AWS SAA: 10 Core Concepts (Explained for Infrastructure Engineers)

Short summary

Comprehensive AWS SAA exam guide covering IAM group-based policies, EC2 storage strategies (EBS/EFS/Instance Store), load balancer routing patterns, Auto Scaling policies, and RDS replication models. Includes concrete exam traps and decision frameworks (e.g., when to use Spot vs On-Demand, ALB vs NLB). Written for infrastructure engineers preparing for certification with practical scenarios rather than theory.

• •IAM: assign policies through groups not individual users; EC2 instances use IAM roles for service access, never embedded credentials
• •Load balancing: ALB for Layer 7 routing (URLs, hostnames), NLB for extreme performance with static IPs; Auto Scaling via Target Tracking, Step, Scheduled, or Predictive policies
• •Storage: EBS for persistent single-instance, EFS for multi-instance shared access, Instance Store for temporary buffers; RDS Read Replicas scale reads while Multi-AZ provides failover

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