AWS Solutions Architect Associate tutorial
Thirteen interactive modules that take you from "what is an AWS service?" to designing for backup and recovery. Each module explains the idea, lets you practise it with interactive exercises, then has you try it in the AWS console and the command line.
- 13modules
- About 16 hoursself-paced
- Freeno sign-up
- Oct 2026facts checked
The 13 modules
Take them in order. Each one builds on the one before, and the last screen links to the next module.
Architecting Fundamentals
What AWS services are, where they really run, and how architects judge whether a design is good. Learn it, play with it, then try it in the console and the command line.
02Account Security
Who can touch your AWS account, and what they may do there. Learn identities, policies and guardrails for many accounts, then create a user, a group and a role and test them yourself.
03Networking 1
The addresses your resources use, how an Amazon VPC is laid out and connected, and how its traffic is filtered. Learn it, play with it, then build a VPC in your own account.
04Compute
The ways to run code on AWS, from virtual servers that you manage to functions that AWS runs for you. Learn Amazon EC2, its storage and its pricing, meet AWS Lambda, then launch a web server in a VPC you build by hand.
05Storage
Where the data lives. Learn block, file and object storage, go deep into Amazon S3, share files between servers with Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx, and choose a tool to move data into AWS. Then practice with one S3 bucket.
06Database Services
Where structured data lives on AWS: the orders, users and products that an application reads and changes all day. Learn Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, put a cache in front of a database, see how an existing database moves to AWS, then add a database layer to your VPC.
07Monitoring and Scaling
Make the system from the earlier modules look after itself. See what it is doing with Amazon CloudWatch, react with alarms and events, spread traffic with Elastic Load Balancing, and add or remove servers with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
08Automation
Stop clicking and start describing. Learn infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation, meet the tools around it (the AWS CDK, AWS SAM, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Systems Manager), then take one stack through its whole life.
09Containers
How to package an application once and run it anywhere. Learn why teams split applications into microservices, how a container image is built and stored in Amazon ECR, and how Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate and Amazon EKS run it. Then run a web server container with no server to manage.
10Networking 2
Private paths from your VPC to AWS services, to other VPCs and to your data center. Learn VPC endpoints, VPC peering, Site-to-Site VPN, AWS Direct Connect and AWS Transit Gateway, and when to use each one. Then peer two VPCs and add a gateway endpoint for Amazon S3.
11Serverless
Build applications from managed services and events, with no servers to look after. Learn what serverless means, how Amazon API Gateway, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon Kinesis and AWS Step Functions connect small pieces of code, and how to choose between a queue, a topic, a stream and a workflow. Then build a small order system from five of these services.
12Edge Services
How AWS brings your application close to its users and keeps attacks away from your servers. Learn the edge network, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Shield and AWS WAF, and AWS Outposts, which is AWS in your own building. Then put a CloudFront distribution in front of a private Amazon S3 bucket.
13Backup and Recovery
Plan for the bad day. Learn the two numbers that every recovery plan starts with, how AWS Backup puts the backups of many services under one set of rules, and the four standard ways to recover a workload in another Region. Then back up a DynamoDB table, damage it and restore it.
How each module works
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