Cracking AWS SysOps Associate Exam In 3 Months

The SysOps Associate Exam Blue Print

• Although there are no SysOps exam prerequisites, it is wise to take this exam after passing at least any one of the other AWS associate exams.

                              AWS SysOps Associate Exam Blueprint

• While AWS Architect Associate exam tests you on how well you know AWS resources, their features, and your ability to design highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems, the AWS SysOps Associate exam extends on it further, and tests you on the deployment, management, and operations on these AWS systems.

Preparing for the Exam

1. Learning the basics first (15 to 30 Days)

Books / Online course(s)

• Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches by David Clinton
• Amazon Web Services Essential Training @ LinkedLearning.Com (Lynda.Com)

2. Preparing for the AWS Architect Associate Exam (1 to 3 months depending on your past knowledge and experience)

Books/Online course(s)

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide
• Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 2017 @ ACloud.Guru
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (New!) @ LinuxAcademy.Com

Whitepapers/FAQs (As recommended by AWS)

• Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices
• AWS Security Best Practices 
• Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes
• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Development and Test on AWS
• Backup and Recovery Approaches Using AWS
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Connectivity Options
• How AWS Pricing Works
• Amazon EC2 - FAQs
• Amazon S3 - FAQs
• Amazon VPC - FAQs
• Amazon Route 53 - FAQs
• Amazon RDS - FAQs
• Amazon SQS - FAQs

Mock Assessments

There are many websites offering mock exams; even AWS offers practice exams for a fee. However, I personally find the LinuxAcademy offered mock exams superior and value for money.

3. Preparing for the AWS SysOps Associate Exam (1 to 2 months depending on your past knowledge and experience)

Books/Online course(s)

• Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate 2017 @ ACloud.Guru
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate Level @ LinuxAcademy.Com
• Sharif Nijim's AWS courses @ LinkedLearning.Com (Lynda.Com)

Whitepapers/FAQs (As recommended by AWS)

• Same as mentioned in #2 above.

Mock Assessments

There are many websites offering mock exams; even AWS offers practice exams for a fee. However, I personally find the LinuxAcademy offered mock exams superior and value for money.

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• Check AWS recommended methods of preparation here.
• To retain what you learn - "rinse, repeat."
• To learn "HOW TO LEARN", check this!

An AWS Migration Story - Hess Corporation

It is March 2013 and Hess Corporation, an energy exploration and production (E&P) company, decides to divest its retail and energy marketing business.

Now, Hess IT has to quickly separate the necessary business systems and data for this new entity. To quickly prepare and deliver an operational infrastructure for the potential buyer to use, Hess IT partners with AWS (and with Nimbo, an AWS AdvancedConsulting Partner) in July 2013. They are to make the new IT environmentoperational by January 2014.

"We believe that AWS was instrumental in helping to materialize the concept of packaging the entire (new) organization up and handing it over to the buyer." - COO of Nimbo

For the quick and effective cloud migration, Hess IT prepares an inventory of all infrastructure/applications and their specifications that were to move out to the cloud.

For IaaS - Hess IT migrates approx. 300 Servers to AWS; stores almost 500 TB of data on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS); uses storage volumes with provisioned IOPS for low-latency performance/to configure RAID arrays; hosts in multiple Availability Zones for disaster recovery (DR); stores backups in Amazon S3 and uses Amazon Glacier for archiving; uses Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring cloud resources, and applications; uses virtual devices from AWS Marketplace to replace On-premises' NetScaler (load balancing) and F5 (application firewall) devices.

For the applications - almost half of the applications that are to move out to the cloud are custom-built (remaining half off-the-shelf type), and about 70 percent of them are web-based. Harnessing the power of the established DevOps practices at Nimbo, Hess IT experiments with creating applications quickly, and failing fast in order to build the new IT environment.

Further, Hess IT uses infrastructure as code to clone servers in the production environment very quickly. They also install Operating Systems, Database Management Systems, and required Virtual Appliances without usual procurement and licensing issues.

“This project was about speed to market and we completed the migration to the AWS Cloud in six months; it would have taken at least twice as long using physical servers.” - Lead Architect, Hess IT

Come January 2014, and the new production environment is ready which gets transitioned to the buyer in February 2014.

“The transition took place in a 30-minute meeting.” - Lead Architect, Hess IT

Eventually, Hess IT parts with the AWS based new IT environment that they have been working on for past 6 months, however, this endeavor leaves them with "raised visibility for cloud services".

“The impetus for this particular effort was provided by the divestiture —In the future, we will look to build cloud solutions as alternatives to our on-premises capabilities.” -Lead Architect, Hess IT

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------NB: Dates in the story are put in BOLD to underscore the speed with which the entire new environment could have been setup.

Further Reading:

1. AWS Case Study - Hess Corporation
2. Whitepaper on Data-Center migration, Nimbo
3. Nimbo Case Study - Hess Corporation

Connection Draining on Elastic Load Balancer

Connection draining is a feature that is enabled by default on Load Balancer created from the AWS console (to be enabled when using CLI or API).

Connection draining ensure that the undergoing activity through open network connections via the load balancer to the EC2 instance. Connection draining prevents from a bad user experience due to incomplete activity when the undelying instance is moved away.

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/elb-connection-draining-remove-instances-from-service-with-care/
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/config-conn-drain.html