AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner cheat sheet

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) has six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, Operations.

Six advantages of cloud: trade fixed expense for variable expense, benefit from massive economies of scale, stop guessing capacity, increase speed and agility, stop spending money on running data centers, go global in minutes.

Well-Architected Framework pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Sustainability.

Cloud deployment models: public cloud, private cloud (on-premises or hosted), hybrid cloud (connecting on-premises to cloud).

AWS regions consist of multiple Availability Zones (AZs); AZs are isolated data centers with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Edge locations (Points of Presence) are used by services like CloudFront and Route 53 for low-latency content delivery and DNS.

AWS responsibility under shared responsibility: security OF the cloud (physical, infrastructure, managed services). Customer: security IN the cloud (data, access, configuration).

Migration strategies (7 Rs): Retire, Retain, Rehost, Relocate, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compares on-premises costs (hardware, power, facilities, labor) with AWS costs (compute, storage, data transfer, support).

IAM policy types: identity-based (attached to users, groups, roles), resource-based (attached to resources, e.g., S3 bucket policy), permissions boundaries, service control policies (SCPs), session policies.

IAM best practices: enable MFA, use least privilege, use roles for applications, rotate credentials, do not use root user for daily tasks.

Security groups are stateful, allow-only rules, evaluated as a whole; network ACLs are stateless, allow and deny rules, evaluated in order by rule number.

AWS Artifact provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports (SOC, ISO, PCI) and agreements.

AWS Shield Standard provides DDoS protection at no cost; Shield Advanced provides enhanced protection with 24/7 DDoS Response Team.

AWS WAF protects web applications from common exploits (SQL injection, cross-site scripting) using web ACL rules.

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity using machine learning and threat intelligence.

AWS KMS manages encryption keys; customer managed keys can be rotated; AWS managed keys are managed by AWS.

Compliance programs include SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP; the customer is responsible for compliance of their workloads.

Compute: EC2 (virtual servers), Lambda (serverless functions), ECS/EKS (containers), Fargate (serverless containers), Elastic Beanstalk (PaaS).

Storage: S3 (object), EBS (block for EC2), EFS (file for Linux), FSx (Windows/Lustre), Glacier (archive).

Databases: RDS (managed relational), Aurora (MySQL/PostgreSQL compatible), DynamoDB (NoSQL key-value), Redshift (data warehouse), ElastiCache (in-memory).

Networking: VPC (isolated network), Route 53 (DNS), CloudFront (CDN), Direct Connect (dedicated private connection), VPN (encrypted internet connection).

S3 storage classes: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, Glacier Deep Archive.

EC2 purchasing options: On-Demand, Reserved (1 or 3 year), Savings Plans, Spot (up to 90% discount, interruptible), Dedicated Hosts.

AWS Global Infrastructure: regions, availability zones, edge locations; services are either regional, global (IAM, Route 53, CloudFront), or AZ-specific.

Management and governance: CloudWatch (metrics/logs), CloudTrail (API audit), Config (resource compliance), Organizations (multi-account), Trusted Advisor (best practice checks).

AWS pricing fundamentals: pay-as-you-go, save when you commit (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans), pay less by using more (volume discounts, tiered pricing).

AWS Free Tier categories: always free (e.g., Lambda 1M requests/month), 12 months free (e.g., EC2 t2.micro 750 hours), trials (e.g., Amazon Inspector 90 days).

AWS Support plans: Basic (free), Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, Enterprise. Business and above include 24/7 phone, chat, and email support.

AWS Trusted Advisor checks: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, service quotas; full checks available in Business and Enterprise support.

AWS Cost Explorer visualizes and forecasts costs; AWS Budgets sets custom alerts; AWS Cost and Usage Report provides detailed billing data.

Consolidated billing through AWS Organizations combines usage across accounts for volume discounts and provides a single bill.

Data transfer IN to AWS is generally free; data transfer OUT to the internet is charged (with some free tier allowances).

Savings Plans: Compute Savings Plans (flexible across EC2, Lambda, Fargate), EC2 Instance Savings Plans (specific family/region), SageMaker Savings Plans.