AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate - Hands-On + Exams

Develop exam strategy for AWS certifications by identifying background, objective, and constraints; use process of elimination, keyword cues, and flag-and-review tactics to maximize accuracy and pacing with automated AWS solutions.

Learn how to schedule your AWS certification exam, request ESL 30-minute accommodation for non-native English speakers, and use 50% discount vouchers for future exams.

Set up a free AWS account, review the AWS free tier benefits for compute, storage, and RDS, and complete identity, billing, and verification steps to start using AWS.

Explore cloud computing basics, benefits, and the three cloud types—public, private, and hybrid—through AWS global infrastructure and services. Learn on-demand provisioning, pay-as-you-go pricing, and AWS security and compliance.

Discover AWS global infrastructure, from regions and availability zones to local and wavelength zones, outposts, and points of presence, enabling ultra low latency and high availability.

Explore the full range of AWS services across compute, storage, database, networking, and analytics. Preview key offerings like EC2, S3, Aurora, Lambda, VPC, and Kinesis to understand high-level capabilities.

Navigate AWS services across blockchain, business applications, developer tools, front end web and mobile services, IoT, and governance; explore Amazon Managed Blockchain, Honeycode, Amplify, CodePipeline, Cognito, and Grafana.

Explore AWS security, identity, and compliance services in part three. Learn how IAM, KMS, Network Firewall, WAF, Resource Access Manager, and Secrets Manager secure access and data.

Explore the three fault isolation categories—zonal, regional, and global—highlighting how services like EC2, EBS, SQS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, Route 53, Local Zones, and Outposts fit layer and enable resilient architectures.

Learn how amazon kinesis data streams enable real-time processing with streams and shards, data records, partition keys, and producers and consumers using the kinesis client library.

Explore a hands-on demo that creates a Kinesis data stream, a data generator Lambda, and a processing Lambda that stores results in DynamoDB.

Learn how Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivers real-time streaming data to destinations like S3, Redshift, OpenSearch, and Splunk, with optional data transformation via Lambda and buffering settings.

Explore Amazon managed service for Apache Flink, including Flink vs Studio, Flink APIs, connectors from Kinesis and Kafka, and operators like map, filter, keyBy, window, and union for streaming analytics.

Explore Amazon managed streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) features, including craft mode, tiered storage, MSK serverless, and MSK Connect, to build scalable real-time streaming applications.

Participate in a hands-on demo to create an Amazon MSK cluster, configure IAM policy and role for EC2, and run a Kafka topic with producer and consumer using Kafka client.

Explore how AWS Data Migration Service simplifies database migration and replication, covering source and target endpoints, schema conversion, DMS Fleet Advisor discovery, and both one-time and ongoing migrations.

Explore Amazon Simple Queue Service, including core concepts, visibility timeout, dead-letter queues, standard and FIFO queues, polling strategies, message retention, integration patterns, and exam-day tips.

Learn to create and test Amazon Simple Queue Service queues, including standard and FIFO types, by sending and receiving messages, examining attributes, and cleaning up resources in the AWS console.

Discover how Amazon MQ, a managed message broker, supports ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, compares with SQS and SNS, and enables availability across AZs with EFS, EBS, and cross-region replication.

Explore how Amazon Simple Notification Service enables high-throughput pub-sub messaging with standard and FIFO topics, message filtering, and fan-out to SQS, Lambda, email, and mobile push.

Learn how to create and manage an Amazon SNS topic, set up an email subscription, confirm subscription, publish a test message, and clean up resources in a hands-on demo.

Learn how AWS Direct Connect creates a private, high-bandwidth, low-latency link from on premises to AWS, with public and private virtual interfaces, direct connect gateway, transit gateway, and multi-account support.

Discover the AWS snow family, including snow cone and snowball edge, their storage, compute, and s3 compatibility, data transfer workflows, and edge computing use cases managed via AWS Ops Hub.

Explore Amazon S3 fundamentals, including objects and buckets, durability, strong read after write consistency, storage classes, security, encryption, object lock, versioning, analytics, and pricing.

Create a new S3 bucket in a region, upload and manage objects, explore S3 URI and copy URL sharing, and finally delete objects and the bucket in a hands-on demo.

Explore Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, snapshots, and encryption to secure scalable storage for EC2. Learn lifecycle management, archiving, and monitoring with Data Lifecycle Manager, CloudWatch, EventBridge, and CloudTrail.

Launch an EC2 instance, create and attach an EBS volume, format and mount it, write data, snapshot the volume, detach, and verify data from the snapshot before cleanup.

Explore Amazon elastic file system (EFS), a serverless, scalable file storage that integrates with EC2, offers regional and one zone types, supports NFS v4, storage and performance modes.

Explore a hands-on demo of Amazon EFS inside a two-AZ VPC. Mount the EFS file system on two EC2 instances and test bidirectional file sharing.

Master centralized backup management with policy-based plans, tagging, lifecycle rules, and vault lock in AWS Backup, plus cross-region and cross-account protection, auditing, and secure vaults.

Explore Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility, a fast, fully managed service that scales clusters and storage. Understand cluster, reader, and instance endpoints, and replica set mode for reliable reads.

Experience a hands-on Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility demo, creating a cluster with read replicas, launching an EC2 client, and performing product catalog CRUD and queries.

Master Amazon DynamoDB, a managed serverless NoSQL database with millisecond latency. Explore data modeling, keys, indexes, capacity and consistency, streams, TTL, transactions, DAX, global tables, and S3 integrations.

Create a DynamoDB table with a partition and sort key, insert items like artist, song title, album title, and awards, then read, update, query, and use a global secondary index.

Learn about DynamoDB provisioned mode, RCUs and WCUs, auto scaling, cost predictability, and how 4 kb item reads—strongly or eventually—and transactional reads/writes drive capacity.

Discover how Amazon RDS simplifies relational databases with backups, multi-AZ, read replicas, and advanced features like RDS Proxy, blue-green deployments, and IAM, KMS, and Secrets Manager security.

Create an EC2 instance to connect to a PostgreSQL RDS database, install the PostgreSQL client, connect to the endpoint, create a database and table, insert a record, then terminate resources.

Amazon ElastiCache, including serverless and custom cluster deployments, supports Memcached and Redis engines; learn use cases from database query caching to real-time analytics.

Build and test an Aurora serverless MySQL cluster with ElastiCache serverless for Valky, implementing a cache-aside pattern via Lambda, Secrets Manager, IAM authentication, VPC endpoints, and security groups.

Explore Amazon Keyspaces, a serverless, Cassandra-compatible managed database. Compare it to traditional Cassandra, understand migration paths, and learn about time to live, point in time recovery, multi-region tables, and querying.

Hands-on with Amazon Keyspaces demonstrates creating an IAM user, provisioning a keyspace and table with a Cassandra-like schema, performing CRUD, and enabling point-in-time recovery.

Memorydb for Redis provides ultra-fast in-memory durability with microsecond reads and single-digit millisecond writes for microservices. It serves as a durable primary database, supporting multi-az replication and scalable shards.

Explore a MemoryDB for Redis demo: build a VPC and subnet groups, deploy a multi-AZ cluster, connect via EC2 with SSM, and run Redis CLI and a Python program.

Explore how Amazon EC2 delivers scalable virtual machines in the cloud, covering instance types, AMIs, storage, regions, security groups, and purchase options from on-demand to spot and reserved instances.

launch an amazon linux 2023 t2 micro ec2 instance, create a key pair, configure a security group for ssh, and connect via ssh or ec2 instance connect.

Explore aws glue, a serverless data integration service that discovers, cleans, and transforms data from 70+ sources into a central data catalog, enabling scalable, automated etl pipelines with glue studio.

Conduct a hands-on AWS Glue workflow: create S3 buckets, build a Glue data catalog with a crawler, run a Glue ETL job, and query results with Athena.

Utilize AWS Glue DataBrew, a serverless visual tool that cleans and normalizes data without code, with 250+ transformations and recipe-based automation.

Learn how Amazon EMR manages clusters and nodes to run steps for processing large data with Hadoop and Spark, with tight integration to Amazon S3, IAM, and CloudWatch.

Launch an EMR cluster, set up an S3 input/output bucket, run a Spark job, monitor with Spark History and Yarn UI, view parquet results, and clean up resources.

Explore AWS Lambda as a serverless compute service, covering invocation types, cold and warm starts, deployment options, VPC integration, and exam patterns with S3, DynamoDB streams, and SQS.

Demonstrate a hands-on AWS workflow by invoking AWS Lambda via API Gateway to send an email through an SNS topic, including topic creation and subscription verification.

Explore AWS Step Functions, comparing standard and express workflows, learn to orchestrate microservices, state machines, parallel processing for data and machine learning pipelines with dynamic parallelism, branching, and error handling.

Explore a hands-on demonstration of building an AWS Step Functions state machine with three Lambda functions—check inventory, process payment, and update order status—and run end-to-end executions.

Learn how AWS Lake Formation centrally manages and secures data lakes with fine-grained access control, ingestion and management, and cross-account sharing across Glue, Athena, Redshift Spectrum, QuickSight, and EMR.

Set up AWS Lake Formation by creating an S3 data lake bucket, registering the location, and building a database and table with a Glue crawler, then test with Athena.

Analyze data directly on S3 with Amazon Athena using SQL for ad hoc queries in a serverless, pay-per-query model, leveraging Apache Spark integration and the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Set up an S3 bucket for Amazon Athena, configure query results, create a database, and run sample CloudFront log queries to analyze browser activity.

Explore Amazon Redshift in provisioned and serverless modes, understanding capacity, pay-per-use pricing, namespaces, work groups, security, and integrations for scalable, cloud-based analytics.

Create and configure an Amazon Redshift cluster, secure access with IAM roles, load sample data from S3, run queries in the query editor, and clean up resources.

Explore Amazon OpenSearch Service for real-time log analytics, full-text search, and observability. Learn data processing, storage tiers, anomaly detection, cross-cluster operations, and integrations with DynamoDB, CloudWatch Logs, Firehose, and IoT.

Create an amazon opensearch domain, ingest sample log data, and build index patterns and visualizations in opensearch dashboard. Run basic searches and clean up resources after testing.

Discover Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-based BI service that connects data from AWS, third-party sources, and more to create integrated dashboards with fast Spice queries, ML insights, and row-level security.

Explore Amazon QuickSight hands-on by connecting data sources, creating datasets, and visualizing with pie chart, line chart, and vertical bar chart to publish interactive dashboards.

Explore Amazon Neptune, a high-performance graph database with Open Graph API support for Gremlin, OpenCypher, and SPARQL, enabling knowledge graphs, recommendations, and fraud detection at scale.

Explore Amazon Neptune through a hands-on demo that builds a social network graph, loads data, runs graph queries for friend recommendations, and cleans up resources.

Discover how Amazon Data Zone catalogs, shares, and governs data across AWS and on-premises sources with fine-grained access controls, integrating with Redshift, Athena, Glue, and Lake Formation.

Explore Amazon Timestream for Live Analytics and InfluxDB—a serverless time series database for IoT, DevOps, and analytics, with in-memory recent data and cost-tier storage for historical data.

Explore how Amazon CloudFront delivers static and dynamic content via 750+ edge locations, caches at the edge to reduce origin load, and uses TTL, cache hits, and origin shield.

Join this hands-on Amazon CloudFront demo to create an S3 bucket, configure a CloudFront distribution with origin access control and bucket policy, test delivery, and review edge caching.

Discover how AWS PrivateLink privately connects your VPC to AWS services and resources via endpoint services, providing secure, private access without internet gateways or NAT.

Discover how Route 53 provides reliable DNS, domain registration, health checks, and global routing using latency and geolocation. Master hosted zones, DNS records, and alias options for flexible routing.

Create a VPC and EC2 instance, set up a private Route 53 hosted zone, add A and CNAME records pointing to the EC2, test with dig/nslookup, and clean up resources.

Create a custom virtual private cloud and launch EC2 instances in both the custom and default VPCs. Test connectivity using public IP across VPCs and observe private IP isolation.

Explore AWS identity and access management fundamentals, including users, groups, roles, policies, credential types, MFA, and password policies, and learn how policy evaluation and cross-account access work.

Explore AWS Identity and Access Management part 2, covering roles, trust and permission policies, cross-account access, policy types, least privilege, and best practices for secure access.

Explore AWS identity and access management (IAM) through a hands-on demo that creates users and groups, attaches policies for S3 and EC2, and builds roles for EC2 access.

Master AWS KMS concepts, including envelope encryption, data keys, key types and states, and multi-region keys for exam readiness.

Explore a hands-on demo of AWS KMS by creating a CMK, enabling S3 encryption, uploading a file, testing IAM user access, and cleanup.

Learn how Amazon Macie automates discovery of sensitive data in S3, detects data types with managed and custom data identifiers, and integrates findings with EventBridge and Security Hub.

AWS Secrets Manager stores, rotates, and retrieves credentials with envelope encryption using KMS, supports cross-region replication, and compares with Parameter Store.

Take a hands-on journey through AWS Secrets Manager by creating a secret, retrieving it with a Lambda function using an execution role, then testing and cleaning up resources.

Discover AWS shield standard and advanced protections against DDoS across EC2, ELB, CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and Route 53. Understand detection, mitigation, perimeters, and 24/7 shield response.

Explore a hands-on demo securing a website with AWS WAF, S3, and CloudFront. Build a web ACL with managed groups and custom rules to block SQL injection and cross-site scripting.

Explore data analytics reference architectures that ingest data from diverse sources into a centralized data lake on S3, using Kinesis, Glue, Lake Formation, OpenSearch, Redshift, and SageMaker for analysis and ML.