In 2012, I created my first AWS account. Back then, I worked as a software engineer and was looking for a way to deploy an online trading platform. Two years later, I attended re:Invent — the yearly conference organized by AWS — in Las Vegas for the first time. I was lucky to pass the Certified Solutions Architect certification without any preparation due to my hands-on experience.
Are you aiming to pass the Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02) exam? In this blog, you’ll find my advice on how to prepare for the certification exam. My approach is not the fastest way to get certified but a sustainable and joyful way to learn about AWS that will pay off in the long term.
What’s the CO² footprint of your architecture?
Fighting climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our days. When designing an architecture, there are many important factors to consider: security, reliability, performance and costs. I’d like to add another factor to that list: the CO² footprint.
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Unusual AWS Architectures
AWS provides many building blocks. As architects, we have to choose the right building blocks to construct our systems. But sometimes, the proper building block is not available, and we have to make compromises. In this blog post, I show four unusual AWS architectures that deal with AWS’s limitations in creative ways.
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Comparing API Gateways on AWS
Of the different API gateways offered by AWS, which option fits your needs?
An API Gateway is “a server that acts as an API front-end, receives API requests, enforces throttling and security policies, passes requests to the back-end service, and then passes the response back to the requester.”
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Caching on AWS 101
Oftentimes, the idea of adding a caching layer arises when users start complaining about the performance of an application. Adding a cache to your architecture does not solve all problems — especially when implementing that change under pressure to fix performance issues. Therefore, thinking about a caching strategy should be part of the process when designing your architecture.
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NoSQL on AWS: Document-Oriented Databases
A document-oriented database stores keys mapped to JSON documents. You can query all documents in such a document-oriented database and retrieve only parts of documents to save network bandwidth.
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