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A provider-deep tour of Amazon Web Services for solutions and cloud architects. Walks the full service landscape - compute, storage, databases, networking, identity, data and analytics - then layers on infrastructure-as-code, containers, operations, security and the Well-Architected Framework, and finishes with the architecture deep-dives and behavioral themes AWS architect loops grade against.
Architects are expected to know what each service is for and when to reach for it. Build a working map of the core families: compute (EC2, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Fargate, Batch), storage (S3, EBS, EFS, Glacier, Storage Gateway), databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Redshift), and the glue (SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions). This category is the spine of the path.
Most AWS design questions come down to the VPC. Anchor subnets, route tables, NAT, security groups vs NACLs, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Route 53, and CloudFront edge delivery before the design rounds.
Choosing the right data store is half of an architect's job. Work through relational vs key-value vs columnar trade-offs, then the analytics path (Kinesis, Glue, Athena, Redshift) and caching patterns that keep reads fast.
Architects don't click in the console. Build fluency in declarative provisioning (CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform) and the container stack (ECS, EKS, Fargate) that runs most modern AWS workloads.
A design isn't done until it can be operated. Cover CloudWatch, X-Ray, CodePipeline/CodeBuild, and the deployment-safety patterns (blue/green, canary) architects are expected to bake in.
The pillars architects are graded on: IAM least privilege, KMS, Organizations and Control Tower for governance, plus the six Well-Architected pillars (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, sustainability).
Bounded designs that exercise the conversations AWS architects lead - decoupling with queues, consistency across services, throttling, and payment-grade reliability.
Architect rounds screen for driving decisions across teams you don't manage and making pragmatic cost/resilience trade-offs. Have a story per theme with concrete business impact.
Original scenario-style practice exams written from the public exam guides - with a timed simulator and per-domain scoring.
Three role-targeted paths are live: Backend, SRE / DevOps, and ML Engineer. More are on the way - if you have a role you want covered, let us know.
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