Welcome aboard India!

Welcome aboard India!

AWS Announces New Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region

At last India has its own region with two availability zones. Much overdue but sure to be a popular decision. The following services are available in the new region:

    AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
    AWS CloudFormation
    Amazon CloudFront
    AWS CloudTrail
    Amazon CloudWatch
    AWS CodeDeploy
    AWS Config
    AWS Direct Connect
    Amazon DynamoDB
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Amazon ElastiCache
    Amazon Elasticsearch Service
    Amazon EMR
    Amazon Glacier
    AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
    AWS Import/Export Snowball
    AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
    Amazon Kinesis
    AWS Marketplace
    AWS OpsWorks
    Amazon Redshift
    Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) – all database engines including Amazon Aurora
    Amazon Route 53
    Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
    Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
    Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
    Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
    AWS Support
    AWS Trusted Advisor
    VM Import/Export

The available  services will no doubt be expanded so be sure to check for more details at:

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/

New Course AWS Certified SysOps Administrator!

The much awaited AWS Certified SysOps Adminstrator Course has been released. Available with the AWS Certified Associate course. All existing members will have access!

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Pre-Warming of EBS Volumes is not necessary

A number of people have asked me about pre-warming of new EBS volumes. I do realise that there are a lot of courses and exam dumps out there stating this is necessary. In fact it is not necessary with new volumes and if you answer this incorrectly you will lose valuable marks on the exam.

The only situation where preparation is required before access is with volumes that were restored from a snapshot:

"New EBS volumes receive their maximum performance the moment that they are available and do not require initialization (formerly known as pre-warming). However, storage blocks on volumes that were restored from snapshots must be initialized (pulled down from Amazon S3 and written to the volume) before you can access the block." Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes

When in doubt read the docs

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Amazon Aurora Cross-Region Read Replicas

Watch out for this on the exam!

Just announced by AWS Cross-Region Read Replicas for Amazon Aurora. You can now create Aurora read replicas in another region to the master. Creating the new read replica also creates an Aurora cluster that can contain up to 15 more read replicas!

We will be updating the course material with the changes. In the meantime, more details in the docs: Replicating Amazon Aurora DB Clusters Across AWS Regions.

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New videos for AWS Certified Associate Courses

We have just created more new videos for the AWS Certified Associate course:
Amazon DynamoDB Core Knowledge  (New)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Core Knowledge  (New)
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Core Knowledge  (New)

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New Course Videos added

We have just updated some existing videos and also created new videos for the AWS Certified Associate course:
AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Core Knowledge  (New)
AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) Core Knowledge (New)
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Core Knowledge (New)
AWS OpsWorks Core Knowledge (New)
Amazon EC2 Core Knowledge (Updated)

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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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