## Commitment and Effort Requirements
**IMPORTANT:** This is an advanced technical class that will require significant investment of effort on the side of the student. Please make sure that you have time to attend to teaching and lab sessions. Attending teaching and lab sessions twice each week will reduce the amount of self study student has to do! Taking self study path on this course is possible, but it will be a challening path to take even for experienced Cloud professionals.
## Overview
AWS Cloud Architecting course is meant as an advanced class about acting as a Solution Architect for Public Cloud technologies. Solution Architect is able to transform customer requirements into a solution that delivers on those requirements in Public Cloud environment. Solution Architect is a an experienced technical member of DevOps Team or Project Team and they have some particular skills in Public Cloud context:
- Business Mindset - Solution Architect understand that Cloud Services are only usefull if they are used to deliver a service that has Business Rationale.
- Public Cloud Service Knowhow - Solution Architect understand which Public Cloud services match to or expand on similar Traditional ICT Infrastructure elements.
- General Technical Skills - Solution Architect has wide spread of technical skills from Automation platforms to CLI Commands, Scripting Languages and Programming Languages.
- Cloud Architecture - Solution Architect is able to design, visualize and implement modern Cloud Architectures:
- Elasticity, High Availability, and Monitoring
- Client-Server Architectures
- Decoupled Architectures
- Microservice Architectures
- Serverless Architectures
- Content Caching
- Disaster Prevention and Recovery
- Public Cloud Design Best Practices - Solution Architect knows how to apply the Six Pillars of Azure/Amazon Web Services Well Architected Framework:
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
- Sustainability
- Cloud Infrastructure Management - Solution Architect is able to create, modify and delete Cloud Resources in core Cloud Service Categories:
- Identity and Access Management
- Billing and Cost Management
- Management, Governance and Monitoring
- Networking Services
- Compute Services
- Storage Services
- Database Services
AWS has following to say about Target Candidates: *The target candidate should have at least 1 year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions that use AWS services.*
Completing an AWS Cloud Architecting course does not immediately confer the title of Solution Architect. However, it does offer a deeper understanding and hands-on experience in designing, evaluating, visualizing, and implementing solutions using Public Cloud technologies. Over time, the skills acquired in this course can pave the way for students to progress toward becoming Solution Architects.
Taking actual **AWS Certified Solutions Architect (SAA-C03)** certification examination is not mandatory part of this course, but historically AWS and Microsoft have provided free or discounted examination vouchers for students so that test can be optionally taken.