AWS Certificate Manager rolling out to new regions

Previously you would need buy your SSL certificates outside of AWS and then convert them to the format for AWS and then upload to your ELB. Life is much easier now with AWS Certficate Manager that provides this service along with the cetificates for free! How cool is that?

The service has been rolled out to most regions so you may get a question on it in the exam.

AWS Certificate Manager is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet. AWS Certificate Manager removes the time-consuming manual process of purchasing, uploading, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates. With AWS Certificate Manager, you can quickly request a certificate, deploy it on AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancers or Amazon CloudFront distributions, and let AWS Certificate Manager handle certificate renewals. SSL/TLS certificates provisioned through AWS Certificate Manager are free. You pay only for the AWS resources you create to run your application.

More details at https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/ 

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Important changes by AWS to Auto Scaling Policies

Today AWS announced the introduction of new auto scaling policies with steps. This is a significant change as no longer does auto scaling need to be a single step response to a CloudWatch alarm. You can now have many steps enabling small changes in capacity to be made in response to small changes in demand and likewise for large changes. The result is highly reactive and smooth response to demand.
We have updated our documentation "Lab Notes - Highly Available and Fault Tolerant Architecture for Web Applications inside a VPC" to v1.02 to reflect this change. Please make sure you understand this before sitting the AWS certification exam.

New Highly Available and Fault Tolerant VPC Architecture Tutorial

New Highly Available and Fault Tolerant VPC Architecture Tutorial Utilising ELB, ENI, Auto Scaling and the new S3 Endpoints and Multi-AZ Aurora Clusters We have just added a new tutorial to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Course that applies what you have learned in the lessons and quizzes.
These videos cover the essential hands knowledge in AWS architecture required for certification. Look for them in the AWS Architecture Design Patterns subject.