AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide

Rajesh Daswani

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781801075244
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Client-Server Computing
• Index: Computer Science

Develop proficiency in AWS technologies and validate your skills by becoming an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Key Features

• Develop the skills to design highly available and fault-tolerant solutions in the cloud
• Learn how to adopt best-practice security measures in your cloud applications
• Achieve credibility through industry-recognized AWS Cloud Practitioner certification

Book Description

Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud computing service provider in the world. Its foundational certification, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01), is the first step to fast-tracking your career in cloud computing. This certification will add value even to those in non-IT roles, including professionals from sales, legal, and finance who may be working with cloud computing or AWS projects. If you are a seasoned IT professional, this certification will make it easier for you to prepare for more technical certifications to progress up the AWS ladder and improve your career prospects.The book is divided into four parts. The first part focuses on the fundamentals of cloud computing and the AWS global infrastructure. The second part examines key AWS technology services, including compute, network, storage, and database services. The third part covers AWS security, the shared responsibility model, and several security tools. In the final part, you'll study the fundamentals of cloud economics and AWS pricing models and billing practices.Complete with exercises that highlight best practices for designing solutions, detailed use cases for each of the AWS services, quizzes, and two complete practice tests, this CLF-C01 exam study guide will help you gain the knowledge and hands-on experience necessary to ace the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

What you will learn

• Create an AWS account to access AWS cloud services in a secure and isolated environment
• Understand identity and access management (IAM), encryption, and multifactor authentication (MFA) protection
• Configure multifactor authentication for your IAM accounts
• Configure AWS services such as EC2, ECS, Lambda, VPCs, and Route53
• Explore various storage and database services such as S3, EBS, and Amazon RDS
• Study the fundamentals of modern application design to shift from a monolithic to microservices architecture
• Design highly available solutions with decoupling ingrained in your design architecture

Who this book is for

If you're looking to advance your career and gain expertise in cloud computing, with particular focus on the AWS platform, this book is for you. This guide will help you ace the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification exam, enabling you to embark on a rewarding career in cloud computing. No previous IT experience is essential to get started with this book, since it covers core IT fundamentals from the ground up.

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Section 1: Cloud Concepts

In this section, we look at the fundamentals of cloud computing. We then look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and an overview of its cloud offering as well as its value proposition. We examine AWS cloud economics and the advantages of cloud computing.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, What Is Cloud Computing?
• Chapter 2, Introduction to AWS and the Global Infrastructure
• Chapter 3, Exploring AWS Accounts, Multi-Account Strategy, and AWS Organizations

Chapter 1: What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing has become the default option to design, build, and implement Information Technology (IT) applications for businesses across the globe. In the old days, you would host the entire infrastructure, hire a group of developers, and design each component and process required to build your applications. This approach not only ate into the bottom line, but also often did not follow best practices. It also lacked flexibility and scope for innovation.

Understanding cloud computing has become vital for IT professionals worldwide if they are to sustain their jobs and make progress in their careers. You can no longer deliver old-school solutions to your clients—it is simply not cost-effective in today's fast-paced IT world.

In addition, architecting solutions for the cloud comes with its own challenges, such as security considerations and network connectivity. This makes it crucial to upskill so that you can gain a deep understanding of how to build resilient, scalable, and reliable solutions that can be hosted in the cloud.

In this chapter, we introduce you to the concept of cloud computing, what it includes, and the key advantages of moving to the cloud. We also discuss the various cloud computing models, as well as deployment options for the cloud. Understanding the key differences between the models and deployment options and their use cases and benefits is fundamental to formulating an effective cloud-adoption strategy for your business.

We also look at a high-level overview of virtualization—a principal ingredient that has made cloud computing possible.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• What is cloud computing?
• Exploring the basics of virtualization
• Exploring cloud computing models
• Understanding cloud deployment models

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a term used to describe the on-demand access to IT services that comprise compute, network, storage, and software services from third-party suppliers, usually via the public internet or some form of direct wide-area network (WAN) access. Companies can provision necessary IT applications for their organization without having to procure and manage their own infrastructure to host those applications. Instead, they lease/rent the required IT infrastructure from such third-party providers.

Cloud computing has existed for many years in some form, since the invention of the internet. In the old days, Hotmail (first launched in 1996 and now branded as Microsoft Outlook) was a prime example of early cloud computing. You could set up email accounts for your colleagues and yourself on Hotmail and use them to communicate. An alternative would be to host your own email servers' (the infrastructure) network connectivity, as well as the email application (the email software). This would ultimately mean additional costs as well as management overheads to maintain the email servers you hosted.

Today, cloud computing has become mainstream and is, in several cases, the default option for many companies and start-ups. Currently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest provider of cloud computing services, offering a variety of cloud IT services in the form of infrastructure, platform, and software solutions. You can opt to consume these services rather than creating your own dedicated environment to host your business applications. The sheer size of AWS enables it to actually provide the necessary components to host your business applications at a fraction of the cost, while providing high availability (HA), security, and resilience.

The six advantages of cloud computing

Let's take a look at the six advantages of cloud computing, according to AWS (AWS, Six Advantages of Cloud Computing, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/six-advantages-of-cloud-computing.html), as depicted in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.1 – The six advantages of cloud computing

Tip

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner examination assumes that you have these six advantages memorized when testing the Define the AWS Cloud and its value proposition objective.

Let's look at these advantages in detail, as follows:

• Trade capital expense for variable expense: One of the primary benefits of moving to cloud computing instead of hosting your own on-premises infrastructure is the method of paying for that infrastructure. Traditionally, you would have to procure expensive hardware and invest precious business capital to acquire infrastructure components necessary for building an environment to host applications.
  With cloud computing, you pay for the same infrastructure components only as and when you consume them. This on-demand, pay-as-you-go model also means that you save costs when you are not utilizing resources.
  The shift away from capital expense (CAPEX) for variable expense, also known as operating expense (OPEX), means that you can direct your precious business capital to more important areas of investment, such as developing new products or improving your marketing strategy.
• Benefit from massive economies of scale: As an individual business, you would generally have to pay retail rates to purchase necessary IT hardware and build an environment that can be used to host your applications. Cloud providers such as AWS, however, host infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of customers, and even get involved in innovating and having components manufactured to their specifications. This gives even greater economies of scale and allows them to offer lower pay-as-you-go rates to customers.
• Stop guessing capacity: Traditionally, while carrying out capacity planning, you would procure necessary hardware components for future growth. Predicting future growth is extremely difficult, and this often meant that you would overprovision your environment. The result would be expensive idle resources simply going to waste. The fact that you would have made large CAPEX to acquire those components would ultimately be detrimental to the balance sheet due to the rapid loss in value arising from depreciation. On the flip side, some companies may end up underprovisioning capacity to save on costs. This can have an adverse effect on corporate image, if—for example—due to underprovisioned resources your customers are not able to complete transactions or suffer from poor performance.

With cloud computing and sophisticated management software, you can provision the necessary infrastructure when you need it most. Moreover, with monitoring and automation tools offered by cloud vendors such as AWS, you can automatically scale out your infrastructure as demand increases and scale back in when demand falls. Doing so will allow you to pay only for what you consume, when you consume it.

• Increase speed and agility: Cloud vendors such as AWS enable you to launch and configure new IT resources in a few mouse clicks—for example, you can provision a new fleet of servers for your developers within minutes, allowing your organization to exponentially increase its agility in building infrastructure and launching applications. If you are building test and development environments or performing experimental work as part of researching a new product/service, then once those tasks are complete you can just as quickly terminate those environments. Equally, if a particular project is being abandoned midway, you do not need to be worried about having any physical wastage—you just turn off or terminate what you no longer need. By contrast, prior to the invention of virtualization technologies (discussed later), prov...