Content Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures - AWS Certification
Task 2.1: Design scalable and loosely coupled architecturesTask 2.2: Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures

Content Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures

Task 2.1: Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures

Knowledge of:

  • API creation and management (for example, Amazon API Gateway, REST API)

  • AWS managed services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Transfer Family, Amazon Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS], AWS Secrets Manager)

  • Caching strategies

  • Design principles for microservices (for example, stateless workloads compared with stateful workloads)

  • Event-driven architectures

  • Horizontal scaling and vertical scaling

  • How to appropriately use edge accelerators (for example, content delivery network [CDN])

  • How to migrate applications into containers

  • Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer [ALB])

  • Multi-tier architectures

  • Queuing and messaging concepts (for example, publish/subscribe)

  • Serverless technologies and patterns (for example, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda)

  • Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)

  • The orchestration of containers (for example, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS], Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS])

  • When to use read replicas

  • Workflow orchestration (for example, AWS Step Functions)

Skills in:

  • Designing event-driven, microservice, and/or multi-tier architectures based on requirements

  • Determining scaling strategies for components used in an architecture design

  • Determining the AWS services required to achieve loose coupling based on requirements

  • Determining when to use containers

  • Determining when to use serverless technologies and patterns

  • Recommending appropriate compute, storage, networking, and database technologies based on requirements

  • Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads

Task 2.2: Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures

Knowledge of:

  • AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions, Amazon Route 53)

  • AWS Managed Services (AMS) with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Polly)

  • Basic networking concepts (for example, route tables)

  • Disaster recovery (DR) strategies (for example, backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active failover, recovery point objective [RPO], recovery time objective [RTO])

  • Distributed design patterns

  • Failover strategies

  • Immutable infrastructure

  • Load balancing concepts (for example, ALB)

  • Proxy concepts (for example, Amazon RDS Proxy)

  • Service quotas and throttling (for example, how to configure the service quotas for a workload in a standby environment)

  • Storage options and characteristics (for example, durability, replication)

  • Workload visibility (for example, AWS X-Ray)

Skills in:

  • Determining automation strategies to ensure infrastructure integrity

  • Determining the AWS services required to provide a highly available and/or fault-tolerant architecture across AWS Regions or Availability Zones

  • Identifying metrics based on business requirements to deliver a highly available solution

  • Implementing designs to mitigate single points of failure

  • Implementing strategies to ensure the durability and availability of data (for example, backups)

  • Selecting an appropriate DR strategy to meet business requirements

  • Using AWS services that improve the reliability of legacy applications and applications not built for the cloud (for example, when application changes are not possible)

  • Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads