Tips and tricks AWS Solutions Architect Associate #12

Big Data & Analytics Services

• EMR (Elastic MapReduce): Managed Hadoop/Spark for big data.

• Glue: ETL service (extract, transform, load).

  • DataBrew: No-code data cleaning/transformations.

  • Streaming ETL: Real-time processing.

  • Bookmarks: Avoid reprocessing, track processed data.

• QuickSight: BI (dashboards, analytics), integrates with Spectrum for querying data in S3.

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AWS Well-Architected 6 Pillars

1. Sustainability – efficient use of resources.

2. Cost Optimization – pay-per-use, right-sizing.

3. Security – least privilege, encryption, compliance.

4. Performance Efficiency – scalable, managed services.

5. Reliability – failover, recovery, consistency.

6. Operational Excellence – monitoring, automation, continuous improvement.

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Availability & Resilience

• General availability: 24/7, may include short maintenance windows (~2h).

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How quickly service must be restored.

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Maximum tolerable data loss.

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Disaster Recovery Strategies

• Backup & Restore: Cheapest, but slowest recovery.

• Pilot Light: Minimal critical infrastructure pre-deployed, manual scale-up if disaster.

• Warm Standby: Reduced but running version, quick scale-up.

• Multi-Site / Active-Active: Full redundancy, instant failover, highest cost.

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Region Choice Criteria

• Cost: Pricing differs by region.

• Availability: Services offered vary by region.

• Legality / Compliance: Data residency, regulations.

• Proximity: Lower latency if closer to users.

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⚡ In short:

• EMR, Glue, DataBrew, and QuickSight cover the AWS data/BI pipeline (from ETL to visualization).

• Architecting on AWS is guided by the 6 Well-Architected Pillars.

• Availability & resilience depend on chosen DR strategy (backup → multi-site).

• Region choice is a balance of cost, latency, and legal requirements.