#AWS
136 posts
S3 — static hosting, presigned URLs
AWS's oldest object storage, S3. The shape of a bucket and the global uniqueness of its name, policies and Public Access Block, static site hosting, presigned URLs, and the patterns for lowering cost with storage classes.
Secrets Manager / Parameter Store
AWS's secret / configuration management, all in one place. We cover the difference in role between Secrets Manager and SSM Parameter Store, automatic rotation, fetching from code (boto3 / caching / Powertools), ECS and Lambda integration, IaC connection, separating secrets from configuration, and a cost comparison.
Security Basics — MFA, Key Rotation, Least Privilege
Enforcing MFA on root and IAM users, automating access-key rotation, checking permissions with IAM Access Analyzer, least-privilege patterns, and common incident cases — the security guardrails that hold up in operations.
Security Governance — Organizations · SCP · Account Monitoring
When and how to move from a single account to multi-account. This chapter lays out the structure of grouping accounts into OUs with AWS Organizations, how to set organization-wide guardrails with SCP (Terraform example), the Control Tower landing zone, how to turn GuardDuty · Security Hub · Config · Inspector on for the whole organization from a delegated administrator, connecting IAM Identity Center SSO, and the one-account → N-account migration pattern.
Step Functions Intro
The AWS workflow engine, all in one place. We cover the role of a State machine, the four states Task / Choice / Parallel / Map, Standard vs Express, the Amazon States Language (ASL), Lambda / ECS / SDK integration, Retry / Catch error handling, and patterns like Saga and Human-in-the-loop.
The AWS Book Is Now Free in Full — AWS: From Basics to Production Operations
From your first IAM policy to running a fullstack app on ECS Fargate, this 33-chapter, six-part AWS practical book is free to read in full on the site.
VPC in Depth — Subnet Design · Peering · Transit Gateway · PrivateLink
Takes the VPC basics from Chapter 8 up to production scale. Covers 3-tier / 4-tier subnet design and CIDR planning, internet ingress/egress with NAT · Egress-only IGW · VPC Endpoint complete with Terraform code and cost math, how to stitch VPCs together with VPC Peering and Transit Gateway, and rounds out with PrivateLink, IPv6 dual-stack, and a multi-VPC mental model.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #4 Domain 1-3 Development with AWS Services — DynamoDB Development
The third post of the DVA-C02 development domain. It covers DynamoDB key design (partition key, sort key), the difference between LSI and GSI, read consistency (eventually consistent vs strongly consistent), capacity modes (on-demand vs provisioned) and throttling, optimistic locking implemented with conditional writes, atomic counters, DynamoDB Streams, TTL, and DAX caching, all at the exam level.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) #15 Exam Tips and Frequently Missed Patterns
After finishing SAA-C03 domain study, here is the practical strategy for protecting your score in the exam room. It lays out time management across 130 minutes and Mark for Review, how to filter options by constraint keywords, the elimination strategy, and the concept pairs most often confused on the exam (Multi-AZ vs. read replica, SG vs. NACL, Gateway vs. Interface Endpoint, and more) in a single table.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #3 Domain 1-2 Development with AWS Services — API Gateway
The second post of the DVA-C02 development domain. It covers the difference between API Gateway's REST API and HTTP API, Lambda proxy integration, the three authentication methods (IAM, Cognito authorizer, Lambda authorizer), throttling and usage plans/API keys, caching, stages and stage variables, and CORS, all at the exam level. API Gateway is the gateway to serverless APIs and appears in the development domain second only to Lambda.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) #14 Domain 4-2 Cost Optimization — Cost Monitoring
The final post of the SAA-C03 cost optimization domain. It covers Cost Explorer for analyzing and forecasting cost, AWS Budgets for alerting on budget overruns, CUR as the most detailed billing data, Trusted Advisor for checking cost , security , performance, Compute Optimizer for right-sizing recommendations, and how to manage multi-account cost with consolidated billing and cost allocation tags.
AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) #2 Domain 1-1 Development with AWS Services — Lambda Deep Dive
The first post of the DVA-C02 development domain. It covers Lambda's execution model across three invocation types — synchronous, asynchronous, and stream polling — along with concurrency (reserved concurrency, provisioned concurrency) and throttling, environment variables and layers, cold starts, idempotency, and failure handling via destinations and DLQs, all at the exam level. The development domain carries the largest weight at 32%, and Lambda sits at its center.