AWS Networking Specialty study guide
AWS Networking Specialty · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty credential is aimed at engineers who design, deploy, and operate complex network architectures on AWS rather than at generalist cloud practitioners. It suits network architects, senior cloud engineers, and consultants who already work daily with VPC design, hybrid connectivity, and routing at scale, and who need to prove depth beyond the associate-level certifications. The AWS Networking Specialty study guide has 4 sections and about 1,447 words.
01Network Design
Design questions test whether you can translate requirements (latency, throughput, isolation, cost, hybrid connectivity) into an AWS topology. Know the building blocks: VPC CIDR planning with non-overlapping ranges, subnet tiers (public, private, isolated), route tables and their association rules, NAT Gateway vs NAT instance, VPC peering (non-transitive), AWS Transit Gateway with route-table segmentation, Site-to-Site VPN and AWS Direct Connect (dedicated vs hosted), and PrivateLink/endpoint services for one-way service exposure.
317 words, about 2 min02Network Implementation
Implementation questions ask you to build what was designed. Master VPC creation (CIDR, subnets, route tables, internet gateway), security groups and NACLs, Elastic Load Balancing (ALB, NLB, GWLB), Route 53 (public/private hosted zones, alias records, routing policies), and hybrid links: Site-to-Site VPN with BGP, Direct Connect virtual interfaces (private, public, transit), and Transit Gateway attachments.
294 words, about 1 min03Network Management and Operation
Operations covers visibility, troubleshooting, and change management. Know VPC Flow Logs (accepted/rejected traffic, aggregation intervals, destinations: CloudWatch Logs, S3, Firehose), Traffic Mirroring for packet capture, Reachability Analyzer for path analysis, and Network Access Analyzer for unintended access.
288 words, about 1 min04Network Security
Security questions blend identity and network controls. Know security groups (stateful, allow-only, referenced by SG or CIDR), NACLs (stateless, ordered rules, allow and deny), AWS Network Firewall (stateful inspection, domain filtering, IPS), and AWS WAF for HTTP(S).
548 words, about 3 min