Exam Essentials

Know the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The five pillars are reliability, performance efficiency, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence. AWS describes these pillars at length in the AWS Well-Architected Framework white paper that you can find at https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf. You don’t need to read the entire white paper for the exam, but you must know the five pillars.

Understand how AWS resources work together and separately to form the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. Architecting AWS infrastructure from the ground up is beyond the scope of this book and the exam. But you should be able to look at an AWS Solution Architect’s diagram and explain some of the ways the resources achieve reliability, cost optimization, performance efficiency, security, or operational excellence.

Be able to evaluate trade-offs between different design decisions. If given...