MCCCD Program Description

Amazon Web Services Cloud Architect Associate

Course: CLD120

First Term: 2021 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 (AWS) and the way cloud services transform IT systems. (I-III, V-VII) 2. Integrate AWS well-architected principles when migrating or designing new applications for the cloud, including security, reliability, high-performance, and cost efficiency. (II-IV, VIII) 3. Identify the design patterns and architectural options applied in a variety of case studies. (II-IV) 4. Configure systems for high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, and to avoid single points of failure. (II-V, VIII, X, XI) 5. Identify the benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). (V, VI) 6. Create, manage, provision, and update related resources using AWS CloudFormation to support automation. (V) 7. Explain 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. Apply design principles and best practices of the operational excellence pillar. (VIII) 10. Apply design principles and best practices of the reliability pillar. (VIII) 11. Utilize the appropriate tools and services to provide security-focused content at every layer in the application. (VIII, IX) 12. Demonstrate best practices to eliminate unneeded costs or suboptimal resources. (VIII, IX) 13. Select storage, compute, database, and networking resources to improve performance and evaluate metrics for applications. (VIII, X) 14. Troubleshoot common errors when deploying or modifying AWS. (X) 15. Evaluate the business impact of network design decisions and how the AWS Well-Architected Framework improves cloud-based architectures. (X, 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. Regions and availability zones B. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon 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 (IaC) C. Grouping resources in a template D. Resources not supported by AWS E. AWS 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 Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) B. Caching with Amazon CloudFront C. NoSQL databases management D. Storing relational data in Amazon Relational Database Service Documentation (Amazon RDS) VIII. AWS Well-Architected Framework A. Five pillars 1. Operational excellence pillar a. Principles b. Drive operational excellence 2. Security pillar a. Principles b. Common security exploits prevention c. Securing data in the Amazon CloudFront 3. Reliability pillar a. Principles b. Practices 4. Performance efficiency pillar a. Principles b. Infrastructure efficiency 5. Cost optimization pillar a. Principles b. Practices B. Design principles IX. Dedicated instances and dedicated hosts A. AWS Trusted Advisor B. Cost optimization with caching C. AWS cost management and calculation tools X. Troubleshooting A. Troubleshooting steps B. AWS Support options XI. 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: February 23, 2021

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.