Attention all exam preppers! AWS Answers

AWS has just released a new AWS Answers page that is essential reading for those preparing for the certification exams.
It provides a great overview of AWS architecture considerations.

Pre-Warming of EBS Volumes is not necessary

A number of people have asked me about pre-warming of new EBS volumes. I do realise that there are a lot of courses and exam dumps out there stating this is necessary. In fact it is not necessary with new volumes and if you answer this incorrectly you will lose valuable marks on the exam.

The only situation where preparation is required before access is with volumes that were restored from a snapshot:

"New EBS volumes receive their maximum performance the moment that they are available and do not require initialization (formerly known as pre-warming). However, storage blocks on volumes that were restored from snapshots must be initialized (pulled down from Amazon S3 and written to the volume) before you can access the block." Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes

When in doubt read the docs

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New videos for AWS Certified Associate Courses

We have just created more new videos for the AWS Certified Associate course:
Amazon DynamoDB Core Knowledge  (New)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Core Knowledge  (New)
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Core Knowledge  (New)

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New Course Videos added

We have just updated some existing videos and also created new videos for the AWS Certified Associate course:
AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Core Knowledge  (New)
AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) Core Knowledge (New)
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Core Knowledge (New)
AWS OpsWorks Core Knowledge (New)
Amazon EC2 Core Knowledge (Updated)

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AWS Certificate Manager rolling out to new regions

Previously you would need buy your SSL certificates outside of AWS and then convert them to the format for AWS and then upload to your ELB. Life is much easier now with AWS Certficate Manager that provides this service along with the cetificates for free! How cool is that?

The service has been rolled out to most regions so you may get a question on it in the exam.

AWS Certificate Manager is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet. AWS Certificate Manager removes the time-consuming manual process of purchasing, uploading, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates. With AWS Certificate Manager, you can quickly request a certificate, deploy it on AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancers or Amazon CloudFront distributions, and let AWS Certificate Manager handle certificate renewals. SSL/TLS certificates provisioned through AWS Certificate Manager are free. You pay only for the AWS resources you create to run your application.

More details at https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/ 

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ECS Auto Service Scaling

Watch for this on the exam! An ECS tutorial will be released with the SysOps videos.

Amazon EC2 Container Service Supports Automatic Service Scaling

Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) can now automatically scale container-based applications by dynamically growing and shrinking the number of tasks run by an Amazon ECS service.

Previously, when your application experienced a load spike you had to manually scale the number of tasks in your Amazon ECS service.
Now, you can automatically scale an Amazon ECS service based on any Amazon CloudWatch metric. For example, you can use CloudWatch metrics published by Amazon ECS, such as each service’s average CPU and memory usage. You can also use CloudWatch metrics published by other services or use custom metrics that are specific to your application. For example, a web service could increase the number of tasks based on Elastic Load Balancing metrics like SurgeQueueLength, while a batch job could increase the number of tasks based on Amazon SQS metrics like ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible.

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New EC2 instance X1

Watch out for this on the exam!

X1 instances, the largest Amazon EC2 memory-optimized instance with 2 TB of memory

X1 instances extend the elasticity, simplicity, and cost savings of the AWS cloud to enterprise-grade applications with large dataset requirements. X1 instances are ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high performance computing (HPC) applications. X1 instances are certified by SAP to run production environments of the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA, Business Suite on HANA (SoH), Business Warehouse on HANA (BW), and Data Mart Solutions on HANA on the AWS cloud.
X1 instances offer 2 TB of DDR4 based memory, 8x the memory offered by any other Amazon EC2 instance. Each X1 instance is powered by four Intel® Xeon® E7 8880 v3 (Haswell) processors and offers 128 vCPUs. In addition, X1 instances offer 10 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and are EBS-optimized by default at no additional cost.

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AWS Certified SysOps Exam Engine

We have just added the Exam Engine for the AWS Certified SysOps Associate course!

The exam engine is included with the Associate courses. All existing paid customers will receive access to the exam engine.

The course videos and material will be released in the next week.

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2016 Updated Courses!

Major changes to the format of our courses! One payment enables access to all associate courses and exam engines.
Course have been updated to 2016 and format has been changed to make study easier. Core AWS subjects that are relevant to all streams are in a separate course and then the specific subjects for the three streams are in separate courses.
Next week we will be adding the SysOps Administrator exam engine followed by the course material the following week. This will also be added to any existing customers for free.

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Study on the go with the new BackSpace Academy mobile site!

Due to popular demand we are introducing two platforms for doing the BackSpace AWS Certification prep courses. The BackSpace Academy mobile site for IOS and Android.

When you go to https://user.backspace.academy you will be automatically directed to the mobile site if you are using a mobile phone.

Great for studying practice exams on the go!

New S3 Storage Class

AWS has just announced another storage class type for S3.

Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA) is an Amazon S3 storage class for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. Standard - IA offers the high durability, throughput, and low latency of Amazon S3 Standard, with a low per GB storage price and per GB retrieval fee. This combination of low cost and high performance make Standard - IA ideal for long-term storage, backups, and as a data store for disaster recovery. The Standard - IA storage class is set at the object level and can exist in the same bucket as Standard, allowing you to use lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

The following table summarizes the durability and availability offered by each of the storage classes.

Storage Class	Durability (designed for)	Availability (designed for)	Other Considerations
STANDARD	99.999999999%	99.99%	None
STANDARD_IA	99.999999999%	99.9%	There is a retrieval fee associated with STANDARD_IA objects which makes it most suitable for infrequently accessed data. For pricing information, see Amazon S3 Pricing.
GLACIER	99.999999999%	99.99% (after you restore objects)	GLACIER objects are not available for real-time access. You must first restore archived objects before you can access them and restoring objects can take 3-4 hours. For more information, see Restoring Archived Objects.
RRS	99.99%	99.99%	None

Our certification courses will be updated this week with the changes.

Important changes by AWS to Auto Scaling Policies

Today AWS announced the introduction of new auto scaling policies with steps. This is a significant change as no longer does auto scaling need to be a single step response to a CloudWatch alarm. You can now have many steps enabling small changes in capacity to be made in response to small changes in demand and likewise for large changes. The result is highly reactive and smooth response to demand.
We have updated our documentation "Lab Notes - Highly Available and Fault Tolerant Architecture for Web Applications inside a VPC" to v1.02 to reflect this change. Please make sure you understand this before sitting the AWS certification exam.

New Video lab - Using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

We have added a new lab video to the Amazon IAM subject of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course.

Using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• Creating users and groups 
• Creating IAM roles.
• Creating an account password policy.
• Downloading a credentials report.

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New Video lab - Using DynamoDB

We have added a new lab video to the Amazon DynamoDB subject of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course.

Using DynamoDB

• Using the console to create a table with a secondary index
• Adding items and attributes to a table using the console.
• Creating a JSON file containing items.
• Importing data  into a table using a JSON file and the Command Lines Interface command batch-write.
• Creating a JSON file containing query.
• Querying data using a JSON file and the Command Lines Interface query command.

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Trusted Adviser lesson added to AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course

Trusted Adviser lesson has been added to the Security subject of the BackSpace AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course to reflect changes in the AWS certification exam.

Check it out at backspace.academy.

New Video lab Low Latency HTML 5 Websites using S3, CloudFront and Route 53 - Part 3

We have added a new lab video to the Amazon Route 53 subject of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course.

Low Latency HTML 5 Websites using S3, CloudFront and Route 53 - Part 3

• Using Route 53 to serve domain traffic to a CloudFront distribution.
• Using Route 53 to serve domain traffic to a Web Server.
• Using a Route 53 weighted routing policy to temporarily direct traffic to another endpoint.
• Creating a Route 53 health check.
• Using a Route 53 failover policy to direct traffic to another endpoint when a health check is failed.

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New Video lab Low Latency HTML 5 Websites using S3, CloudFront and Route 53 - Part 2

We have added a new lab video to the Amazon CloudFront subject of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course.

Low Latency HTML 5 Websites using S3, CloudFront and Route 53 - Part 2

• Types of origin servers
• Types of CloudFront Distribution strategy
• Creating a CloudFront distribution
• Invalidating a CloudFront distribution

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New Video lab Low Latency HTML 5 Websites using S3, CloudFront and Route 53 - Part 1

We have added a new lab video to the Amazon S3 subject of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course.

Low Latency HTML 5 Websites using S3, CloudFront and Route 53 - Part 1

• How to create a bucket 
• Upload a HTML5 website to S3
• Enable versioning and recovering deleted files.
• Configure life cycle rules to automate archiving of past versions to Glacier.
• Hosting a website on S3.

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New Highly Available and Fault Tolerant VPC Architecture Tutorial

New Highly Available and Fault Tolerant VPC Architecture Tutorial Utilising ELB, ENI, Auto Scaling and the new S3 Endpoints and Multi-AZ Aurora Clusters We have just added a new tutorial to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Course that applies what you have learned in the lessons and quizzes.
These videos cover the essential hands knowledge in AWS architecture required for certification. Look for them in the AWS Architecture Design Patterns subject.

Big Data subject added to AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course

A big data (Redshift, Kinesis, EMR) subject has been added to the BackSpace AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course to reflect changes in the AWS certification exam.

Check it out at backspace.academy.