Solution Architect handbook

One of a the best book about Solution Architecture AWS oriented.

AWS Solution Architect Handbook 

1. Core Concepts

• Global Infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones (AZs), Edge Locations.

• Shared Responsibility Model:

  • AWS → Security of the cloud (infra, services).

  • Customer → Security in the cloud (data, IAM, configs).

• Well-Architected Framework → 6 Pillars:

  1. Operational Excellence

  2. Security

  3. Reliability

  4. Performance Efficiency

  5. Cost Optimization

  6. Sustainability

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2. Compute

• EC2: On-demand, reserved, spot, savings plans.

• Scaling: ASG (Auto Scaling Group).

• Containers: ECS (EC2/Fargate), EKS (K8s).

• Serverless: Lambda (event-driven).

• Elastic Beanstalk: PaaS deployment.

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3. Networking & Connectivity

• VPC: Subnets (public/private), Route Tables, IGW, NACL, SG.

• Endpoints:

  • Gateway (S3/DynamoDB, free).

  • Interface (ENI-based, paid).

• Connectivity: VPN (site-to-site, client), Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, VPC Peering.

• Load Balancers: ALB (L7), NLB (L4), GWLB.

• Global: CloudFront (CDN), Route 53 (DNS), Global Accelerator.

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4. Storage

• S3: Object storage, storage classes, versioning, replication.

• EBS: Block storage for EC2.

• EFS: Shared POSIX file system.

• FSx: Windows, NetApp, Lustre.

• Snow Family: Snowcone, Snowball, Snowmobile.

• Storage Gateway / DataSync: Hybrid storage.

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5. Databases

• RDS: Managed relational DB (Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server).

• DynamoDB: Serverless NoSQL, DAX for caching.

• DocumentDB: Mongo-compatible.

• Neptune: Graph DB.

• Keyspaces: Cassandra-compatible.

• Redshift: Data warehouse, Enhanced VPC Routing.

• Athena: SQL queries on S3.

• ElastiCache: Redis / Memcached.

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6. Analytics & Big Data

• EMR: Hadoop/Spark.

• Glue: ETL, DataBrew (no-code), Catalog.

• Kinesis: Streams, Firehose, Analytics.

• MSK: Managed Kafka.

• QuickSight: BI dashboards.

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7. Security & Identity

• IAM: Roles, Policies, Federation.

• Organizations: Multi-account governance.

• Control Tower: Landing zone setup.

• GuardDuty: Threat detection.

• Macie: Sensitive data discovery.

• Inspector: Vulnerability scanning.

• KMS: Key management.

• Secrets Manager / Parameter Store: Secret storage.

• WAF / Shield: Protection against attacks.

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8. Monitoring & Ops

• CloudWatch: Metrics, Logs, Alarms.

• CloudTrail: API call auditing.

• Config: Compliance tracking.

• Systems Manager (SSM): Automation, Session Manager.

• Trusted Advisor: Best practices recommendations.

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9. Migration & DR

• DMS: Database migration service.

• SMS / Application Migration Service: Lift & shift apps.

• Backup: Centralized backups.

• Disaster Recovery Models: Backup/restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby, Multi-site.

• Region Selection Criteria: Cost, latency, compliance.

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10. AI / ML & Extra Services

• Lex: Chatbots.

• Polly: Text-to-speech.

• Transcribe / Translate: Speech-to-text / Text translation.

• Rekognition: Image/video analysis.

• Kendra: Search in unstructured data.

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⚡ In short:
The handbook covers all major AWS services, the Well-Architected Framework pillars, and design strategies (scalability, HA, DR, cost optimization). It’s essentially the cheat sheet for architecting solutions on AWS.