My AWS Certified Security Specialty Exam Experience – Tips and Important Notes
My AWS Certified Security Specialty Exam Experience - Tips and Important Notes The AWS Certified Security - Specialty is included in the top 10 Most Popular Cybersecurity Certifications based on Global Knowledge’s 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report. Beating some of the famous security certifications on the list (e.g. CEH, CompTia: Security+) only shows how influential AWS has been to the IT industry in the previous years. Not only Security Professionals can benefit from [...]
Amazon Aurora Machine Learning
Amazon Aurora Machine Learning Amazon Aurora Machine Learning is a proprietary technology of Amazon that enables a native SQL user to integrate Machine Learning-based predictions to an application without knowing or understanding any machine learning algorithms. Machine learning heavily relies on datasets for it to work. You can say that data is the oil that keeps the engine of machine learning running. There is a massive amount of data generated every day. To give [...]
NEW EXAM VERSION – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 vs SOA-CO1
NEW EXAM VERSION - AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 vs SOA-CO1 AWS recently announced a new update on the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam. This certification exam is designed for individuals who have at least a year of hands-on experience with networking, management, deployment, and security on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. The sample exam questions can be found in this link. If you are interested in taking the new version of the AWS Certified [...]
Logging Using awslogs Log Driver in Amazon ECS
Logging Using awslogs Log Driver in Amazon ECS Monitoring and logging can be as important as developing and deploying applications. Imagine managing an enterprise-level distributed application that runs on hundreds of containers. You must place your containers cleverly on instances to achieve a certain level of resilience and performance. On top of that, you would want to have visibility into CPU and memory usage so you’ll have an idea which task/tasks are resource-hungry at [...]
AWS Savings Plan
AWS Savings Plan Savings Plan is a flexible pricing model that helps you save up cost on Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda usage. You can purchase Savings Plans from any account, payer or linked. By default, the benefit provided by Savings Plans is applicable to usage across all accounts within an AWS Organization/consolidated billing family. You can also choose to restrict the benefit of Savings Plans to only the account that purchased [...]
NEWS: AWS re:Invent 2020 will be Hosted Online and Registration is FREE!
NEWS: AWS re:Invent 2020 will be Hosted Online and Registration is FREE! AWS re:Invent is a conference organized by Amazon Web Services for the cloud computing community. Since 2012, the conference has always been held in Las Vegas, but this time it’s going to be different. This 3-week conference will now be hosted online, and take note that this event is FREE for everyone. To join AWS re:Invent 2020 on November 30 - December [...]
AWS Glue
AWS Glue A fully managed service to extract, transform, and load (ETL) your data for analytics. Discover and search across different AWS data sets without moving your data. AWS Glue consists of: Central metadata repository ETL engine Flexible scheduler Use Cases Run queries against an Amazon S3 data lake You can use AWS Glue to make your data available for analytics without moving your data. Analyze the log data in your data warehouse Create [...]
AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty Exam Study Path
AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty Exam Study Guide The AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty exam is intended for people who have experience in designing, building, securing, and maintaining analytics solutions on AWS. The exam will test your technical skills on how different AWS analytics services integrate with each other. You also need to know how they fit in the data lifecycle of collection, storage, processing, and visualization. This specialty certification exam is on par [...]
Managing Amazon GuardDuty Security Findings Across Multiple Accounts
Managing Amazon GuardDuty Security Findings Across Multiple Accounts In our previous article, we discussed how GuardDuty can help organizations monitor their workloads and AWS accounts from malicious activities and how to monitor findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events. Imagine that your organization has multiple AWS accounts for different workloads, teams, and projects. With every account, you need to monitor GuardDuty findings individually. It will be quite difficult for your security team to monitor these findings [...]
Monitoring GuardDuty Findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events
Monitoring GuardDuty Findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events Large scale cyber attacks are now becoming normal in this age of interconnectivity. As we rely more and more on cloud technologies, companies are looking to tap into digital innovations to improve their businesses. Cyber attacks are costing companies millions of dollars of downtime not to mention the possibility of lawsuits whenever an attack occurs. It is imperative that security teams have the means to prevent, detect, [...]
Aurora Serverless Tutorial Part 2
Aurora Serverless Tutorial - Part 2 In the first part of this tutorial, we gave a walkthrough on Aurora Serverless and its use case. You can read the article here. For this tutorial, we will do some hands-on training and create an Aurora Serverless database. Creating an Aurora Serverless Database: 1. Open the AWS console and go to RDS. Click the button “Create database”. 2. Choose Amazon Aurora. You can either choose MySQL or [...]
Aurora Serverless Tutorial – Part 1
Aurora Serverless Tutorial - Part 1 What is Aurora Serverless? Before we get into it, let us briefly define Aurora and serverless first. Aurora is a fully managed, closed source relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. According to Amazon, it is five times faster than the standard MySQL and three times faster than PostgreSQL. It uses a distributed architecture that provides fault tolerance and high availability. Serverless is a technique in [...]
Google Cloud Source Repositories
Google Cloud Source Repositories A fully managed git repository where you can securely manage your code. Features You will be able to extend your git workflow with Cloud Source Repositories. Set up a repository as a Git remote. Push, pull, clone, log, and perform other Git operations as required by your workflow. You can create multiple repositories for a single Google Cloud project. This allows you to organize the code associated with your cloud [...]
Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Google Cloud Deployment Manager Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service that automates the creation and management of Google Cloud resources. Features You can write template and configuration files and utilize them to create deployments that have a variety of Google Cloud services working together, such as: Cloud Storage Compute Engine Cloud SQL A configuration defines the structure of your deployment. You must specify a configuration on a YAML file to create [...]
Google Cloud Billing
Google Cloud Billing You can configure billing on Google Cloud in a variety of ways to meet different needs. To use Google Cloud services, you must have a valid Cloud Billing account, Features If you have a project that is not linked to a Cloud Billing account, you will have limited use of products and services available for your project. Cloud Billing Account & Payments Profile Cloud Billing Account It is set up in [...]
Google Cloud Console
Google Cloud Console Google Cloud Console is a web admin interface to manage your Google cloud infrastructure. Features You can create projects on Google Cloud Console. With Cloud Console, you can quickly find and check the health of all your cloud resources in one place, including virtual machines, network settings, and data storage. Logging Manage and audit user access to project resources. Track down production issues quickly by viewing logs. You can explore the [...]
Google Cloud Key Management Service
Google Cloud Key Management The Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) is a cloud-hosted key management service that enables you to manage encryption keys on the Google Cloud Platform. Features Lets you manage your symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic keys the same way you manage them in an on-premises environment. You can decide to use the keys generated by Cloud KMS with other Google Cloud services. These keys are known as customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). [...]
Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) Create and manage permissions for your Google Cloud resources with Identity Access Management (IAM). Provides a unified view into your organization’s security policy with built-in auditing to ease compliance purposes. Features Lets you authorize who can take specific actions on resources to give you full control and visibility on your Google Cloud services centrally. Permissions are represented in the form of service.resource.verb Can map job functions into groups [...]
Google Virtual Private Cloud
Google Virtual Private Cloud You can create and manage your own virtual topology network where you can launch your Google Cloud resources using Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Google VPC is the networking layer of Google Cloud resources. A VPC spans all the zones in the region. After creating a VPC, you can add one or more subnets in each zone. Key Concepts A virtual private cloud (VPC) allows you to specify an IP [...]
Google Cloud Load Balancing
Google Cloud Load Balancing Google Cloud Load Balancing allows you to put your resources behind a single IP address. Features Can be set to be available externally or internally with your Virtual Private Network (VPC). HTTP(S) load balancing can balance HTTP and HTTPS traffic across multiple backend instances, across multiple regions. Enable Cloud CDN for HTTP(S) load balancing to optimize application delivery for your users with a single checkbox. You can define the autoscaling [...]
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub Cloud Pub/Sub is a fully-managed real-time messaging service for event driven systems that allows you to send and receive messages between independent applications. Features Capable of global message routing to simplify multi-region systems. Synchronous, cross-zone message replication and per-message receipt tracking ensure at-least-once delivery at any scale. Pub/Sub delivers each message at least once, so the Pub/Sub service might redeliver messages. You can declare independent quota and billing for publishers and [...]
Google Cloud SQL
Google Cloud SQL A fully managed relational database service. Cloud SQL is available for: MySQL PostgreSQL SQL Server Features Scale instantly with a single API call as your data grows. Automated and on-demand backups are available. You can restore your database instance to its state at an earlier point in time by enabling binary logging. Data replication between multiple zones with automatic failover. You can perform an analytics job by using BigQuery to directly [...]
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Secured and managed Kubernetes services with auto-scaling and multi-cluster support Features Can be configured to automatically scale node pool and clusters across multiple node pools based on changing workload requirements. Auto-repair can be enabled to do health checks on node Choose clusters tailored to your requirements based on: Availability Version Stability Isolation Pod Traffic requirements Enable Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring via simple checkbox configurations. Kubernetes version can be enabled [...]
Google Compute Engine (GCE)
Google Compute Engine (GCE) Linux-based and Windows-based virtual machines Each instance you create belongs to a project A project can have one or more instances Configurations Generally, when you create an instance, you should specify the following. Zone Operating System Machine type General purpose (E2, N1, N2, N2D) - provides a good balance of price and performance Compute optimized (C2) - offers high-end vCPU performance for compute-intensive workloads Memory optimized (M2) – offers the [...]
Google Cloud Platform Overview
Google Cloud Platform Overview The Google Cloud Platform is the infrastructure that powers the Google products you are familiar with including Gmail, Search, and Google Photos. In April of 2008, Google announced its first service called App Engine, a cloud compute service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Since then, Google has evolved and added more cloud services to its platform. GCP lets developers build and host applications and websites, [...]
Lifecycle Event Hooks in CodeDeploy
Lifecycle Event Hooks in CodeDeploy In biology, life cycle refers to the series of stages or events that occur during an organism’s lifetime. Lifecycle also applies when automating software deployment on AWS CodeDeploy. Lifecycle event hooks refer to the series of events that describes how a deployment is accomplished. It allows you to control or perform actions on different stages of your deployment. In the traditional way, whenever you release a new feature for [...]
Amazon EBS Multi-Attach
Amazon EBS Multi-Attach Amazon Elastic Block Store or EBS is a durable block-based storage device that can be attached to your EC2 instance. AWS released a feature called Multi-Attach, which allows EC2 instances to share a single EBS volume for up to 16 instances and provide higher availability of your applications for Linux workloads. Each instance to which the volume is attached has full read and write permissions to the volume. The following are [...]
ECS Network Modes Comparison
ECS Network Modes Comparison Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) allows you to run Docker-based containers on the cloud. Amazon ECS has two launch types for operation: EC2 and Fargate. The EC2 launch type provides EC2 instances as hosts for your Docker containers. For the Fargate launch type, AWS manages the underlying hosts so you can focus on managing your containers instead. The details and configuration on how you want to run your containers are [...]
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner vs Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Exam
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner vs Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Exam One way to boost your career in the cloud computing space is through certifications. These exams will help validate your current understanding and knowledge in the cloud. Cloud service providers offer different learning paths such as Cloud Architect, Cloud Developer, and Cloud Administrator. Both AWS and Microsoft have introductory certifications that will test your understanding of the basics. AWS has what they call the AWS [...]
Amazon SES
Amazon SES A cost-effective and scalable email service that enables you to send mail from within any application. A regional service. Amazon SES is for applications that need to send communications via email. Amazon SES supports custom email header fields, and many MIME types. Amazon SNS is for messaging-oriented applications, with multiple subscribers requesting and receiving push notifications of messages via different available transport protocols, such as HTTP, Amazon SQS, and email. SNS does [...]
Google Cloud Certifications Path
Google Cloud Certifications Path In the previous article, we talked about the most in-demand Azure Certifications in the market today. In this article, we'll discuss the certifications offered by Google Cloud, which is currently the third most popular cloud service provider in the world. It is important to note there are no prerequisites in taking any GCP certification exam. Also, the official passing score on associate and professional level certification exams is not published [...]
Azure Certifications Path
Azure Certifications Path In the previous article, we have discussed the different AWS Certifications path. In this article, we will give you an overview of the top and most in-demand Azure certifications today. Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Purpose The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification exam is intended for individuals who want to have a foundational knowledge when venturing into the cloud. Although the AZ-900 test is the easiest to acquire among all the Azure certification [...]
AWS Certifications Path
AWS Certifications Path Before going through the AWS certifications path below, it is important to note that AWS has scrapped the prerequisite for Professional-level exams. Previously, you can only take the Professional-level exams (Solutions Architect Professional and DevOps Engineer Professional) after passing their Associate-level counterparts. Now, you can take any AWS exam without the need to pass any prior AWS exam, which is ideal for those who already have extensive working experience in the [...]
AWS Certified Database – Specialty Exam Study Path
AWS Certified Database - Specialty Exam Study Guide The global cloud adoption trend will continue to accelerate in the coming years and that will include the proliferation of deploying and managing purpose-built databases. Companies from all industries will look for talents that can manage the challenges of migrating their data and securing them in the cloud. The AWS Certified Database - Specialty (DBS-C01) exam is the latest addition to the AWS Specialty Certifications. This exam validates [...]
AWS, Azure, and GCP Certifications Path
AWS, Azure, and GCP Certifications Path In cloud computing and the IT industry in general, one way to prove that you know what you’re talking about is through certifications. If you are new to cloud, you might be wondering which AWS, Azure or Google Cloud certification exam is suitable for you. The first thing you need to do before you start is to write down your purpose in getting certifications. Is it for career [...]
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB)
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) Fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority. Used to track all application data changes, and maintain a complete and verifiable history of changes over time Amazon QLDB is serverless. No capacity provisioning required or setting read/write limits. QLDB transactions are ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) compliant. Amazon QLDB uses PartiQL as its query language. How [...]
10 Common Use Cases of Cloud Computing
10 Common Use Cases of Cloud Computing In the previous post, we gave you a few compelling reasons why you should learn cloud computing. In this section, we'll share with you the 10 most common use cases of cloud computing. Cloud computing is a powerful way of quickly building I.T infrastructures that can scale at any time. Large businesses and corporations have started moving their operations into the cloud as early as a decade [...]
Amazon DocumentDB
Amazon DocumentDB Fully managed document database service designed to be fast, scalable, and highly available. Data is stored in JSON-like documents. Compatible with MongoDb. Flexible schema and indexing. Commonly used for content management, user profiles, and real-time big data. How it Works An Amazon DocumentDB cluster decouples storage and compute. A cluster consists of Cluster volume and Instances Cluster volume refers to the storage layer that spans multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has [...]
AWS DataSync vs Storage Gateway
AWS DataSync vs Storage Gateway Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/datasync/faqs/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/datasync/latest/userguide/what-is-datasync.html https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/faqs/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/WhatIsStorageGateway.html
AWS CloudFormation Deletion Policy
AWS CloudFormation Deletion Policy Deleting a stack on CloudFormation also removes all the provisioned resources in it. In some cases, you want some resources to be retained even after deleting its stack. The good thing is that you can do this by defining its DeletionPolicy. This is pretty straightforward - you just need to define DeletionPolicy with Retain value and for the resources that support snapshot, (like RDS databases) you can set Snapshot as [...]
AWS CloudFormation StackSets and Nested Stacks
AWS CloudFormation StackSets and Nested Stacks AWS CloudFormation lets you model and provision resources for your environment using programming language, leveraging the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). You don’t need to manually create all of your resources one by one, CloudFormation will do this for you. All resources are defined on the AWS CloudFormation template. This means that this AWS environment can be reliably and easily reproduced since everything is declared on a [...]
Amazon Neptune
Amazon Neptune Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service used for building applications that work with highly connected datasets. Optimized for storing billions of relationships between pieces of information. Provide milliseconds latency when querying the graph. Neptune supports graph query languages like Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and W3C's SPARQL. How it works Common Use Cases: Social Networking Amazon Neptune can easily process user’s interactions like comments, follows, and likes in a social network [...]
Amazon S3 Access Points
Amazon S3 Access Points Managing access to your S3 buckets should be pretty easy using Amazon S3’s bucket policy. But as the number of your users and data grows, this easily becomes a complicated task. Provisioning access policies (who and where to access these objects) to these users could be a messy thing to do. AWS added this feature called Access Points on S3 to resolve this current problem. Access Points can simplify things [...]
Amazon S3 Event Notifications
Amazon S3 Event Notifications With Amazon S3 being virtually unlimited in size, it's quite a challenge to keep everything monitored especially when you are dealing with a large number of objects that scales up from time to time. With Amazon S3 Event Notifications, you’ll be able to immediately know when an object in your bucket was created, removed or restored. This feature allows you to get notifications every time an event happens on your [...]
AWS Service Catalog
AWS Service Catalog Allows you to create, manage, and distribute catalogs of approved products to end-users, who can then access the products they need in a personalized portal. Administrators can control which users have access to each product to enforce compliance with organizational business policies. Administrators can also set up adopted roles so that end users only require IAM access to AWS Service Catalog in order to deploy approved resources. This is a regional [...]
Configuring Notifications for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks
Configuring Notifications for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks In the previous post, we talked about Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks and how to configure it on your Auto Scaling group. You can view the article here. It’s better to read it first before proceeding with this section. In a nutshell, Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks allow you to put an instance in the “wait” state while the Auto Scaling group responds [...]
AWS Secrets Manager vs Systems Manager Parameter Store
AWS Secrets Manager vs Systems Manager Parameter Store Managing the security of your applications is an integral part of any organization especially for infrastructures deployed in the cloud. One aspect of application security is how the parameters such as environment variables, database passwords, API keys, product keys, etc. are stored and retrieved. As a best practice, secret information should not be stored in plain text and not be embedded inside your source code. It [...]
MID-YEAR SALE – 20% OFF on All Practice Test Courses PLUS Bigger Bundle Discounts!
MID-YEAR SALE - 20% OFF on All Practice Test Courses PLUS Bigger Bundle Discounts! We hope you are staying safe in these challenging times. For seven days only, Tutorials Dojo is running a MID-YEAR SALE where all of our AWS practice exams and eBooks are offered at heavily discounted prices. Promo period is from July 1 7PM (UTC+8) to July 8 7PM (UTC+8). How are the courses from the Tutorials Dojo portal different from those on other learning platforms like Udemy? Aside from [...]
Step Scaling vs Simple Scaling Policies in Amazon EC2
Step Scaling vs Simple Scaling Policies in Amazon EC2 Amazon’s EC2 Auto Scaling provides an effective way to ensure that your infrastructure is able to dynamically respond to changing user demands. For example, to accommodate a sudden traffic increase on your web application, you can set your Auto Scaling group to automatically add more instances. And when traffic is low, have it automatically reduce the number of instances. This is a cost-effective solution since [...]
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to scale-out or scale-in your EC2 instances automatically based on policies you configured in response to changing demand on your application. Auto Scaling Groups lets you set a minimum and maximum number of EC2 instances to automatically resize your cluster based on a defined schedule or instance metrics such as CPU utilization, network traffic, etc. This is an excellent way to cut [...]
AWS Global Accelerator vs Amazon CloudFront
AWS Global Accelerator vs Amazon CloudFront In this day and age, your site speed performance is an important factor when it comes to user experience. It is widely recommended for websites to have an average load time of 3 seconds as users tend to abandon the site if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. According to Amazon, just 100 milliseconds of extra load time cost them 1% in sales. Indeed, every [...]
AWS CodeCommit Repository
AWS CodeCommit Repository Amazon Web Services, with its ever-growing breadth of services, offers a fully-managed version control system where developers can privately store their application source code like Github or Bitbucket. CodeCommit can be used as a staging ground coupled with CodeDeploy and CodePipeline to seamlessly deploy code to Amazon EC2 instances. In this article, I will discuss how we can leverage Amazon SNS to send notifications whenever there are events in our repository. [...]
Our AWS Community is Expanding!
Our AWS Community is Expanding! Join our Slack and Facebook Groups for More Exam Tips Over the past couple of years, Tutorials Dojo has garnered over 100,000 student enrolments on Udemy and is proud to have a passing rate of at least 90% in all of our practice test courses based on user feedback. Every day, we'd receive more than a handful of success stories and valuable insights about the actual AWS exams, however, [...]
Increasing MTU for Your EC2 Instance
Increasing MTU for Your EC2 Instance What is MTU? MTU (maximum transmission unit) is the maximum size of one packet of data that can be transferred in a network. The default MTU size for Ethernet devices is 1500 bytes. This packet size contains the actual payload data as well as network overhead information needed for communication within the network. All AWS EC2 instances support the default MTU size. But many current instance sizes support [...]
Amazon Cognito User Pools vs Identity Pools
Amazon Cognito User Pools vs Identity Pools With the proliferation of smartphones in our connected world, more and more developers are quickly deploying their applications on the cloud. One of the first challenges in developing applications is allowing users to log in and authenticate on your applications. There are multiple stages involved in user verification and most of these are not visible from the end-user. AWS provides an easy solution for this situation. User [...]
Resolve Route 53 Private Hosted Zones from an On-premises Network
Resolve Route 53 Private Hosted Zones from an On-premises Network Route 53 Private Hosted Zones Amazon Route 53 DNS service supports Public Hosted Zones and Private Hosted Zones. Private Hosted Zones are useful when you want to use your private domain and have Route 53 respond to queries on that domain from resources within your VPC. For example, if you host a database on an EC2 instance on a private subnet, you can create [...]
Locking your Glacier Vault using the Amazon S3 Glacier API
Locking your Glacier Vault using the Amazon S3 Glacier API What is Amazon S3 Glacier Vault Lock A Glacier Vault can be described as a container for your archived objects in S3 Glacier. To begin using Amazon S3 Glacier, you need a vault. Creating and deleting vaults can be easily done in the AWS Management Console, but interacting with them requires you to use the APIs. For example, let’s say you want to upload [...]
Amazon S3 Bucket Policies for VPC Endpoints
Amazon S3 Bucket Policies for VPC Endpoints Amazon S3 and Amazon VPC Relationship Amazon S3 is a versatile object storage solution that boasts virtually unlimited storage capacity. You can expect that your files will be durably stored in S3 given that AWS provides an SLA for this service. When creating your S3 bucket, AWS provides you with a unique bucket URL that you can use to access your S3 bucket directly from the public [...]
Which AWS Certification Exam Is Right For Me? – Part 1
Which AWS Certification Exam Is Right For Me? - Part 1 Want to boost your career by becoming AWS certified but not sure which AWS certification exam to take? Tutorials Dojo is here to help you decide which one is suitable for you depending on your career goals. It’s important to know why you’re taking a certification exam. It can be because your job requires you to have one, or because you want to [...]
Customer Master Key (CMK) Policy Management in AWS KMS
Customer Master Key (CMK) Policy Management in AWS KMS What is a Customer Master Key (CMK)? In security, a master key is what you use to encrypt all other encryption keys in your system. Customer master keys are logical representations of a master key. They are the primary resources in AWS KMS. The CMK contains the key material used to encrypt and decrypt data. It also contains metadata such as the key ID, creation [...]
Working with Customer Master Keys (CMKs) using the AWS KMS API
Working with Customer Master Keys (CMKs) using the AWS KMS API What is AWS Key Management Service? AWS Key Management Service (or KMS for short) is the service you use to securely store your encryption keys in AWS. If you need data encryption on your AWS resources, such as EBS volumes or RDS databases, you can use AWS KMS to simplify the process for you. You start using the service by requesting the creation [...]
How to Book and Take Your AWS Certification Exam Online
How to Book and Take Your AWS Certification Exam Online Amazon now allows you to take your AWS Certification exams via online proctoring using its third-party test delivery provider: Pearson VUE. However, this option is not yet available with its other delivery provider (PSI). This means that you can now take all AWS Certification exams at home or office anytime! Before, you can only take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP) exam online. Today, [...]
Using the Secure String Parameter in Systems Manager Parameter Store
Using the Secure String Parameter in Systems Manager Parameter Store What is AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store helps you securely store and share key-value pairs across your AWS environment. It is one of the packages under AWS Systems Manager that helps you design a more robust and abstract infrastructure. With Parameter Store, you don’t have to hard code parameters nor save them in config files for application use. You [...]
SAA-C02 New AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2020 Exam Materials
SAA-C02 New AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2020 Exam Materials Are you planning to take your SAA-C02 (AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate) exam soon? In this article, we have compiled a list of helpful SAA-C02 exam prep materials that you can use to help you pass and even ace the exam. What’s this new SAA-C02 exam all about? The popular AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam SAA-C02 is intended for IT Professionals who perform [...]
BREAKING NEWS: You can now take ALL AWS Certification Exams At Home!
BREAKING NEWS: You can now take ALL AWS Certification Exams At Home! The AWS Certification team is now offering extended support to IT Professionals who need additional time to reschedule their AWS exams. This is in response to recent wave of temporary testing center closures around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic. Everyone can now take all AWS Certification exams at the comfort of their home or office with Pearson Vue via online [...]
SAA-C01 vs SAA-C02 Plus Developing Story: Expiry Date for SAA-C01 Extended to June 30, 2020
SAA-C01 vs SAA-C02 Plus Expiry Date for SAA-C01 Extended to June 30, 2020 I took the BETA exam of the AWS Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C02 last November and got the results 3 months after. Here’s my experience and I hope this may help you when you take the actual SAA-C02 exam soon. I would say that the new exam version SAA-C02 is at par with the SAA-C01 in terms of exam difficulty and format. It still [...]
The New Tutorials Dojo Practice Test Portal is now LIVE!
The New Tutorials Dojo Practice Test Portal is now LIVE! For the past two years of offering practice test courses on Udemy, we have gathered tons of feedback on how to improve our students’ learning experience. One of the most commonly requested feature is the ability to view the answers as you go through each question. A lot of you are able to learn better with this mode vs. having to wait to finish [...]
Released – AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Exams PLUS the Tutorials Dojo Practice Test Portal is Coming Soon!
Released - AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Exams PLUS the Tutorials Dojo Practice Test Portal is Coming Soon! We are happy to announce the release of our 6th AWS practice test course - the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Exams. It contains a total of 150 high-quality questions with complete explanations on correct and incorrect answers, visual images and diagrams, YouTube videos as needed, and also contains reference links to official AWS [...]
Top 5 AWS Study Tips for Busy Professionals
Top 5 AWS Study Tips for Busy Professionals In this fast-paced world, there are a lot of things in our TO DO list that needs to be accomplished in such a short period of time. We wake up, prepare for work, rush to the office, attend our daily stand-up scrum meeting, do our Jira tickets for the current sprint, attend a yet-another-meeting at work, take care of the kids, pump iron, de-stress, socialize, hit [...]
BLACK FRIDAY SALE! Get a Chance to WIN Any of our AWS Practice Tests for FREE
BLACK FRIDAY SALE! Get a Chance to WIN Any of our AWS Practice Tests for FREE It's the biggest SALE of the year once again! And if rock bottom prices are not enough then we have something even more enticing for you. For five days only, if you get any 1 of our AWS practice test courses on Udemy using coupon code: TUTORIALSDOJO-2019 then you'll have a chance to be one of 30 lucky winners [...]
Our Thoughts on the Beta Exam for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02)
Our Thoughts on the Beta Exam for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02) Mark your calendars! March 2020 is the expected standard exam availability of the new version for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02). I took the beta exam this November in order to take a peek on the new technologies and scenarios that Amazon will probably add to the new exam version which they will release early next year. My Preparation [...]
IP Blocking: Use AWS WAF or NACL?
IP Blocking: Use AWS WAF or NACL? What should you do if you identified a series of malicious attacks on your application coming from a specific IP address? Will you use AWS WAF to block that IP address or create a rule in your Network Access Control List to deny traffic from that IP? It is true that AWS WAF can filter web requests based on IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, or URI [...]
PRE-BLACK FRIDAY SALE – All of our AWS Practice Tests at Rock Bottom Prices!
PRE-BLACK FRIDAY SALE: All of our AWS Practice Tests at Rock Bottom Prices! As you may already be aware, the biggest sale of the year is coming in a few weeks. Udemy's annual Black Friday sale will showcase all of the courses listed on their site at heavily discounted prices, including our AWS practice test courses. If you can't wait until the Black Friday sale happening on the week of November 25 then we [...]
Released – AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams
Released - AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams It is with absolute delight that we announce the release of our newest course - the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams. And for the first time ever, this course was 50% co-authored by one of our valued team members, Adrian Formaran, who has recently passed both the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate exams. x x Get it through this link [...]
Longest Prefix Match: Understanding Advanced Concepts in VPC Peering
Longest Prefix Match: Understanding Advanced Concepts in VPC Peering VPC Peering Basics In AWS, a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs which allows you to route specific traffic between them using either private IPv4 addresses or IPv6 addresses. A VPC peering connection can be created between your own VPCs, or alternatively, a VPC in another AWS account. You can also create an inter-region VPC peering connection where [...]
How to invalidate API Gateway Cache
How to Invalidate API Gateway Cache To invalidate an existing cache entry of a request and retrieve the latest data from the integration endpoint, one must send the request together with the Cache-Control: max-age=0 header. If the recipient is authorized to communicate directly to the integration endpoint, then the integration endpoint will respond with the latest data for the request. This also replaces the existing cache entry with the new response. The IAM Policy [...]
Top 5 Free AWS Review Materials
Top 5 Free AWS Review Materials Currently, the cost of an AWS Certification exam starts from 150 USD for associate-level exams and up to a whopping 300 USD for professional-level and specialty-type exams. For some, this amount is negligible but to many IT professionals around the world, this amount is relatively expensive. The official AWS Practice Exam ranges from 20 to 40 USD, which you can only take once (unless you shell out another $20 or $40 again [...]
Instrumenting your Application with AWS X-Ray
Instrumenting your Application with AWS X-Ray Instrumenting your Node.js application The AWS X-Ray SDK for Node.js provides middleware that you can use to instrument incoming HTTP requests. You need to add the SDK to your application’s dependencies, usually via package.json. Initialize the SDK client and add it to your application prior to declaring routes. var AWSXRay = require('aws-xray-sdk'); AWSXRay.setDaemonAddress('host:port'); app.use(AWSXRay.express.openSegment('MyApp')); 3. Lastly, use the SDK exceptions after declaring routes. app.get('/', function [...]
Calculating the Required Read and Write Capacity Unit for your DynamoDB Table
Calculating the Required Read and Write Capacity Unit for your DynamoDB Table Read Capacity Unit On-Demand Mode When you choose on-demand mode, DynamoDB instantly accommodates your workloads as they ramp up or down to any previously reached traffic level. If a workload’s traffic level hits a new peak, DynamoDB adapts rapidly to accommodate the workload. The request rate is only limited by the DynamoDB throughput default table limits, but it can be raised upon [...]
AWS Lambda Integration with Amazon DynamoDB Streams
AWS Lambda Integration with Amazon DynamoDB Streams Amazon DynamoDB is integrated with AWS Lambda so that you can create triggers, which are pieces of code that automatically respond to events in DynamoDB Streams. With triggers, you can build applications that react to data modifications in DynamoDB tables. After you enable DynamoDB Streams on a table, associate the DynamoDB table with a Lambda function. AWS Lambda polls the stream and invokes your Lambda function synchronously [...]
Kinesis Scaling, Resharding and Parallel Processing
Kinesis Scaling, Resharding and Parallel Processing Kinesis Resharding enables you to increase or decrease the number of shards in a stream in order to adapt to changes in the rate of data flowing through the stream. Resharding is always pairwise. You cannot split into more than two shards in a single operation, and you cannot merge more than two shards in a single operation. The Kinesis Client Library (KCL) tracks the shards in the [...]
DynamoDB Scan vs Query
DynamoDB Scan vs Query Scan The Scan operation returns one or more items and item attributes by accessing every item in a table or a secondary index. The total number of scanned items has a maximum size limit of 1 MB. Scan operations proceed sequentially; however, for faster performance on a large table or secondary index, applications can request a parallel Scan operation. Scan uses eventually consistent reads when accessing the data in a [...]
ECS Task Placement Strategies
ECS Task Placement Strategies A task placement strategy is an algorithm for selecting instances for task placement or tasks for termination. When a task that uses the EC2 launch type is launched, Amazon ECS must determine where to place the task based on the requirements specified in the task definition, such as CPU and memory. Similarly, when you scale down the task count, Amazon ECS must determine which tasks to terminate. A task placement [...]