AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional — Cheatsheet

Take your cloud career to the next level!

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional is one of the most sought-after certifications in the IT industry. It is regarded as one of the most difficult IT certifications to acquire, as the syllabus of the exam is incredibly vast and compasses a wide range of concepts and topics related to the field of cloud computing and touches almost every service AWS has to offer.

As a Certified Solutions Architect — Professional, I have prepared this cheat sheet to help in your pursuit of earning this prestigious professional-level AWS certification and next-up your cloud career, just as I have.

About this Cheatsheet

This cheat sheet is divided into in-scope AWS services and features as defined in the official exam guide and covers the most important concepts, needed for the exam.

What's Inside?

1. Introduction
2. About the Exam
3. Domains Breakdown
4. AWS Well-Architected Framework
5. AWS IAM — Identity and Access Management
   1. Multi-Factor Authentication
   2. IAM Role & Policy
6. Data Stores
   1. General concepts
   2. EC2 Instance Store
   3. AWS S3
   4. Amazon DynamoDB
   5. Amazon DocumentDB
   6. AWS Storage Gateway
   7. Amazon WorkDocs
   8. Amazon Elastic File Service
   9. Amazon ElastiCache
   10. Amazon Redshift
   11. Amazon Neptune (very unlikely to come in Exam)
   12. Amazon Aurora — MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible
7. Networking
   1. AWS Networking Technologies
   2. Implicit and explicit networking technologies
   3. VPC Peering
   4. VPC Mesh
   5. Site-to-site VPN using Virtual Private Gateway (Private Connectivity to On-Prem)
   6. Direct Connect
   7. Transit Gateway
   8. PrivateLink
   9. Client VPN
   10. CloudFront
   11. Global Accelerator
   12. AWS NLB
   13. NAT Gateway & NAT Instance
   14. Egress-Only Internet Gateway
   15. Amazon VPC
8. Security
   1. Shared Responsibility Model
   2. Security baseline
   3. AWS Secrets Manager
   4. IAM Access Analyzer
   5. AWS Inspector
   6. AWS Security Hub
   7. Amazon Detective
   8. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
   9. Security Best Practices
   10. What is Intrusion Detection System (IDS) vs Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)?
   11. AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail
9. Multi-Accounts Management and Strategies
   1. AWS Organizations
   2. Multi-Account and Structure
   3. AWS Service Catalogs
10. Migrations
    1. Migration Strategies
    2. Migration services offered by AWS
    3. Network Migration Planning
11. Streaming Data
    1. Kinesis Data Stream
    2. Kinesis Data Analytics
    3. Kinesis Data Firehose
    4. AWS Glue
    5. AWS Athena
    6. Amazon EMR
    7. Amazon QuickSight
12. Application decoupling
    1. Micro-services Pro’s and Con’s
    2. Decoupling Technologies in AWS
    3. AWS X-Ray
13. Data Processing
    1. ETL Technologies on AWS
    2. EMR — Managed Hadoop cluster
    3. Workflow/Task co-ordination
14. Logging and Monitoring
    1. CloudWatch Logs and Metrics
15. Deployment
    1. Infrastructure as Code
    2. Deployment Pipelines
    3. AWS Developer Tools
16. Architecting to Scale and High-Availability
    1. Auto-Scaling Group
    2. Auto-scaling
    3. Serverless
    4. Backups
17. Disaster Recovery
    1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
    2. Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
    3. Disaster prevention and recovery
    4. Failover and routing solution

About the Author

Hi! My name is Puru Tuladhar, a lifelong technology enthusiast and aspiring minimalist. I have 10+ years of experience building software and digital infrastructure on the Internet. I'm a certified professional in AWS and Kubernetes.

Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter