ACE-Professional study plan

Diagram the shared responsibility model and label which controls belong to the customer versus the provider

Compare IaaS, PaaS, and serverless across at least five decision criteria in a written table

Explain the difference between availability zones, regions, and edge locations in your own words

Map three common workload patterns to an appropriate architectural tiering choice

Design a multi-tier reference architecture that names the network, compute, storage, and identity components

Classify at least ten security controls as preventive, detective, or corrective

Identify where encryption at rest and in transit applies in your reference architecture

List the top five failure modes of your design and one mitigation for each

Compare virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions on scaling, cold start, and operational overhead

Write the lifecycle states of a compute instance from provisioning through termination

Explain how autoscaling policies react to load and when they fail to react fast enough

Choose a compute service for three given workload descriptions and justify each pick

Distinguish block, file, and object storage and match each to a realistic use case

Explain durability versus availability and how redundancy choices change each

Describe lifecycle tiering rules and the cost tradeoffs of each transition

Outline a backup and restore strategy that states RPO and RTO targets

Sketch a VPC-style network with public and private subnets, route tables, and an internet gateway

Explain how security groups and network ACLs differ in scope and statefulness

Describe how DNS resolution and load balancing route traffic to healthy endpoints

Compare private connectivity options against public internet paths for latency and exposure

Design an identity and access model using least privilege and role assumption rather than long-lived keys

Apply a defense-in-depth layering to a workload you already designed in week 2

Explain how key management, rotation, and audit logging fit together for compliance evidence

Identify three compliance obligations and the technical controls that satisfy each

Define the metrics, logs, and alarms you would ship for the week 2 architecture

Interpret a cost breakdown and identify the top three cost drivers in a sample workload

Apply tagging and right-sizing practices to reduce spend without breaking SLOs

Write one alert that fires on a real symptom rather than a raw resource threshold

Re-derive the responsibility model, service models, and network hierarchy from memory without notes

Complete a timed mixed-domain practice set and log every missed question by domain

Re-teach your three weakest domains aloud or in writing using your own diagrams

Consolidate all prior deliverables into a single reviewable architecture portfolio