Category Archives: AWS

S3 Standard – this class offers:

• Durability of 99.999999999% across multiple AZs – three minimum
• Low latency
• Resilient in the event of entire AZ destruction
• 99.99% availability
• An SLA governing performance
• Encryption of transit and rest data
• Lifecycle management

S3 Standard-Infrequent Access – this class offers:

• Many of the S3 Standard features such as incredible durability
• Designed for less frequent access, but still provides for responsiveness
• This class is ideal for workloads like backups
• You can actually set this class at the object level in a bucket that contains S3 Standard class objects
• Note that this class reduces availability slightly at 99.9%

S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access – this class offers:

• This might be an ideal class for objects like secondary backup copies of data
• The objects in this storage class could be replicated to another region should the need arise to increase the availability
• As you would guess, availability here is reduced slightly to 99.5%
• There is a risk of data loss in the event of an AZs destruction

S3 Glacier – this class offers:

• An ideal storage class for the archiving of data
• Access times to archived data can be from minutes to hours depending on your configuration and purchase plan

Interested in cloud certification, specifically the AWS platform? During his recent webinar, Anthony Sequeira discussed the updated AWS Solutions Architect – Associate exam, which can help you get up to speed with AWS, sooner rather than later.

Here are the timestamps of Anthony’s key points:

01:11 – Which exam should you take? The old one or the new one?
02:27 – A quick AWS certification disclaimer
04:35 – The new exam specs
08:58 – Why the new exam might be easier
09:44 – Breaking down domains

Get ready to learn about the revamped AWS Solutions Architect exam in Anthony’s webinar.

What: What’s New in 2018 with AWS Solutions Architect webinar
When: Wednesday, June 6 at 10 a.m. PT (5 p.m. UTC)

Click here to register!

As you might know – decoupling is a big deal in the new blueprint for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate level exam. In this post, I want to take a moment to outline some of the highlights of this interesting term and approach.

First of all, what the heck does it even mean – decoupling – it sure sounds like divorce! Decoupling refers to components remaining autonomous and unaware of each other as they complete their work for some greater output. This decoupling can be used to describe components that make up a simple application, or the term even applies on a broad scale. For example, many point to the fact that in public cloud computing, the architecture is decoupled in that someone like Amazon will completely handle the physical infrastructure of the network for us, while we work with the data and applications hosted on this hardware. We are not really sure what they are up to, while they are not entirely positive what the heck we are doing!

For your exam, you also need to be able to distinguish between two valid decoupling techniques in AWS – synchronous decoupling and asynchronous decoupling. Because, you know, we need to apply these two terms (synch/asynch) to just about any computer technology 😉

With synchronous decoupling, you have two components (for example) that must both always be available in order for the overall resource to function properly. While they both must always be available, they certainly are “unaware” of each other as this means they are truly decoupled.

With asynchronous decoupling, communication can still be achieved between the components even if one of the components is temporarily unavailable.

An example of synchronous decoupling in AWS would be using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute traffic between EC2 instances that are hosted in multiple Availability Zones. Note that in order for this to function properly, you need at least one EC2 instance in each AZ. They are unaware of each other – but they both better be there or you have no load balancing. What is also great is the fact that you can add nodes to this configuration, and even later remove them, without disrupting anything!

An example of asynchronous decoupling is using the Simple Queue Service (SQS) to handle messaging between components. You can have a component temporarily go offline, and the message can be properly queued until the component is back online.

I hope this post has peeled back any curtains that might have been hanging in front of these concepts for you!

The latest certification from AWS is here and it represents your foundation for all other AWS certifications. My latest podcast gives you all the details! 

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST AS WELL AS OTHER EPISODES!