Exam Essentials

Understand how a large and geographically dispersed infrastructure improves service quality. The sheer scale and geographic redundancy of the physical compute and networking resources owned by AWS mean that the company is able to guarantee a level of reliability and availability that would be hard to reproduce in any other environment.

Understand how metered, pay-per-use pricing makes for flexible compute options. Access to cloud infrastructure—sometimes for pennies per hour—makes it possible to experiment, sandbox, and regularly reassess and update application stacks.

Understand that cloud services come on a wide range of forms. IaaS gives you near-full control over virtualized hardware resources, closely emulating the way you would administrate actual physical servers. PaaS products abstract the underlying infrastructure, providing a simplified interface for you to add your application code. SaaS products provide services over a public network directly...