Congratulations on your purchase of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Practice Tests. This test will serve as a preparation tool for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Solutions Architect (CSA) – Associate exam as well as help you in the development of your career as an AWS Solutions Architect.The objective of this test is to prepare you for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam by explaining the terminology and technology that will be tested on the exam. The main focus of this test is to help you pass the exam. Because of this focus, there are times when not every aspect of a piece of AWS technology is covered and other times when particularly unusual edge cases or details are emphasized. These are an effort to prepare you for the exam, which at times is not always perfectly aligned with the practi-cality of a real-world cloud architect.That said, learning these odd details and edge cases will still come in handy in your career. The exam is largely use-case based, and often the answer bank has lots of “good” answers and one “best” answer. Additionally, these answers commonly have invalid or made-up terms. Learning the odd details about AWS will help you weed through these inaccuracies and throw out invalid answers

• Certification Pays

         AWS has become one of the most common requirements for job applicants. However, with many organizations moving to AWS for the first time or hiring their first AWS cloud engineers or solution architects, it’s not easy to figure out to whom it’s worth paying those large engi-neering salaries. A certification from AWS can often be the credential that helps your resume, application, and experience rise above competitors. This is particularly true when you are being interviewed and evaluated by management, where certification is an easy distinguisher.Additionally, certification makes you more competitive and employable in general. Research has shown that people who study technology get hired. In the competition for entry-level jobs, applicants with high school diplomas or college degrees who included IT coursework in their academic load fared consistently better in job interviews and were hired in significantly higher numbers

This practice test includes 1,000 practice test questions, which will help you get ready to pass the CSA Associate exam. The interactive online learning environment that accompanies the CSA Associate practice tests provides a large and varied test bank to help you prepare for the certification exam and increase your chances of passing the first time. There’s a tremen-dous value in taking practice questions as often as possible, even leading up to your actual test. Don’t worry if you start to recognize questions from earlier practice runs... that just means you’re learning the material and committing it to memory. The test bank also includes a practice exam. Take the practice exams just as if you were taking the actual exam (without any reference material). As a general rule, you should be consistently making 85% or better before taking the exam

• Exam Objectives

     The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam validates your technical expertise in two key areas:

■ Taking customer requirements and defining an appropriate solution at the architecture level using AWS design principles

■ Providing guidance on implementation based on best practices that go beyond initial design and cover troubleshooting, optimization, and cost considerations

        While the exam guide suggests a year of AWS experience, you’ll most benefi t from work-ing extensively with the AWS console and setting up new infrastructure, especially related to compute (EC2), storage (RDS, DynamoDB, and S3), and networking (VPCs)

     The actual exam is organized into five different domains, each focusing on a specific objective, with each domain broken up further into subobjectives:

Chapter 1, Design Resilient Architectures (Domain 1)Choose reliable and resilient stor-age; determine how to design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services; determine how to design a multi-tier architecture solution; determine how to design high availability and/or fault tolerant architectures.

Chapter 2, Define Performant Architectures (Domain 2)Choose performance storage and databases; apply caching to improve performance; design solutions for elasticity and scalability.

Chapter 3, Specify Secure Applications and Architectures (Domain 3)Determine how to secure application tiers; determine how to secure data; define the networking infrastructure for a single VPC application.

Chapter 4, Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (Domain 4)Determine how to design cost-optimized storage; determine how to design cost-optimized compute.

Chapter 5, Define Operationally Excellent Architectures (Domain 5)Choose design fea-tures in solutions that enable operational excellence