Amazon Web Services

AWS Tutorials & Certification Paths

100+ hands-on AWS guides organised by certification track — from Cloud Practitioner to Specialty level. Every article maps to a real AWS exam domain so your reading builds toward a credential.

100

In-Depth Articles

Cert Learning Paths

Topic Categories

Prerequisites

AWS Certification Learning Path

Click any certification to jump to the articles that cover its exam domains.

Foundational

↓

Associate Level — Choose Your Track

Associate

SAA-C03

Solutions Architect Associate

~80 hrs · Intermediate

~60 hrs · Intermediate

SysOps Admin Associate

~60 hrs · Intermediate

20 articles

View articles ↓

↓

Professional Level

Professional

SAP-C02

Solutions Architect Professional

~120 hrs · Advanced

SAA + DevOps sections

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Professional

DOP-C02

DevOps Engineer Professional

~100 hrs · Advanced

20 articles

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↓

Specialty — Pick Your Domain

Data Analytics Specialty

~80 hrs · Expert

12 articles

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Skills you'll build across all paths

Cloud Architecture Serverless Containers & K8s Databases Security & IAM Networking Observability AI / ML CI/CD Cost Optimisation

CLF

Cloud Practitioner Foundations

CLF-C02 · Foundational · ~40 study hours · Beginner

Core AWS services, cloud concepts, pricing, security fundamentals, and the Well-Architected Framework. Start here if you are new to AWS.

EC2 S3 IAM VPC CloudWatch Cost Management

EC2

AWS EC2 Complete Guide: Instances, Types & Auto Scaling

AWS S3: Buckets, Storage Classes, Lifecycle & Security

IAM

AWS IAM Roles and Policies: Complete Security Guide

VPC

AWS VPC Networking: Subnets, NAT Gateway & Routing

CloudWatch

AWS CloudWatch: Metrics, Alarms, Logs & Dashboards

CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail: Audit Logging and Compliance Guide

Well-Architected

AWS Well-Architected Framework: Five Pillars Guide

Cost

AWS Cost Optimization: 15 Strategies to Reduce Your Bill

Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer and Budgets: Complete Guide

Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor: Best Practice Checks Guide

Security

AWS Security Best Practices: IAM, KMS, GuardDuty

Lightsail

AWS Lightsail: Simple Cloud Hosting Guide

SAA

Solutions Architect Associate

SAA-C03 · Associate · ~80 study hours · Intermediate

Design highly available, cost-efficient, scalable distributed systems. Also forms the foundation for the SAP-C02 Professional exam.

RDS & Aurora Load Balancing Route 53 CloudFront Multi-Region Transit Gateway

RDS

AWS RDS: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Aurora Best Practices

Aurora

AWS Aurora Serverless v2: Auto-scaling Database Guide

RDS Proxy

AWS RDS Proxy: Connection Pooling for Lambda and ECS

ElastiCache

AWS ElastiCache: Redis and Memcached Caching Strategies

Auto Scaling

AWS Auto Scaling: Scaling Policies and Best Practices

Load Balancer

AWS Load Balancers: ALB vs NLB Complete Guide

Route 53

AWS Route 53: DNS, Routing Policies & Health Checks

CloudFront

AWS CloudFront: CDN and Edge Computing

CloudFront

AWS CloudFront Security: OAC, WAF, Signed URLs

AWS S3 Lifecycle Policies and Cross-Region Replication

AWS S3 Pre-signed URLs and Access Control

Multi-Region

AWS Multi-Region Architecture: Active-Active Guide

VPC

AWS VPC Connectivity: VPN, Peering, and Endpoints

Transit Gateway

AWS Transit Gateway: Hub-and-Spoke Networking Guide

Direct Connect

AWS Direct Connect: Dedicated Network Connectivity

Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Managed App Deployment Guide

Backup

AWS Backup: Centralized Data Protection Guide

DVA

Developer Associate

DVA-C02 · Associate · ~60 study hours · Intermediate

Serverless, APIs, messaging, NoSQL, CI/CD pipelines, and developer tools. Biggest section — covers the services developers use daily.

Lambda DynamoDB API Gateway SQS / SNS Cognito CDK / SAM

Lambda

AWS Lambda: Functions, Triggers & Performance

Lambda

AWS Lambda Cold Starts: Causes and Mitigation Guide

Lambda

AWS Lambda Layers: Sharing Code and Dependencies

Lambda

AWS Lambda Power Tuning: Memory and Cost Optimization

API Gateway

AWS API Gateway: REST and HTTP APIs Complete Guide

API Gateway

AWS API Gateway WebSocket APIs: Real-Time Communication Guide

DynamoDB

AWS DynamoDB: NoSQL Design and Best Practices

DynamoDB

AWS DynamoDB Single-Table Design Patterns

DynamoDB

AWS DynamoDB Streams with Lambda: Event Processing

Cognito

AWS Cognito: User Authentication and Authorization

Step Functions

AWS Step Functions: Orchestrating Serverless Workflows

SAM

AWS SAM: Serverless Application Model Guide

CDK

AWS CDK: Infrastructure as Code with TypeScript/Python

CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation: Infrastructure as Code Guide

Parameter Store

AWS Parameter Store vs Secrets Manager: When to Use Each

Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager: Automated Secret Rotation Guide

EventBridge

AWS EventBridge: Event-Driven Architecture on AWS

EventBridge

AWS EventBridge Pipes: Point-to-Point Integration Guide

SQS / SNS

AWS SQS and SNS: Event-Driven Architecture

SNS

AWS SNS: Push Notifications and Message Fanout

SQS / SNS

AWS SNS-SQS Fanout: Decoupled Message Processing

DOP

DevOps, Containers & CI/CD

DOP-C02 / SOA-C02 · Professional & Associate · ~100 study hours

Containers with ECS and EKS, automated deployment pipelines, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and multi-account governance. Covers both the SysOps Associate and DevOps Professional exam domains.

ECS & EKS CodePipeline Terraform Organizations SSM Observability

ECS

AWS ECS: Container Orchestration with Fargate and EC2

Containers

ECS vs EKS vs Lambda: Choosing the Right Service

ECR

AWS ECR: Container Registry and Image Lifecycle Management

EKS

AWS EKS: Running Kubernetes on AWS

EKS

AWS EKS Fargate: Serverless Kubernetes Pods

EKS

AWS EKS Add-ons: CoreDNS, kube-proxy, VPC CNI, EBS CSI

EKS

AWS EKS Security: IRSA, OIDC, Pod Identity

Fargate

AWS Fargate Cost Optimization Strategies

CI/CD

AWS CodePipeline: CI/CD Automation Guide

CI/CD

AWS CodeDeploy: Automated Application Deployments

CI/CD

AWS CodeArtifact: Package Management for CI/CD

SSM

AWS Systems Manager: EC2 and ECS Management Guide

Proton

AWS Proton: Platform Engineering Automation Guide

Service Catalog

AWS Service Catalog: Self-Service Infrastructure Guide

Organizations

AWS Organizations and Control Tower: Multi-Account Governance

App Runner

AWS App Runner: Containerized Apps Without Infrastructure

Terraform

Terraform on AWS: Complete IaC Guide

CloudWatch

AWS CloudWatch Logs Insights: Query and Analysis

Observability

AWS Managed Grafana and Prometheus: Observability at Scale

EC2

AWS EC2 Spot Instances: Cost Savings and Interruption Handling

SEC

Security Specialty

SCS-C02 · Specialty · ~80 study hours · Expert

Advanced threat detection, vulnerability management, network security, and compliance. Requires a working understanding of all Associate-level content first.

WAF & Shield GuardDuty Macie Inspector Config Network Firewall

WAF / Shield

AWS WAF and Shield: Web Application Protection Guide

GuardDuty

AWS GuardDuty: Intelligent Threat Detection

Macie

AWS Macie: Sensitive Data Discovery in S3

Inspector

AWS Inspector: Automated Vulnerability Assessment

Config

AWS Config and Security Hub: Compliance Monitoring

Network Firewall

AWS Network Firewall: Stateful Traffic Filtering Guide

DAS

Data, AI & Analytics Specialty

DAS-C01 · Specialty · ~80 study hours · Expert

Data lakes, streaming pipelines, data warehousing, search, machine learning, and generative AI. Covers the AWS Data Analytics Specialty and AI/ML practitioner domains.

Kinesis Athena / Glue Redshift SageMaker Bedrock Lake Formation

Kinesis

Advanced, Edge & Full-Stack

SAP-C02 supplement · Edge Computing · Full-Stack Services

Graviton processors, edge deployments, migration tools, IoT, full-stack app platforms, and file storage. Topics that appear in the SA Professional exam and real-world advanced architectures.

Graviton Outposts Amplify AppSync IoT Core Migration

Graviton

AWS Tutorials & Certification Paths

AWS Certification Learning Path

Cloud Practitioner Foundations

New to AWS? Start with Cloud Practitioner.

Solutions Architect Associate

Developer Associate

DevOps, Containers & CI/CD

Security Specialty

Data, AI & Analytics Specialty

Advanced, Edge & Full-Stack

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