#Infrastructure
446 posts
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.
K8s Practice #5: Monitoring & Alerting — Prometheus / CloudWatch / Alertmanager
The `myshop-api` built in [#4](/en/posts/k8s-practice-4) now has code-to-deploy automation, but operations do not work unless you can see what it is doing. This post organizes the EKS cluster observability stack. We install Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager at once with kube-prometheus-stack, combine that with CloudWatch via Container Insights and Fluent Bit, standardize myshop-api metrics and alerts via ServiceMonitor / PrometheusRule, and organize the on-call flow with the 4 golden signals rule set and Slack / PagerDuty routing.
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.
K8s Practice #4: CI/CD Pipeline — GitHub Actions / ECR / ArgoCD
The `myshop-api` built in [#3](/en/posts/k8s-practice-3) still relies on manual steps whenever a new version is released. This post automates that process. GitHub Actions pushes container images to AWS ECR via OIDC without static keys, auto-commits Helm values in the manifest repo so the ArgoCD covered in [Advanced #6](/en/posts/k8s-advanced-6) can detect the change and sync to the cluster, and keeps PR approval gates, dev/prod branching, and canary deployment in one flow.
RHEL in Practice #6 Wrapping Up the Track: A Reference Architecture
The final post of the RHEL in Practice track. We tie together the nginx web server, PostgreSQL, Podman containers, Cockpit/PCP monitoring, and Ansible automation covered across posts #1 through #5 into a single reference architecture, drawing the full picture of running one small web service on a single box. We also walk through an operations checklist covering persistence, SELinux, firewalld, backups, logging, permissions, and time sync, plus the learning path that leads on to the RHCSA and RHCE certifications.
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.
K8s Practice #3: DB Integration — RDS / Secrets Manager / External Secrets / Connection Pool
The `myshop-api` exposed in [#2](/en/posts/k8s-practice-2) is still an empty shell with no data store. This post organizes the flow of bringing up RDS PostgreSQL with Terraform, storing the master secret in AWS Secrets Manager, auto-syncing it into a K8s Secret with External Secrets Operator, accessing AWS without static credentials via IRSA, and adding PgBouncer as a connection pool. It also covers automating schema migration as a Job.
RHEL in Practice #5: Automating RHEL with Ansible — Bridging to the RHCE Track
The fifth post in the RHEL in Practice track. We take the hand-driven work from #1〜#4 — nginx, PostgreSQL, Podman, and monitoring — and tie it back together with Ansible, organizing the big picture of reproducing the same result from a single set of code. We cover ansible-core installation, a minimal inventory and ansible.cfg, the idempotency concept, examples of moving hand work into a playbook, and the path to abstraction with rhel-system-roles — leaving the deep syntax to the RHCE track.
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.
K8s Practice #2: The Foundation of App Deployment — Deployment / Service / Ingress / Helm
The stage of putting `myshop-api` on the empty EKS cluster brought up in [#1](/en/posts/k8s-practice-1). We organize Deployment / Service / Ingress / ConfigMap / Secret / ServiceAccount / HPA as one bundle, auto-provision an ALB with AWS Load Balancer Controller, and package the bundle as a Helm chart so the same chart deploys to dev and prod with different values.