AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional

The below prerequisites demonstrate the skills and knowledge that will help you achieve the AWS Solutions Architect – Professional certification.

• Required: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification.
• Two or more years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS.
• Ability to evaluate cloud application requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementation, deployment and provisioning applications on AWS.
• Ability to provide best practices guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications, projects or the enterprise.

AWS Knowledge and Experience

• AWS core services, including Compute and Networking, Storage and CDN, Database, Application Services, Deployment and Management.
• Security features that AWS provides and best practices.
• Ability to design and implement for elasticity and scalability.
• Network technologies as they relate to AWS networking, including DNS and load balancing, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Direct Connect.
• Storage and archival options.
• State management.
• Database and replication methodologies.
• Self-healing techniques and fault-tolerant services.
• Disaster recovery and failover strategies.
• Application migration plans to AWS.
• Network connectivity options.
• Deployment and management.

General IT Knowledge 

• Large-scale distributed systems architecture.
• Eventual consistency.
• Relational and non-relational databases.
• Multitier architectures: load balancers, caching, web servers, application servers, networking and databases. 
• Loose coupling and stateless systems. 
• Content delivery networks. 
• System performance tuning. 
• Networking concepts, including routing tables, access control lists, firewalls, NAT, HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP and OSI model. 
• RESTful Web Services, XML, JSON. 
• One or more software development models.
• Information and application security concepts, including public key encryption, remote access, access credentials and certificate-based authentication. 

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam