AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Study Guide

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 Whats 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 PermissionsSometimes 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 Scal