Elastic Load Balancing. It covers basic monitoring as well as the advanced monitoring features in CloudWatch. It walks through some of the error codes when monitoring an ELB instance.

Redundancy with Route 53

This section explores redundancy features in the Domain Name Service(DNS) system, Route 53. It explains Route 53, DNS, DNS zones and record sets (A/CNAME/MX/etc.). It provides DNS redundancy through Route 53 Routing Policies. It covers routing policies like Simple, Round-Robin policies as well as Weighted policies that allow to handle DNS traffic through setting custom priorities.

RDS Redundancy

This section takes a look at AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) redundancy features. It covers the basics of RDS and explains the different databases available. It shows the ways to enable redundancy for your databases. It includes using the setup wizard during the database creation, as well as methods for making already running databases redundant.

Automation and Orchestration

This section explores AWS Orchestration services, which includes CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, and OpsWork. It describes the differences and similarities between the services as well as explain why would use one over the other. It demonstrate each one of these services for a practical look at each one in action.

Backup and Recovery Services

This section covers the backup and recovery services provided by the many AWS services. It explains Disaster Recovery concepts like Recovery Time Objective(RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). It discusses traditional DR and AWSs DR solutions like Regions, S3, Glacier, EBS, and AWS Storage Gateway.

Backup and Restore Scenarios

This section explores different methods for backing up and restoring on-premises environment with AWS. It covers Pilot Light, which is a low-cost, minimalistic approach to Disaster Recovery in AWS. It also discusses robust solutions to Disaster Recovery, specifically the Warm Standby and Multi-Site models.

Backing up RDS

This section describe how to employ backups for AWS Relational Database Services(RDS). It explains how RDS is backed up as well as some pre-requisite work that needs to be done to prepare RDS for being backed up. It shows how to setup automated backups and/or take an on-demand backup.

Billing and Cost Management

This section covers the topic of billing and cost management for AWS account(s). It explains cost optimization in the AWS dashboard to see how much you’re spending and how much Amazon predicts you’ll be spending. It also shows detailed billing info through IAM and the use of cost allocation tags. At the end it covers the cost differences with each of the EC2 instance types(On Demand/Reserved/Spot).