Breezing through the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam

Breezing through the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam free download

SAA-C03 Exam: How to design a sound, secure, resilient, economical, and high-performing architecture in the AWS Cloud ?

This course of Practice Tests will hone your skill broadly as you start your journey into the Cloud in search of cutting edge solutions. It is meant to help pass not only the AWS Certification (AWS Solutions Architect Associate Level), but also enable an in-depth understanding of the Cloud space to empower you to meet the future professional challenges with confidence. The course audience is expected to be diverse and there are no pre-requisites, except a curiosity to learn about Cloud Computing at an intermediate level of sophistication.

Why one should take the AWS Cloud Solutions Associate Architect Certification Exam?

The preparation for this exam ensure you have a broad understanding of the AWS Cloud and its components and services than covered in the AWS Cloud Practitioner (Foundational) Certification. This certification can also be a competitive discriminator in your career.

What benefit do I get by taking this exam and obtaining the Certification?

As outlined by AWS, the 'AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate' showcases knowledge and skills in AWS technology, across a wide range of AWS services. The focus of this certification is on the design of cost and performance optimized solutions, demonstrating a strong understanding of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This certification can enhance the career profile and earnings of certified individuals and increase your credibility and confidence in stakeholder and customer interactions. This certification exam does not require deep hands-on coding experience, although familiarity with basic programming concepts would be an advantage.

Sample Question and Answer with Explanation

As you will see in the sample explanation, not only it gives details of the question and its answer, but explanation on why others are unfit for the given use case. For complex questions, the scenario is explained with keywords to focus on; and plenty of Exam Tips are underscored which will help you face alternative Exam scenarios, or possible Exam questions. Plenty of relevant inline and explicit references are also cited to help further your solutions architect knowledge quest.

Question. A customer table in Dynamo DB has the following attributes in the us-east-1 region: customer_ID, customer_name, customer_address, and customer_income. As you started to see more queries using customer name, you created a global secondary index using the customer_name column. However, your Devops teams are noticing decreased performance and throttling exceptions for queries using the the global secondary index during peak time. The queries generally select all the attributes of the table. What would be your fix for this issue ?

• Create a Dynamo DB global table.

• Increase the capacity units of the global secondary index.

• Increase the capacity units of the Dynamo DB table.

• Create the global secondary index with KEYS_ONLY option so it will be the smallest index.

Explanation

Note - Illustrative figures and additional details are in the Test explanation, but not produced here per Udemy guidelines.

When you create a global secondary index on a provisioned mode table in Dynamo DB, you must specify read and write capacity units for the expected workload on that index. This is because the provisioned throughput settings of a global secondary index are separate from those of its base table.

A Query operation on a global secondary index consumes read capacity units from the index, not the base table. When you put, update or delete items in a table, the global secondary indexes on that table are also updated. These index updates consume write capacity units from the index, not from the base table.

Example if you Query a global secondary index and exceed its provisioned read capacity, your request will be throttled. If you perform heavy write activity on the table, but a global secondary index on that table has insufficient write capacity, the write activity on the table will be throttled.

Exam Tip Queries using a Global Secondary Index use the index's own Capacity Units. However, queries using a Local Secondary Index utilize the Table's capacity units.

Important To avoid potential throttling, the provisioned write capacity for a global secondary index should be equal or greater than the write capacity of the base table because new updates write to both the base table and global secondary index.

Scenario - Global Secondary Index queries are getting throttling exceptions in a Dynamo DB Table.

Keywords - Created a global secondary index using customer-name; decreased performance and throttling exceptions for queries using the global secondary index; selecting all the attributes

Note The Table information in the scenario plays no role in the answer. The crux of the question is Throttling occurring in queries when the new Global Secondary Index is used during peak times.

Correct Choice(s)

Increase the capacity units of the global secondary index.

Per above this is the correct fix.

For the other choices

Create a Dynamo DB global table.

Amazon DynamoDB global tables is a fully managed, serverless, multi-Region, and multi-active database. Global tables provide you 99.999% availability, increased application resiliency, and improved business continuity. As global tables replicate your Amazon DynamoDB tables automatically across your choice of AWS Regions, you can achieve fast, local read and write performance.

DynamoDB global tables are ideal for massively scaled applications with globally dispersed users. In such an environment, users expect very fast application performance. Global tables provide automatic multi-active replication to AWS Regions worldwide. They enable you to deliver low-latency data access to your users no matter where they are located.

This is a distractor - enabling Global Tables has no impact on the issue which is at a Global Secondary index level.

Exam Tip Write in any region must be available instantly in other regions for a multi-regional Dynamo DB setup: think Dynamo DB global table.

Increase the capacity units of the Dynamo DB table.

This will work if the index is a Local Secondary Index. As a Global Secondary Index consumes its own capacity units, this will not help.

Create the global secondary index with KEYS_ONLY option so it will be the smallest index.

First some background on how attributes are projected into a Dynamo DB secondary index.

A projection is the set of attributes that is copied from a table into a secondary index.

• The partition key and sort key of the table are always projected into the index;

• You can project other attributes to support your application's query requirements.

  • When you query an index, Amazon DynamoDB can access any attribute in the projection as if those attributes were in a table of their own.

When you create a secondary index, you need to specify the attributes that will be projected into the index. DynamoDB provides three different options for this:

• KEYS_ONLY – Each item in the index consists only of the table partition key and sort key values, plus the index key values. The KEYS_ONLY option results in the smallest possible secondary index. This is the default if you dont specify any other option.

• INCLUDE – In addition to the attributes described in KEYS_ONLY, the secondary index will include other non-key attributes that you specify.

• ALL – The secondary index includes all of the attributes from the source table. Because all of the table data is duplicated in the index, an ALL projection results in the largest possible secondary index.

So the given choice suggests to use KEYS_ONLY which will make the index contain only the table partition key and sort key only. Sure, the index will be small, but it may not be sufficient if the query using the index requires other attributes of the Table using the index. The scenario clearly says the queries using the index select all the columns in the table; so creating this index with KEYS_ONLY will not be sufficient. Hence this choice is ruled out.

Suggested Ways to Crack the Exam Questions

1. Study the question Fully. Make an expectation of what the answer should be without reading the choices, but DO NOT attach yourself to this conclusion - keep it tentative.

2. Make sure you note the constraint keywords and asks such as least cost, high performance, least effort, etc.

3. Beware if a question says: "Pick a choice that is NOT  TRUE (or Pick a choice that is FALSE) - natural human thinking tends to gravitate towards True.

4. Review ALL the choices - DO NOT make a selection without reading all. Common mistake is picking the earliest choice that seem to fit as the best answer without reading all the choices. But, the next choice could have been the perfect answer.

5. Answer ALL the questions even if you don't know any - there is no penalty for incorrect answers. Further, if you don't know or not fully confident of the question, use elimination of the choices that definitely are wrong, then focus only on the fit ones to choose the answer (your probability of being correct increases this way!).

6. Keep time to review at the end. Reasons:

• Sometime you may have inadvertently forgot to answer a question, or

• Beware, though you knew a question and selected the answer correctly, inadvertently due to mouse click, it may have selected a wrong choice, or

• You may have skipped a question to save time, but forgot about it: remember, every question's answer counts.

The practice tests will ensure you are prepared on the above especially #6 pitfalls.

Check List

1. Prepare BEFORE you take these Tests. Pretend the Test is the Exam itself so allocate time.

2. Read the explanation fully for a Test after completing it before moving to the next Test.

3. Review your Incorrect Answers.

4. Review also your Correct Answers.

   • For some questions, you could have used elimination or just guessed - so understand why that choice is indeed the right answer.

   • For some questions, you picked a choice thinking of a reason; the Choice is correct, but that reason is wrong. Reading the explanation will tell you why it is the right choice and its reason precisely.

5. Review the Incorrect choices because you need to know why they are not the right answers. Moreover, in a different problem context, they may be valid choices.

6. If you wish to re-take the Tests, give a couple days so your memory will not interfere with your understanding in answering the questions.

7. A few days before the exam, see if you have time to quickly re-take all the Tests (or simply review the Exam Tip content).

8. If you get over 85-90 percent or above in the Tests, I believe you are ready to take the Exam.

AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Domains

Notice the focus of the certification is on the design of a sound, robust, and resilient architecture (not just deploying an application to the Cloud!)

• Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures 30%

• Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures 26%

• Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures 24%

• Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20%

This Practice Tests Course will  thoroughly vet your understanding of the AWS Cloud above and beyond the level of an AWS Solutions Architect Associate.

How this course can help you effectively and efficiently (esp. valuing your time) ?

The carefully designed tests will prepare you above and beyond the knowledge level  and challenge expected for the exam.

The knowledge level as an AWS Associate Architect comprises of but not limited to the following:

1. Knowledge and skills in compute, networking, storage, and database AWS services as well as AWS deployment and management services

2. Knowledge and skills in deploying, managing, and operating workloads on AWS as well as implementing security controls and compliance requirements

3. Knowledge and skills in using the AWS Management Console and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)Understanding of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS networking, security services, and the AWS global infrastructure

4. Ability to identify which AWS services meet a given technical requirement and to define technical requirements for an AWS-based application

Additional Preparatory Materials

• Consult AWS Skills Builder for a free Practice Exam.

• It should be noted of a Cloud foundational level called Cloud Practitioner which is an optional curriculum before taking the Assoc. Architecture Exam. The author also has courses for AWS Cloud Practitioner exam in Udemy as well (titled 'Preparatory Tests for AWS Cloud Practitioner and Beyond'). It helps to vet your high level understanding of the Cloud. Comparatively, the Solutions Associate Architect goes a bit deeper - however, either course can be taken for a first AWS Certification exam depending on your level of interest.

  • Ref - Preparatory Tests for AWS Cloud Practitioner and Beyond  (Udemy Practice Tests for Cloud Practitioner)

The knowledge you gain as part of these Tests and the subsequent Certification that you will be able to obtain by passing the exam goes above and beyond just the Certification itself. It will (guaranteed!) value-add to your endeavors in this space whether it is relating to Cloud migration from your premises; designing Cost-effective and Resilient Architectures; Issue Diagnoses with pin-point Root Cause Analysis; or Deploy advanced solutions in the Cloud.

Focus on the pattern of asks, the key words and optimization constraints of the question carefully - not just the question!

Good Luck!