Top 20% AWS Services for 80% Exam Success

Each section of the exam domains for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam is covered in a separate chapter in this book. Below is a list providing short explanations of various AWS services covered by the exam domains, grouped by families and categories to help you quickly understand their functions. For more detailed information, refer to the related FAQs for each service. While there might be exam questions on some of these services, the provided details should suffice for preparing for the test questions.

For comprehensive exam preparation, consider exploring resources like the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) Exam Guide.

Compute Services

• Amazon EC2: Provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
• AWS Lambda: Run code without provisioning or managing servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume.

Storage Services

• Amazon S3: An object storage service offering scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
• Amazon EFS: A scalable file storage solution for use with Amazon EC2.

Database Services

• Amazon RDS: Makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
• Amazon DynamoDB: A key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.

Networking & Content Delivery

• Amazon VPC: Enables you to launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network that you define.
• Amazon CloudFront: A fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs.

Security, Identity, & Compliance

• AWS IAM: Enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely.
• AWS Shield: A managed DDoS protection service designed to safeguard web applications running on AWS.
• AWS Security Hub: Provides a comprehensive view of your security environment by consuming and prioritizing findings from various AWS security services.
• Amazon Detective: Analyzes, investigates, and identifies the root cause of potential security issues by collecting log data from your AWS resources and using machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory.
• AWS Audit Manager: Provides prebuilt frameworks that map your AWS resources to industry standards like CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, GDPR, and PCI DSS.

Management & Governance

• AWS CloudFormation: Provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment.
• AWS Config: A service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard: Provides notifications and alerts about AWS service issues and changes affecting your AWS resources.
• AWS Proton: Allows platform teams to create rules for developers provisioning automated infrastructure as code using either AWS-managed CloudFormation templates or self-managed Terraform templates.
• AWS X-Ray: Analyzes and debugs applications to quickly identify and troubleshoot performance issues and errors, providing an end-to-end view of workload communication.

Analytics

• Amazon Athena: A serverless query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
• Amazon EMR: A cloud big data platform for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools such as Apache Hadoop, Spark, and HBase.
• Amazon Kinesis: Allows customers to connect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data. It supports various use cases like streaming video, audio applications, logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analysis, and storage.
• AWS Glue: A fully managed ETL service that helps discover details and properties of data stored in Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift for analytics, machine learning, and application development. Key components include AWS Glue Data Catalog, Glue Crawlers, AWS Glue Studio, AWS Glue Schema Registry, and AWS Glue DataBrew.
• Amazon QuickSight: A hosted business intelligence service providing data visualizations and insights from an organization’s data records for reports or dashboards.

Machine Learning

• Amazon SageMaker: Provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.
• Amazon Comprehend: A natural language processing (NLP) service using machine learning to find meaning and insights in text.
• Amazon Forecast: Provides accurate time-sensitive forecasts for various markets, including retail, manufacturing, travel demand, logistics, and web traffic.
• Amazon Fraud Detector: A managed service that helps identify potentially fraudulent online activities such as payment fraud and fake account creation.
• Amazon Rekognition: Adds visual capabilities to applications using methods like Rekognition Image for detecting objects and faces in images and Rekognition Video for analyzing motion-based context in videos.
• Amazon Textract: A document analysis service that detects and extracts printed text and handwriting from images and scanned documents.
• Amazon Transcribe: Converts speech to text.
• Amazon Translate: A neural machine translation service that delivers high-quality language translation.
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot: Automatically inspects raw data, applies feature processors, and selects the best algorithm, training and tuning multiple models.
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines: Creates fully automated ML workflows.

Application Integration

• Amazon AppFlow: A fully managed integration service that enables you to securely transfer data between AWS services and SaaS applications.
• Amazon SQS: A fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

Developer Tools

• AWS CodePipeline: A continuous integration and continuous delivery service for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
• AWS CodeBuild: A fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages.

Customer Engagement

• Amazon Pinpoint: A flexible and scalable outbound and inbound marketing communications service.
• Amazon Connect: An easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service.

Media Services

• Amazon Elastic Transcoder: A highly scalable, easy-to-use, and cost-effective way to convert (or transcode) media files from their source formats into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

Management Tools

• AWS CloudWatch: A monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

Mobile

• AWS Amplify: A set of tools and services that can be used together or on their own to help front-end web and mobile developers build scalable full-stack applications powered by AWS.
• AWS Device Farm: An application testing service that allows you to improve the quality of your web and mobile apps by running tests concurrently on multiple desktop browsers and real physical mobile devices.

Data Exchange

• AWS Data Exchange: Supports the secure exchange of third-party data files and tables into AWS. Customers can use the AWS Data Exchange API to copy selected third-party data into Amazon S3 storage.
• AWS Data Pipeline: Processes and moves data between different AWS compute and storage services, and from on-premises data sources, transferring results into Amazon S3, RDS, DynamoDB, and EMR.

For more in-depth preparation and to access a comprehensive study resource, check out the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) Exam Guide. This guide will help you understand and utilize these AWS services effectively, ensuring you are well-prepared to answer exam questions and succeed in achieving your certification.