Course Introduction
Domain One of The AWS Solution Architect Associate exam guide SAA-CO2 requires us to be able to Design a multi-tier architecture solution so that is our topic for this course.
The objective of this course is to prepare you for answering questions related to this domain. We’ll cover the need to know aspects of how to design Multi-Tier solutions using AWS services.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be well prepared for answering questions related to Domain One in the Solution Architect Associate exam.

Architecture Basics
You need to be familiar with a number of technology stacks that are common to multi-tier solution design for the Associate certification- LAMP, MEAN, Serverless and Microservices are relevant patterns to know for the exam.

What is Multi-Tier Architecture?
A business application generally needs three things. It needs something to interact with users - often called the presentation layer - it needs something to process those interactions - often called the logic or application layer - and it generally needs somewhere to store the data from that logic and interactions - commonly named as the data tier.

When Should You Consider a Multi-Tier Design?
The key thing to remember is that the benefit of multi-tier architecture is that the tiers are decoupled which enables them to be scaled up or down to meet demand. This we generally call burst activity and is a major benefit of building applications in the cloud

When Should We Consider Single-Tier Design?
Single tier generally implies that all your application services are running on the one machine or instance. Single-Tier deployment is generally going to be a cost-effective and easy to manage architecture but speed and cost is about all there is for benefits. Single tier suits development or test environments where finite teams need to work and test quickly.

Design a Multi-Tier Solution
First we review the design of a multi-tier architecture pattern using instances and elastic load balancers. Then we’ll review how we could create a similar solution using serverless services or a full microservices design.

AWS Services we use

The Virtual Private Cloud
Subnets and Availability Zones
Auto Scaling
Elastic Load Balancers
Security groups and NACLs
AWS CloudFront
AWS WAF and AWS Shield

Serverless Design
AWS Lambda
Amazon API Gateway

Microservices Design
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS KMS

Sample Questions
We review sample exam questions to apply and solidify our knowledge.

Course Summary
Review of the content covered to help you prepare for the exam.