MCCCD Program Description

Amazon Web Services Cloud Architecting

Course: CLD120

First Term: 2020 Summer

Lec + Lab 3.0 Credit(s) 4.0 Period(s) 4.0 Load
Subject Type: Occupational
Load Formula: T- Lab Load

Description: Fundamentals of building IT infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Focus on how to optimize use of the AWS Cloud by understanding AWS services and best practices for the AWS Cloud and how they fit into cloud-based solutions. Covers design patterns for architecting optimal IT solutions on AWS, as well as strategies and services implemented on AWS.

MCCCD Official Course Competencies
1. Describe the benefits of Amazon Web Services and the way cloud services transform IT systems. (I, II, III, V, VI, VII) 2. Integrate the principles when migrating or designing new applications for the cloud, including security, reliability, high-performance, and cost efficiency. (II, III, IV, VIII, IX) 3. Identify the design patterns and architectural options applied in a variety of use cases. (II, III, IV) 4. Configure systems for high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, and how to avoid single points of failure. (II, III, IV, V, VIII, IX, XI, XII) 5. Identify the benefits of Infrastructure as Code. (V, VI) 6. Create, manage, provision, and update related resources using AWS CloudFormation to support automation. (V) 7. Articulate the importance of making systems highly cohesive and loosely coupled to support the distributed nature of applications built for the cloud. (VI, VIII) 8. Compare structured query language (SQL) databases with NoSQL databases for storing and deploying web-accessible applications. (V, VII) 9. Evaluate the business impact of design decisions and how the AWS Well-Architected Framework improves cloud-based architectures. (IX, XI, XII) 10. Apply design principles and best practices of the Operational Excellence pillar. (IX) 11. Utilize the appropriate tools and services to provide security-focused content at every layer in the application. (IX, X) 12. Apply design principles and best practices of the Reliability pillar. (IX) 13. Select storage, compute, database, and networking resources to improve performance and evaluate metrics for applications. (IX, XI) 14. Demonstrate best practices to eliminate unneeded costs or suboptimal resources. (IX, X) 15. Troubleshoot common errors when deploying or modifying Amazon Web Services. (XI)
MCCCD Official Course Competencies must be coordinated with the content outline so that each major point in the outline serves one or more competencies. MCCCD faculty retains authority in determining the pedagogical approach, methodology, content sequencing, and assessment metrics for student work. Please see individual course syllabi for additional information, including specific course requirements.

MCCCD Official Course Outline
I. Introduction to Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) A. Cloud scenarios B. Infrastructure overview C. AWS Foundation Services II. Designing a cloud environment A. Region and Availability Zones B. Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and subnets C. On-premise components integration III. Designing for high availability A. Load balancing and fault tolerance B. High availability across regions C. Connections outside of Amazon VPC D. Forklifting and existing application IV. Designing for scalability A. Best practice B. Automatic scaling C. Scaling data stores D. AWS Lambda and event driven scaling V. Automating infrastructure A. Manual environment configuration B. Infrastructure as code C. Grouping resources in a template D. Resources not supported by AWS E. CloudFormation VI. Decoupling infrastructure A. Loose coupling and strategies B. Communicate easily and reliably among components C. Communicate with loose coupling and Amazon DynamoDB D. Amazon API Gateway E. Serverless architectures VII. Designing web-scale media A. Storing Web-Accessible Content with Amazon S3 B. Caching with Amazon CloudFront C. NoSQL databases management D. Storing relational data in Amazon RDS VIII. Well Architected Framework A. Pillars of the Well-Architected Framework B. Well-Architected design principles IX. Well-Architected Pillars A. Pillar 1: Operational Excellence 1. Principles 2. Drive Operational Excellence B. Pillar 2: Security 1. Principles 2. Common security exploits prevention 3. Securing data in the CloudFront C. Pillar 3: Reliability 1. Principles 2. Practices D. Pillar 4: Performance Efficiency 1. Principles 2. Infrastructure efficiency E. Pillar 5: Cost Optimization 1. Principles 2. Practices X. Dedicated instances and dedicated hosts A. Trusted Advisor B. Cost optimization with caching C. AWS cost calculation tools XI. Troubleshooting A. Troubleshooting steps B. AWS Support options XII. Design patterns and sample architectures A. High-availability design patterns B. Stream processing C. Sensor network data ingestion and processing D. Application backend E. Transcoding and serving video files

MCCCD Governing Board Approval Date: April 7, 2020

All information published is subject to change without notice. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information presented, but based on the dynamic nature of the curricular process, course and program information is subject to change in order to reflect the most current information available.