AWS Certified Architect: Associate

Simple Queue Service (SQS) Amazon SQS is a web service that gives you access to a message queue that can be used to store messages while waiting for a computer to process them. Amazon SQS is a distributed queue service that enables web service applications to quickly and reliably queue messages that one component in the application generates and another consumes. A queue is a temporary repository for messages that are awaiting processing. Messages can contain up to 256KB of text in any format. There are two types of queues: Standard queues (default): Lets you have nearly unlimited number of transactions per second. Standard queues guarantee that a message is delivered at least once. However, occasionally (because of the highly distributed architecture that allows high throughput), more than once copy of a message might be delivered out of order. Standard queues provide best-effort ordering which ensures that messages are generally delivered in the same order as they are sent.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Think of a VPC as a virtual center in the cloud.When you setup your AWS account you get a default VPC but there are cases where is not what you need. VPC (AWS Definition) : Amazon VPC lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. For example, you can create, you can create you own public facing subnet containing your webservers that have access to the Internet, and place you backend systems such as databases and application servers in private-facing subnet with no Internet access. You can leverage multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control list

IAM is a region agnostic service since it manages groups, users, roles and policies regardless of their zones. When you are in the IAM dashboard you'll notice a "IAM users sign-in link" label and next to it a link that seems a bit random, this link is the specific sign-in link for you account and the number in the link is your account number, for branding or to make it easier to remember you can change the display number to something easier to remember by clicking the "Customize" link, for example, here I changed the text to moresoft : What are IAM roles? IAM roles are a secure way to grant permissions to entities that you trust. these could be users in another account, an application running in an EC2 instance, an AWS service, users from a corporate directory, etc. IAM roles issue keys that are valid for short durations, making them a secure way to grant access. An IAM role is an identity that defines a set of permissions for making AWS service reques

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) S3 is a managed object store service, this means Amazon manages the sizing, infrastructure and durability of the Amazon S3 service. There is not setup cost or minimum usage fee. Managed Highly durable, standard class 99.999999999 % durability (11 nines) Highly available, is built for 99.99% availability for objects during a given year (4 nines), although Amazon gives customers a SLA of 99.9%. Objects reside in the region of your choice but AWS will replicate the object across multiple availability zones within the chose region. Objects are stored in elastic buckets. S3 objects can range from 0 bytes to 5TB. Largest object that can be uploaded in a single PUT is 5GB. For objects larger that 100MB use multi-part upload. 100 buckets per region. No need to resize your buckets, since they resize automatically. A bucket can be deleted only if it is empty, once deleted you can reuse the bucket name. Bucket ownership is not transferable. D

Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) This is the platform that lets you deploy virtual servers within the AWS environment. The following subsections discuss each one of the elements that make EC2. Amazon Machine Images (AMI's) AMI's are templates of pre-configured EC2 instances. An AMI comprises an operating system, applications and custom configuration. When configuring an EC2 instance selecting your AMI is the first choice you need to make, Amazon offers a lot of AMI configurations but you can also create your own AMIs and reuse them to start you EC2 instances. To create an AMI instance you start with one of the existing Amazon AMIs (you can select one of the AMIs offered directly by Amazon or pick one from the AMI Marketplace ) and create an EC2 instance from it, then you proceed to install your custom applications and configuration to end with a customized EC2 instance which now you can save as an AMI template. You can also create your own AMI from scratch, instead of

This is a list a links that are worth bookmarking or adding to your references since they provide information you may want to use later. CloudPing.info : Pings every one of the AWS regions and prints the latency in ms that it took for each ping to reach the target region. This page should give a general idea about the latency from your location to the different regions but keep in mind that you should run multiple tests and add other considerations before taking a decision based on these results. AWS Simple Monthly Calculator : This web page contains a simple form that you can use to estimate the cost of a configuration involving some (it's not an extensive list of every option) of the basic compute, network and storage options. These are list prices so you may be able to get better prices through your company or individual account. AWS Service Health Dashboard : This dashboard displays the status for every service by region, you can subscribe to specific services if desir