- [Seph] Welcome you all, I'm Seph. Glad you're here for our course on the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam. Before we start diving directly into the content, I wanted to take this time to help you understand the focus of this certification and what it provides. And I know many of you are already aware of the benefits of becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and that is why you're here. But to make sure everyone's on the same page, I wanted to talk about this certification. To start, this exam is intended for individuals who perform a solutions architect role and have one or more years experience designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems. The certification validates your ability to design and implement systems on AWS, highlighting your capacity to incorporate resiliency, high performance, security, and cost optimization. While preparing for the exam, you will dive into designing resilient, high-performing, secure, and cost-optimized architectures. During the exam, you'll be asked to complete tasks like evaluating the design and implementation of multi-tiered and highly available architectures, utilizing scaling for compute and storage solutions, identifying cost-effective solutions, and more. I know that sounds like a broad range of topics, and you may be wondering about how you would begin to prepare and assess your abilities for the exam, but that's why you're here. The certification exam guide, which outlines this course and is included in the notes, is organized into four domains relating to the topics necessary to cover for the exam. Designing resilient architectures is covered in Domain 1. This focuses on multi-tiered solutions, highly available and fault-tolerant architectures, AWS services used as decoupling mechanisms, and appropriate resilient storage options. Domain 2, which is about designing high-performing architectures, will guide you through identifying elastic and scalable compute and storage solutions and selecting high-performing networking and database solutions. Designing secure applications and architectures is covered in Domain 3. This domain reviews designing secure access to AWS resources, application tiers, and data-security options. The fourth and final domain focuses on designing cost-optimized architectures. This is where you will look at identifying cost-effective storage, compute, and database solutions, as well as designing cost-optimized network architectures. Throughout the course, you'll also see some other aids to help you in your assessment and preparation as you ready yourself for the exam, but everything will be related to those topics. So you know, our goal here is not to provide every bit of information you'll need for each of these topics. Instead, we want to provide a method for you to do a couple of things. One is that we want to enable you to assess your readiness for the exam. Through covering the topic domains, you should be able to evaluate if you're ready to move forward with registering for the exam, or if you need more preparation. The other goal we have is to provide a way for you to structure your continued study. As you assess your level of knowledge with the topics, we're here to help clarify and explain the context of the domains so that you're able to best understand what the exam is asking you. Using that information, you can then evaluate the areas you need to cover and understand how you need to dive into those topics. Good luck as you go through the course. See you soon.