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Your #1 all-in-one reference and exam Study Guide for the UPDATED AWS SysOps Administrator certification!
This comprehensive book guides readers through the role of a SysOps Administrator and helps prepare candidates to take the updated AWS Certified SysOps Administrator—Associate (SOA-C01) Exam. The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator—Associate certification validates technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on the AWS platform.
This Study Guide not only prepares readers for the AWS exam, but it makes sure the reader is ready to perform the duties expected of SysOps Administrators. The book focuses on the skill-set required of AWS professionals by filling in the gap between test preparation and real-world preparedness. Concepts covered include:
Readers will also have one year of free access to the Sybex interactive online learning environment and test bank, providing a suite of robust study tools including an assessment test, chapter tests, bonus practice exam, electronic flashcards, and a glossary of key terms.
SARA PERROTT is an accredited AWS Academy instructor at Bellevue College where she is an adjunct professor. She works full-time in the cybersecurity field and is passionate about her work. She has an MS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance and holds several industry certifications such as the CISSP and GCIH, in addition to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate and AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate certifications. You can contact Sara via her website at https://www.saraperrott.com.
BRETT MCLAUGHLIN currently works in cloud computing, focusing on scalable cloud platforms and staging and distributing petabyte-scale data stores. He is an expert in cloud-based architectures and large data sets and has led projects for NASA and billion-dollar AUM hedge funds. He is currently the CTO for Volusion, as well as an active instructor in the AWS and serverless communities.
Introduction xxvii
Assessment Test xxxiv
Part I AWS Fundamentals 1
Chapter 1 Introduction to Systems Operations on AWS 3
The AWS Ecosystem 5
The AWS Services Model 6
The AWS Global Presence 7
AWS Managed Services 8
What is Systems Operations? 14
The AWS Shared Responsibility Model 15
The AWS Service Level Agreement 16
The Seven Domains 16
Working with AWS 17
The AWS Management Console 17
The AWS CLI 19
AWS SDKs 19
Technical Support and Online Resources 19
Support Plans 20
Other Support Resources 20
Key Exam Resources 20
Summary 21
Exam Essentials 21
Review Questions 24
Part II Monitoring and Reporting 29
Chapter 2 Amazon CloudWatch 31
Monitoring on AWS 32
Monitoring is Event-Driven 33
Monitoring is Customizable 34
Monitoring Drives Action 36
Basic CloudWatch Terms and Concepts 36
CloudWatch is Metric- and Event-Based 36
Alarms Indicate Notifiable Change 36
Events and CloudWatch Events are Lower Level 37
CloudWatch Events Has Three Components 37
Choosing Between Alarms and Events 37
What’s in a Namespace? 37
To the 10th Dimension 38
Statistics Aggregate Metrics 38
Monitoring Compute 39
EC2 Instance Metrics 39
EC2 EBS Metrics 40
ECS Metrics 41
Monitoring Storage 41
S3 Metrics 42
RDS Metrics 42
DynamoDB2 Metrics 43
CloudWatch Alarms 44
Create an Alarm Threshold 45
Set Off an Alarm 45
Respond to an Alarm 45
CloudWatch Events 46
Events 46
Rules 46
Targets 47
Summary 47
Resources to Review 48
Exam Essentials 48
Exercises 49
Review Questions 56
Chapter 3 AWS Organizations 61
Managing Multiple Accounts 62
AWS Organizations Consolidates User Management 63
AWS Organizations Consolidates Billing 63
Core AWS Organizations Concepts 64
An Organization is a Collection of Accounts 64
Organizations Have a Master Account 65
Manage Organizational Units Across Accounts 65
Apply Service Control Policies 66
AWS Organizations and Consolidated Billing 68
Compliance Benefits 69
Prefer AWS Organizations Over Tagging 69
Summary 69
Exam Essentials 70
Exercises 70
Review Questions 73
Chapter 4 AWS Config 77
Managing Configuration Changes 78
Continuous Everything 79
On-Premises Solutions 80
Configuration in the Cloud 80
AWS Config Use Cases 81
Centralized Configuration Management 81
Audit Trails 83
Configuration as Security 83
AWS Config Rules and Responses 83
Rules are Desired Configurations 83
A Configuration Item Represents a Specific Configuration 84
Rules are Evaluated 85
AWS Config or AWS CloudTrail? 87
Summary 87
Resources to Review 88
Exam Essentials 88
Exercises 89
Review Questions 96
Chapter 5 AWS CloudTrail 101
API Logs are Trails of Data 102
What Exactly is a Trail? 103
The CloudTrail Process 105
CloudTrail as a Monitoring Tool 106
Viewing CloudTrail Logs 106
Connect a CloudTrail Trail to SNS 107
CloudTrail Handles Permissions…Sometimes 108
Summary 108
Resources to Review 108
Exam Essentials 109
Exercises 109
Review Questions 115
Part III High Availability 119
Chapter 6 Amazon Relational Database Service 121
Creating Databases with Amazon RDS 122
Amazon RDS vs. Your Own Instances 123
Supported Database Engines 125
Database Configuration and Parameter Groups 125
Scalability with Amazon RDS 127
Amazon RDS Key Features 128
Scaling Amazon RDS Instances 128
Backing Up Amazon RDS Instances 128
Securing Amazon RDS Instances 129
Multi-AZ Configuration 129
Creating a Multi-AZ Deployment 129
Failing Over to the Secondary Instance 130
Read Replicas 131
Replication to Read Replicas 131
Connecting to Read Replicas 132
Read Replicas’ Requirements and Limitations 132
Amazon Aurora 132
Aurora Volumes 133
Aurora Replicas 133
Summary 133
Resources to Review 134
Exam Essentials 134
Review Questions 136
Chapter 7 Auto Scaling 141
Auto Scaling Terms and Concepts 142
Auto Scaling Groups 143
Scaling In and Scaling Out 143
Scaling More than EC2 144
Minimums, Maximums, and Desired Capacity 145
Auto Scaling Groups Auto Scale 145
Auto Scaling Instances Must Be Maintained 146
Launch Configurations 147
EC2 Instances are Launch Configuration Templates 147
One Auto Scaling Group Has One Launch Configuration 148
Launch Templates: Versioned Launch Configurations 148
Auto Scaling Strategies 149
Manual Scaling 149
Scheduled Scaling 149
Dynamic Scaling 150
Cooldown Periods 150
Instances Terminate in Order 151
When Auto Scaling Fails 152
Summary 153
Resources to Review 153
Exam Essentials 153
Exercises 154
Review Questions 158
Part IV Deployment and Provisioning 163
Chapter 8 Hubs, Spokes, and Bastion Hosts 165
VPC Peering 166
Understanding the Use Case for Hub-and-Spoke Architecture 168
Using a VPC Peering Connection Across Multiple Regions
(Interregion Peering) 169
Bastion Hosts 169
Architecting for Bastion Host Use 170
Options for Bastion Hosts 170
Summary 171
Resources to Review 172
Linux Bastion Hosts on the AWS Cloud: 172
Exam Essentials 172
Exercises 173
Review Questions 183
Chapter 9 AWS Systems Manager 187
AWS Systems Manager 188
Communication with AWS Systems Manager 189
AWS Managed Instances 190
AWS Resource Groups 191
Taking Action with AWS Systems Manager 191
Summary 196
Resources to Review 196
Exam Essentials 197
Exercises 197
Review Questions 205
Part V Storage and Data Management 209
Chapter 10 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) 211
Object Storage and Amazon S3 212
What’s in a URL? 214
Availability and Durability 215
S3 Storage Classes 216
Securing and Protecting Data in S3 217
Access Control 217
Versioning 220
Encryption 221
Amazon Glacier 222
Amazon Glacier Deep Archive 223
S3 Lifecycle Management 223
Storage Gateways 224
Summary 225
Resources to Review 225
Exam Essentials 226
Exercises 226
Review Questions 232
Chapter 11 Elastic Block Store (EBS) 237
Understanding Block Storage and EBS 238
Types of EBS Storage 239
EBS vs. Instance Stores 241
Encrypting Your EBS Volumes 242
EBS Snapshots 244
Summary 244
Resources to Review 244
Exam Essentials 245
Exercises 245
Review Questions 248
Chapter 12 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) 253
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) 254
Accessibility of AMIs 255
AMI Storage 257
AMI Security 258
Launch Permissions 258
Encryption 258
Moving AMIs Between Regions 258
AWS Management Console 259
AWS CLI 259
Common AMI Issues 260
Summary 260
Resources to Review 260
Exam Essentials 261
Exercises 261
Review Questions 264
Part VI Security and Compliance 269
Chapter 13 IAM 271
Shared Responsibility Model: A Cloud Security Primer 272
Building Blocks of IAM 273
Users 273
Groups 274
Roles 274
Policies 275
Managing IAM 278
Managing Passwords 278
Managing Access Keys 279
Securing Your AWS Accounts 281
Protecting the Root Account 281
IAM Best Practices 281
Trusted Advisor 282
Other Identity Services 282
Cognito 282
Federation 283
AWS KMS 283
Summary 283
Resources to Review 284
Exam Essentials 284
Exercises 285
Review Questions 290
Chapter 14 Reporting and Logging 295
Reporting and Monitoring in AWS 296
AWS CloudTrail 296
Applying a Trail to All Regions 298
Management Events 298
Data Events 298
But You Said CloudTrail Was Free… 300
Amazon CloudWatch 300
Amazon CloudWatch Alarms 301
Amazon CloudWatch Logs 302
Amazon CloudWatch Events 303
Amazon CloudWatch Dashboard 303
AWS Config 304
Summary 305
Resources to Review 305
Exam Essentials 306
Exercises 306
Review Questions 311
Chapter 15 Additional Security Tools 315
Amazon Inspector 316
Amazon GuardDuty 318
Summary 320
Resources to Review 320
Exam Essentials 320
Exercises 321
Review Questions 326
Part VII Networking 331
Chapter 16 Virtual Private Cloud 333
Understanding AWS Networking 334
Classless Inter-Domain Routing Refresher 335
Virtual Private Cloud 336
Subnets 337
Route Tables 338
Internet Gateways 339
NAT Gateways and Instances 340
VPC Endpoints 342
Connecting to the Outside 344
Securing Your Network 345
Security Groups 345
Network Access Control Lists 346
Troubleshooting Network Issues 347
VPC Flow Logs 347
Other Resources 348
Summary 348
Resources to Review 349
Exam Essentials 350
Exercises 351
Review Questions 356
Chapter 17 Route 53 361
Domain Name System 362
DNS Records 363
Amazon Route 53 364
Amazon Traffic Flow 366
AWS Private DNS 366
Routing Policies 366
Simple Routing Policy 366
Failover Routing Policy 367
Geolocation Routing Policy 368
Geoproximity Routing Policy 368
Latency Routing Policy 369
Multivalue Answer Routing Policy 369
Weighted Routing Policy 370
Health Checks and Failover 371
Summary 372
Resources to Review 372
Exam Essentials 373
Exercises 373
Review Questions 377
Part VIII Automation and Optimization 381
Chapter 18 CloudFormation 383
An Introduction to IaaS 384
CloudFormation Templates 385
AWSTemplateFormatVersion 385
Description 385
Metadata 386
Parameters 386
Mappings 386
Conditions 387
Transform 388
Resources 388
Outputs 388
Creating and Customizing Your Stacks 389
Parameters 389
Outputs 390
Improving Your Templates 390
Built-in Functions 390
Mapping 391
Pseudo Parameters 392
Issues with CloudFormation Templates 392
Summary 392
Resources to Review 393
Exam Essentials 393
Exercise 394
Review Questions 396
Chapter 19 Elastic Beanstalk 401
What is Elastic Beanstalk? 402
Platforms and Languages 403
Creating a Custom Platform 405
Updates in Elastic Beanstalk 408
All-at-Once Deployment 409
Rolling Deployment 409
Rolling with Additional Batches Deployment 409
Immutable Deployment 409
Testing Your Application with a Blue/Green Deployment 410
Configuring Elastic Beanstalk 410
Securing Elastic Beanstalk 412
Data Protection 412
Identity and Access Management 412
Logging and Monitoring 412
Compliance 412
Resilience 413
Configuration and Vulnerability Analysis 413
Security Best Practices 413
Applying Security Best Practices to Elastic Beanstalk 413
AWS Elastic Beanstalk CLI 414
Troubleshooting Elastic Beanstalk 414
Summary 415
Resources to Review 415
Exam Essentials 416
Exercise 416
Review Questions 418
Appendix Answers to Review Questions 423
Chapter 1: Introduction to Systems Operations on AWS 424
Chapter 2: Amazon CloudWatch 425
Chapter 3: AWS Organizations 427
Chapter 4: AWS Config 429
Chapter 5: AWS CloudTrail 430
Chapter 6: Amazon Relational Database Service 432
Chapter 7: Auto Scaling 434
Chapter 8: Hubs, Spokes, and Bastion Hosts 436
Chapter 9: AWS Systems Manager 437
Chapter 10: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) 439
Chapter 11: Elastic Block Store (EBS) 440
Chapter 12: Amazon Machine Image (AMI) 441
Chapter 13: IAM 443
Chapter 14: Reporting and Logging 444
Chapter 15: Additional Security Tools 446
Chapter 16: Virtual Private Cloud 447
Chapter 17: Route 53 449
Chapter 18: CloudFormation 451
Chapter 19: Elastic Beanstalk 452
Index 455
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