AWS
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) #1 Exam Introduction — Exam Structure and Study Roadmap
The opening post of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) series. It covers the structure of 65 questions, 130 minutes, and a 720 passing score; the weight and meaning of the four domains (Security 30% , Resilience 26% , High Performance 24% , Cost 20%); how it differs from Cloud Practitioner; and a study strategy that turns the intuition built on the hands-on [AWS track](/en/posts/aws-basics-1) and [CLF-C02](/en/posts/aws-clf-1-exam-introduction) into design-oriented exam answers. This 16-part series targets a SAA-C03 pass, wrapping up with a full-scale mock exam in #16.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) #8 Domain 4 Billing and Support — Pricing Models, Support Plans, TCO
The final CLF-C02 domain — Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%). The weight is small, but the question patterns are formulaic, so this is a domain you can take near-full marks on. We cover the four EC2 pricing models (On-Demand, Reserved, Savings Plans, Spot), the free tier, AWS Pricing Calculator and TCO Calculator, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, Cost and Usage Report, Consolidated Billing, the four Support Plan tiers (Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise), and the check coverage of Trusted Advisor.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) #7 Domain 3-2 Core Services — Networking and Databases
The second half of Domain 3. Networking (VPC, subnets, Route 53, CloudFront, the four ELB types, VPN, Direct Connect, Global Accelerator), databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Redshift, DocumentDB, Neptune), and ops/management services (CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Trusted Advisor, Systems Manager, CloudFormation). The volume looks heavy, but it compresses into a single workload-to-service mapping table. #8 picks up with Domain 4, Billing and Support.
AWS in Practice #6: Cost Optimization and Dashboards — Wrapping Up the Track
Cost Explorer analysis, Savings Plans / Spot / Graviton, Right Sizing, tag enforcement and cost classification, the FinOps angle — and the wrap-up of 27 posts of AWS track converging into one system.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) #6 Domain 3-1 Core Services — Compute and Storage
The front half of Domain 3 (34%), the widest-surface domain on the CLF-C02 exam. We classify the compute services (EC2, Lambda, ECS, Fargate, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, Batch) by the kind of workload they fit, and lay out the storage services (S3 storage classes, EBS, EFS, FSx, Storage Gateway, Snow Family) by category and use case. The volume looks large, but it collapses into workload → service mappings. #7 continues with networking and databases.
AWS in Practice #5: Monitoring — CloudWatch Alarms and X-Ray
CloudWatch Logs Insights operational queries, ECS / RDS / ALB core metrics and alarm thresholds, SNS → Slack notifications, X-Ray distributed tracing for catching slow requests in one line — turning on the operational eye.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) #5 Domain 2-2 Compliance — Governance, AWS Artifact, GDPR/HIPAA
The second half of Domain 2. What AWS compliance certifications (SOC, ISO, PCI DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR) actually mean, how to pull certification documents through AWS Artifact, where governance tools (CloudTrail, Config, Organizations SCP) and security operations tools (GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, Security Hub) sit, and finally data encryption (at rest and in transit) together with KMS and CloudHSM. In #6 we head into Domain 3 — Compute and Storage at 34% of the exam weight.
AWS in Practice #4: IaC — Terraform Fundamentals
Why IaC, Terraform shape of provider / resource / state, team collaboration with S3 + DynamoDB backend, environment separation through modules, and the flow of code-ifying the #1–#3 infrastructure line by line.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) #4 Domain 2-1 Security — Shared Responsibility Model and IAM Basics
The first half of Domain 2 (30%), the largest-weighted domain of the CLF-C02 exam. Where the responsibility line falls between AWS and the customer (and how that shifts with the service model), the four IAM essentials — users, groups, roles, and policies — and how they differ, operating principles for MFA and access keys, and a root user guide that often appears as an exam trap. The next post #5 continues with compliance certifications, AWS Artifact, and encryption.
AWS in Practice #3: CI/CD — GitHub Actions + ECR + ECS
GitHub Actions without access keys via OIDC, ECR push, automatic Task Definition updates, ECS Service rolling deployments, deployment circuit breakers and auto-rollback, and a touch of CodeDeploy blue/green — a deployment flow that ends with a single git push.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) #3 Domain 1-2 Cloud Design — The Six Well-Architected Pillars
The second half of CLF-C02 Domain 1. We unpack the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework — Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability — and organize the design principles and exam-scenario mappings for each. We also fix the common mistake of memorizing only five pillars and forgetting Sustainability, which was added in December 2021. From #4 onward we head into Domain 2 Security, the 30% giant.
AWS in Practice #2: RDS Integration and Migration Operations
RDS Postgres Multi-AZ inside the VPC, Security Group design, password injection through Secrets Manager, the operational side of Alembic / Django migrations, and blue/green-compatible migration patterns.