A sentence for every service featured in the Solution Architect Associate exam

I recently sat for my AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam (SAA-003) and I found that quite a few of the questions in the exam were about just recalling what the services AWS has are. Understanding the services in depth didn't seem the priority of the exam which was a bit disappointing considering the practice I did but nonetheless this is what Amazon expects from the people they certify.

Below are the services specific to the Solutions Architect exam with a single sentence description of what they are as a quick reference in a highly opinionated way:

Analytics

• Amazon Athena: Serverless - scalable interactive analytics service
• AWS Data Exchange: use shared data sets
• AWS Data Pipeline: Server - set triggers for starting data pipelines
• Amazon EMR: server non-interactive Athena
• AWS Glue: Serverless - triggers
• Amazon Kinesis: collect large amounts of data and stream to many consumers
• AWS Lake Formation: Tool to manage setting up an S3
• Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK): it's Kafka
• Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon Elasticsearch Service): it's Elasticsearch
• Amazon QuickSight: Serverless - a PowerBI clone
• Amazon Redshift: Serverless optional - Data warehousing tool

Application Integration

• Amazon AppFlow: Easy integrations
• AWS AppSync: Serverless - GraphQL/pub-sub for applications
• Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events): lesser SQS but needs SQS to work
• Amazon MQ: SQS but compatible with RabbitMQ
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS): Pub/Sub queue, can do notifications
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS): Polling Queue
• AWS Step Functions: UI based event tool

Cost Management

• AWS Budgets: cost control, budgeting and forcast
• AWS Cost and Usage Report: Current cost and usage with estimated charges
• AWS Cost Explorer: Visualise cost over time
• Savings Plans: the name of the savings plans for services (compute. EC2. SageMaker)

Compute

• AWS Batch: generalised tool for batching ML jobs
• Amazon EC2: neat little machine, backbone of AWS
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling - scheduled, predictive: target tracking, step, simple
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Amazon's answer to Heroku
• AWS Outposts: on premises AWS rack or server
• AWS Serverless Application Repository: deploy premade serverless app examples
• VMware Cloud on AWS: exactly what it says on the tin
• AWS Wavelength: aws 5G edge computing for IOT

Containers

• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR): Amazon's answer to Docker Hub (has scan on push)
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS): launch containers on AWS
• Amazon ECS Anywhere: run containers on local infra with AWS branding
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS): Kubernetes service
• Amazon EKS Anywhere: on local infra with AWS branding
• Amazon EKS Distro: AWS branded EKS

Database

• Amazon Aurora: Serverless optional - relational db
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility): Server - MongoDB hosting
• Amazon DynamoDB: Serverless optional - Amazon's answer to document databases, has transfer acceleration features (DAX is for CACHING not for writing)
• Amazon ElastiCache: Server - Redis/Memcache compatible hosting
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra): Cassandra hosting
• Amazon Neptune: graph DB
• Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB): ledger db
• Amazon RDS: all relational DB hosting
• Amazon Redshift: Data warehouse
• Amazon Timestream: time series database

Developer Tools

• AWS X-Ray: collect logs from production but more developer focused

Front-End Web and Mobile

• AWS Amplify: Amazon's answer to Firebase

• Amazon API Gateway: the ultimate middleware

• AWS Device Farm: automated device testing

• Amazon Pinpoint: Amazon's answer to Mailchimp

Machine Learning

• Amazon Comprehend: Natural Language Procesing
• Amazon Forecast: automatic data forecasting
• Amazon Fraud Detector:  fraud detection tool
• Amazon Kendra: custom search engine (Amazon's answer to Algolia)
• Amazon Lex: conversation AI chatbot
• Amazon Polly: text to speech
• Amazon Rekognition: Image/Video classification
• Amazon SageMaker: managed ML model training and deployment
• Amazon Textract: Optical Character Recognition
• Amazon Transcribe: speech to text
• Amazon Translate: see title

Management and Governance

• AWS Auto Scaling: configurations for auto scaling compute services
• AWS CloudFormation: Amazon's infra as code
• AWS CloudTrail: Amazon's answer to Kibana (Install cloudtrail on ec2 instance)
• Amazon CloudWatch: logs from everywhere
• AWS Command Line Interface: AWS CLI
• AWS Compute Optimizer:  metric to suggest improvements in your service (opt in)
• AWS Config: audit configuration of resources in AWS (not a config tool!)
• AWS Control Tower: multi-account AWS environment
• AWS License Manager: manage licences provided to resources in AWS
• Amazon Managed Grafana: Grafana hosting
• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus: prometheus hosting
• AWS Management Console: AWS UI
• AWS Organizations: subset of control tower, more general
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard: overall health of your AWS account (global)
• AWS Proton: Infra as templates (use CloudFormation instead)
• AWS Service Catalog: list of pre-made proton/CloudFormation/terraform templates
• AWS Systems Manager: tool to watch all AWS resources including hybrid
• AWS Trusted Advisor: gives general recommendations
• AWS Well-Architected Tool: a tool to plan architecture through a questionnaire

Media Services

• Amazon Elastic Transcoder: transcodes media
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams: kinesis for video stream, that’s pretty cool

Migration and Transfer

• AWS Application Discovery Service: install on premises, spies on usage, suggests AWS services to replace on premises equivalent
• AWS Application Migration Service (CloudEndure Migration)  MGN: Move on-premises to AWS
• AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS): connect/discover DB, migrate to Aurora
• AWS DataSync: sync files between locations to AWS
• AWS Migration Hub: status updates from AMS and DMS
• AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS): Deprecated service, use Application Migration Service
• AWS Snow Family: snow cone 8TB, snowball 80TB, snowmobile 100PB - used for moving large amounts of data into AWS by physically uploading it
• AWS Transfer Family: other methods for connecting to AWS

Networking and GetContents Delivery

• Amazon CloudFront: GetContents Delivery Service run by AWS, rules the web
• AWS Direct Connect: setting up a server in a peering center for AWS direct access
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Application (smart) and network (fast) - Note: can only assign static IP to Network LB
• AWS Global Accelerator: optimise paths to nearest regional endpoint
• AWS PrivateLink: interface to VPC without public exposure
• Amazon Route 53: DNS service - Note: A name is alias, CNAME is redirect
• AWS Transit Gateway: on premises connection over VPN, AWS accounts or on-prem networks
• Amazon VPC: Virtual Private Cloud - keep your AWS services isolated
• AWS VPN: Amazon's VPN offering

Security, Identity, and Compliance

• AWS Artifact - pre-generated report: compliance/security
• AWS Audit Manager: automated audit of usage risk/compliance
• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM): SSL TLS certs
• AWS CloudHSM: single tenant hardware security
• Amazon Cognito: an auth service - use an alternative auth service if possible
• Amazon Detective -(not ML) analyse security issues
• AWS Directory Service: MS Active Directory integration
• AWS Firewall Manager: manage firewalls across everything
• Amazon GuardDuty - ML threat detection: account wide
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): AWS service permissioning
• Amazon Inspector - (not ML) vulnerability management: EC2 specific (installed on)
• AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS): see name of service
• Amazon Macie: ML - find exposed sensitive data
• AWS Network Firewall: VPC level firewall
• AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM): share resources across accounts
• AWS Secrets Manager: supplies secrets to AWS resources
• AWS Security Hub: automate security checks
• AWS Shield: DDos protection, on by default from R53, paid advanced for support
• AWS Single Sign-On: manage AWS account access
• AWS WAF: Web Application Firewall to protect against common app exploits

Serverless

• AWS AppSync: Serverless - GraphQL/pub-sub for applications
• AWS Fargate: Serverless - container orchestration service
• AWS Lambda: Serverless - compute service

Storage

• AWS Backup: AWS resource backup
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS )  - EC2 network linked storage
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS )  - multi EC2: scalable storage
• Amazon FSx (for all types): mountable storage
• Amazon S3: S3 vanilla, IA, one zone IA, intelligent tiering
• Amazon S3 Glacier glacier instant retrieval, glacier deep archive
• AWS Storage Gateway: mountable storage
• Volume Gateway - iSCSI: present on-premises
• File Gateway: SMB and NFS - present on prom
• AWS storage gateway: hybrid cloud/on-premises storage gateway

Other services

• AWS Secure Token Service: temporary cli/user access
• Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager: specific EBS EFS backup management
• Elastic Fabric Adapter: Network interface for high level inter-node communication between EC2 instances

Extra notes

EC2 Types

• General - M,T,A
• Compute - C
• Memory - R, X, Z
• Storage I, D, H
• GPU - P, G
• HPC - Hpc

Differences in similar auditing services

• Inspector: Vulnerability
• GuardDuty: Threat detect
• Shield: DDos
• Detective: Analyze security issues
• Macie: IIP data finding
• WAF: app exploits (SQL inject.)
• security hub: automated security checks

Differences in similar monitoring services

CloudWatch - performance monitoring
CloudTrail - record api calls and activity

EBS Volume Types

• gp: General Purpose SSD: cheaper
  • gp3: general purpose, higher throughput
  • gp2: general purpose, lower throughput
• IO: Provisioned IOPS SSD: faster
• io2 Block Express, most IOPS, highest durability
• io2: same durability, lower IOPS
• io1: lower durability, same IOPS as standard io2
• s: standard HDD, cheaper and slower than SSD
  • st1: Throughput optimised
  • sc1: Cold, for lowest possible storage cost

if it says “cost effective” for EBS that means HDD

Throughput is a measurement of bits or bytes per second that can be processed by a storage device. IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) refers to the number of read/write operations per second.