AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — Notes (Part 1)

7 min readApr 3, 2022

I started preparing for this certification in Jan 2022 with the help of a course on A Cloud Guru. Thanks to them for wonderful courses and lecture series! Below are my notes for passing AWS certification. I hope this will be helpful for people who are preparing for the exam.

Table of Content

Foundations of Cloud Computing
IAM
Computing Services
Storage Services

Foundations of Cloud Computing

Know the 6 Advantages of Cloud

Trade Capital expense for Variable expense
Benefit from massive economies of scale
Stop guessing about capacity
Increase speed and agility
Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
Go global in minutes

Know 3 Types of cloud computing

Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS)
Platform As A Service (PAAS)
Software As A Service (SAAS)

Know 3 Types of cloud computing deployments

Public Cloud — AWS, Azure, GCP
Hybrid — Mixture of public and private
Private Cloud (Or On-Premise) — You manage it, in your data center. OpenStack or VMware

Difference between Region, Availability Zone (AZ), and an Edge location

A region is a physical location in the world that consists of two or more Availability Zones (AZs). (Basically a Datacenter)
An AZ is one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.
Edge Locations are endpoints for AWS which are used for caching content. Typically this consists of CloudFront, Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Choosing the right AWS Region?

Data Sovereignty Laws
Latency to end-users
AWS Services

Understand the different support packages

Basic — Free
Developer — $29 a month (scales based on usage)
Business — $100 a month (scales based on usage)
Enterprise — $15,000 a month (scales based on usage) — TAM (Technical Account Manager)

IAM

IAM stands for Identity and Access Management. It is Global, you do not specify a region when dealing with IAM. When you create a user or group, this is created GLOBALLY.

You can access the AWS platform in 3 ways:

Via the Console
Programmatically (Using CLI)
Using the SDK

Your root account is the email address you used to set up your AWS account. The root account always has full admin access. You SHOULD NOT give these account creds away to anyone. Instead, create a user for each individual within your organization. You should always secure this root account using MFA.

To set permissions in a group you need to apply a policy to that group. Policies consist of JSON. These are referred to as key-value pairs. You have your key, such as name and then value. e.g.; {”name” : ”Dev”}

IAM Credential Reports

You can generate and download a creds report that lists all users in your account. It will show things like Passwords, Access Keys, and MFA.
Go to IAM service. Click on ‘Credential report’ and click on ‘Download Report’.

Computing Services

1. EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute)

EC2 instance allows you to rent and manage virtual servers in the cloud. AWS virtual servers are called instances.

Things to remember for Exam:

✔️ EC2 pricing options (Understand On-Demand, Spot, Reserved Instances, Dedicated Hosts, and Savings Plans)

✔️ Know the types of load balancers — Classic, Application, Gateway, and Network

✔️ Understand real-world usage of EC2 instances — Deploying a database or web application

✔️ Horizontal scaling vs. vertical scaling — Horizontal scaling (or scaling out) adds or replaces instances, while vertical scaling (or scaling up) upgrades an existing instance.

✔️ Understand the benefits of Auto Scaling — Remember Auto Scaling improves the availability of your applications, and don’t confuse it with load balancing.

✔️ Understand how to connect to an EC2 instance from your local machine — A key pair is needed to access an EC2 instance from your local machine.

2. AWS Lambda

Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without managing servers.

You author application code, called functions, using many popular languages.
Scales automatically
Serverless means you don’t worry about managing servers like EC2

Serverless simply means AWS manages the servers for you and you cannot access them. You can pretend they don’t exist.

Lambda is a building block for many serverless applications.

Few use-cases:

Real-time file processing
Sending email notifications
Backend business logic

Features:

Supports popular programming languages like Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby
You author code using your favorite development environment or via the console
Lambda can execute your code in response to events
Lambda functions have a 15-minute timeout

Pricing Model: You are charged based on the duration and number of requests.

Compute time: Pay only for compute time used — there is no charge if your code is not running.
Request count: A request is counted each time it starts execution. Test invokes in the console count as well.
Always free: The free usage tier includes 1 million free requests each month.

3. Fargate

Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers

It allows you to manage containers, like Docker.
Scales automatically
Serverless means you don’t worry about provisioning, configuring, or scaling servers.

4. Lightsail

Lightsail allows you to quickly launch all the resources you need for small projects.

Deploy pre-configured applications, like WordPress websites, at the click of a button
Simple screens for people with no cloud experience
Includes a VM, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP
Provides a low, predictable monthly fee, as low as $3.50

5. Outposts

Outposts allow you to run cloud services in your internal data center.

Supports workloads that need to remain on-premises due to latency or data sovereignty needs
AWS delivers and installs servers in your internal data center
Used for a hybrid experience
Have access to the cloud services and APIs to develop apps on-premises

6. Batch

Batch allows you to process large workloads in smaller chunks (or batches).

Runs hundreds and thousands of smaller batch processing jobs
Dynamically provisions instances based on volume

Storage Services

1. S3 (Simple Storage Service)

S3 is an object storage service for the cloud that is highly available.

Objects (or files) are stored in buckets (or directories)
Essentially unlimited storage that can hold millions of objects per bucket.
Objects can be public or private.
You can upload objects via the console, CLI, programmatically from within code using SDKs.
You can set security at the bucket level or individual object level using access control lists (ACLs), bucket policies, or access point policies.
You can use S3 access logs to track access to your buckets and objects.
You can enable versioning to create multiple versions of your file in order to protect against accidental deletion and to use a previous version.
S3 is a regional service, but bucket names must be globally unique.

S3 is an object storage service with several storage classes:

1. S3 Standard

General-purpose storage
Data stored across multiple Availability Zones
Low latency and high throughput
Recommended for: Frequently access data

2. S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Automatically moves your data to the most cost-effective storage class
Automatic cost-savings
No retrieval fees
Data stored across multiple Availability Zones
Recommended for: Data with the unknown or changing access pattern

2. S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Automatically moves your data to the most cost-effective storage class
Automatic cost-savings
No retrieval fees
Data stored across multiple Availability Zones
Recommended for: Data with the unknown or changing access pattern

3. S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA)

Data accessed less frequently required rapid access
Data stored across multiple AZ
Cheaper than S3 standard
Recommended for: Long-lived data, Infrequently accessed, Millisecond access when needed

4. S3 One-Zone Infrequent Access (IA)

Like S3 Standard-IA but data stored in a single AZ
Costs 20% less than S3 Standard-IA
Data stored in this storage class can be lost
Recommended for: Re-creatable data, Infrequently accessed with millisecond access, Availability and durability are not essential

5. S3 Glacier

Long-term data storage and archival for lower costs
Data retrieval takes longer
3 retrieval options: 1–5 minutes, 3–5 hours, or 5–12 hours
Data stored across multiple AZ
Recommended for: Long-term backups, Cheaper storage options

6. S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Like S3 Glacier but with longer access times
2 retrieval options: 12 hours or 48 hours
Cheapest of all S3 options
Data stored across multiple AZ
Recommended for: Long-term data archival accessed once or twice a year, Retaining data for regulatory compliance requirements

7. S3 Outposts

Provides object storage on-premises
A single storage class
Store data across multiple devices and servers
Recommended for: Data that needs to be kept local, Demanding application performance needs

2. Elastic Block Store (EBS)

EBS is a storage device (called a volume) that can be attached to (or removed from) your instance.
Data persists when the instance is not running
Tied to one AZ
Can only be attached to one instance in the same AZ
Recommended for: Quickly accessible data, Running a DB on an instance, Long-term data storage
Details: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/

3. EC2 Instance Store

It is local storage that is physically attached to the host computer and cannot be removed.
Storage on disks physically attached to an instance
Faster with higher I/O speeds
Storage is temporary since loss occurs when the EC2 instance is stopped
Recommended for: Temporary storage needs, Data replicated across multiple instances
Details: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

4. Elastic File System (EFS)

EFS is a serverless network file system for sharing files.
Only supports the Linux file system
More expensive than EBS
Accessible across different AZ in the same Region
Recommended for: Main directories for business-critical apps, Lift-and-shift existing enterprise apps
Details: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

5. Storage Gateway

It is a hybrid storage service.
Connect on-premises and cloud data
Supports a hybrid model
Recommended for: Moving backups to the cloud, Reducing costs for hybrid cloud storage, Low latency access to data
Details: https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/

6. AWS Backup

AWS Backup helps you manage data backups across multiple AWS services.
Integrates with resources like EC2, EBS, EFS, and more
Create a backup plan that includes frequency and retention
Details: https://aws.amazon.com/backup/