I've just earned my AWS SAA certification and I'm now gearing up for the Professional-level exams. However, I'm struggling to get a clear understanding of how companies actually design their cloud networks and what services they regularly implement. While I'm confident in working with individual AWS services, I find myself at a loss when it comes to designing a full environment for an enterprise or a university. Apart from hopefully landing a cloud-related job soon, I'm looking for any good resources—whether they're study sites, PDFs, or reference guides—that can help me understand high-level AWS network and service design. I'm more interested in the big-picture architecture rather than step-by-step configurations. Thanks in advance!
3 Answers
For foundational resources, check out the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It’s a solid starting point that outlines best practices, even if I’ve seen that in the field many don’t implement it strictly. Most designs are minimalistic and only aimed at serving current products, with plans to improve that never seem to happen. Remember, if you want to design high-level infrastructure, the existing setup is often what you'll be building on.
A big difference between the SAA certification and real-world applications is that enterprise systems typically involve multiple accounts under a single organization, along with authorizing access through external providers like SSO or SAML. While the networking fundamentals remain similar to what you've learned for SAA, managing many accounts complicates things. Really, SAA focuses more on handling a single account as opposed to the broader enterprise perspective.
You might want to clarify what you mean by designing an environment for an enterprise or university. Unlike an AWS account that serves applications, these organizations typically have extensive, interconnected physical networks. If you’re actually looking at designing network applications instead of infrastructure, that’s a slightly different ballpark!
You'd be surprised! A lot of the extensive networks you see actually run on AWS nowadays, like VPCs and Transit Gateways. While some companies still use MPLS, many have switched to AWS networking. AWS isn't just about applications; it handles much more than just those basic tasks.