Lesson 1
AWS Cloud Architect
Nanodegree Program
The AWS Cloud Architect program focuses on designing highly available, reliable, and resilient systems and networks using AWS infrastructure. It covers availability zones, regions, building for resiliency, business objectives, security, monitoring, reacting, and recovering. Learners will also understand the differences between traditional data centers and cloud infrastructure and how to design, provision, and monitor infrastructure using open-source tools. Additionally, the program covers cost and monitoring, high performance, servers and security groups, storage and databases, and securing access to cloud services and infrastructure. Throughout the program, learners will practice designing for performance and scalability, recovering from failure, and securing cloud infrastructure.
The AWS Cloud Architect program focuses on designing highly available, reliable, and resilient systems and networks using AWS infrastructure. It covers availability zones, regions, building for resiliency, business objectives, security, monitoring, reacting, and recovering. Learners will also understand the differences between traditional data centers and cloud infrastructure and how to design, provision, and monitor infrastructure using open-source tools. Additionally, the program covers cost and monitoring, high performance, servers and security groups, storage and databases, and securing access to cloud services and infrastructure. Throughout the program, learners will practice designing for performance and scalability, recovering from failure, and securing cloud infrastructure.
Advanced
2 months
Real-world Projects
Completion Certificate
Last Updated March 3, 2024
AWS availability zones • Cloud security in AWS • Terraform • Cloud performance management
Application architecture • Basic web development • Object-oriented programming basics
Courses In This Program
Course 1 • 2 hours
Welcome to the AWS Cloud Architect Nanodegree program
Lesson 1
AWS Cloud Architect program introduction
Lesson 2
Career interview with your instructors
Lesson 3
Getting Help
You are starting a challenging but rewarding journey! Take 5 minutes to read how to get help with projects and content.
Course 2 • 3 weeks
Design for Availability, Reliability, and Resiliency
In this course, you will learn to use AWS to create highly available and resilient systems and networks.
Lesson 1
Introduction to Availability, Reliability, and Resiliency
In this lesson, you will review the course prerequisites and history of the high level concepts. You will learn what makes these topics important and you'll get a glimpse at the course project.
Lesson 2
AZs and Regions
Overview of AWS Regions and Availability Zones and how they are used to enable high availability and geographic redundancy.
Lesson 3
Building For Resiliency
In this lesson you will learn how to make individual AWS services resilient. You'll look at native and non-native services and learn about the difference between them with regard to high availability
Lesson 4
Business Objectives
A look at how resilience and availability are measure by your business and how these engineering concepts integrate with the day-to-day business world.
Lesson 5
Monitor, React, and Recover
Now that you've seen how to build highly available systems, you'll take a look at how to make sure that these systems are up and running and what to do when problems do occur.
Lesson 6 • Project
Project: Recoverability In AWS
Course 3 • 3 weeks
Design for Performance and Scalability
In this course, you will use AWS tools to identify and implement best practices for cost and identify and understand the elements required to design and architect scalable infrastructure. You will be able to modify traditional infrastructure for performance and identify architectures and workloads where serverless infrastructure should be considered to meet cost and performance goals. Finally, you will be able to provision and destroy infrastructure from the command line using the AWS CLI and Terraform.
Lesson 1
Introduction to Design for Cost, Performance, & Scalability
Welcome to the course! In this lesson, we'll discuss the importance of performance efficiency, look at the history of performance in the cloud and get you set up for the rest of the course.
Lesson 2
Cost and Monitoring
Managing cloud spend is quoted as one of the major challenges facing organizations today. This lesson will help you understand the challenges of costs in the cloud and give you some tools to help you manage those costs.
Lesson 3
Cloud Performance and Optimization
Performance and cloud resources are closely related to costs and resource allocation. In this lesson, we will explore ways to utilize AWS services to optimize performance.
Lesson 4
Serverless Computing
Serverless computing is an architecture model where a cloud provider offers scalable, flexible, and low-cost backend services as needed.
Lesson 5
Infrastructure as Code
Defining your infrastructure in code reduces error and effort by providing a visual representation of your cloud services in code that can be run to create, modify, and destroy infrastructure
Lesson 6 • Project
Design, Provision and Monitor AWS Infrastructure at Scale
In this project, you will plan, design, provision, and monitor infrastructure in AWS using industry-standard and open source tools.
Course 4 • 1 week
Design for Security
In this course, you will explore best practices and strategies around securing access to cloud services and infrastructure. You will also use tools and methods available with AWS to ensure that data stored in the cloud is protected. Finally, you will investigate security practices around monitoring and defending cloud-based applications and environments.
Lesson 1
Introduction to Designing for Security
The who, what, when, and why of Designing for Security in the cloud.
Lesson 2
Securing Access to Cloud Services
After this lesson, you will be able to secure access for both AWS users and applications, apply security best practices such as identity federation, and fine tune least privilege access permissions.
Lesson 3
Securing Access to Cloud Infrastructure
After this lesson, you will be able to access cloud resources securely, protect against data exfiltration, ensure compliance, and configure VPC endpoints to keep traffic within your VPC.
Lesson 4
Protecting Data Stored in the Cloud
Our goal is to minimize the risk of a malicious actor accessing our networks and servers, invoke the AWS API, and, ultimately, perform destructive or unauthorized actions in our environments.
Lesson 5
Defensive Security in the Cloud
You will identify vulnerable misconfigurations, guard against malicious activity, and design a deployment pipeline that ensures that security practices are implemented early on.
Lesson 6 • Project
Project: Secure the Recipe Vault Web Application
In this project, you'll put everything you learned in the course to secure a web application.
Taught By The Best
Leslie Bell
Disaster Recovery Specialist at Aon
Leslie Bell is a Senior Solutions Architect specializing in IT Governance and Disaster Recovery. She has worked in technology across a number of industries, from scientific research, chemical analysis, transportation, to insurance to cloud-based infrastructure.
Mehdi Razvi
Senior Cloud Architect at NuEra Automotive Solutions
Mehdi is a senior cloud architect and consultant based out of the Chicago area. He loves helping companies large and small build, deploy, and run their applications in the cloud. Most recently, he has worked with companies such as 2ndWatch and GuidePoint Security.
Tom Verbiscer
Director of Engineering at Current Media
Tom is a coach and builder specializing in creating, running, and advancing highly scalable, reliable, and flexible platforms. He is AWS Certified at the professional tier as both an AWS Solutions Architect, and DevOps Engineer.
Ratings & Reviews
Average Rating: 4.6 Stars
174 Reviews
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