Modules

The first four modules takes a top down approach to exposing the environment a SysOps Administrator will find themselves. The training also incorporates content from on-line courses. Each module

1. Recipe To Build & Launch An E-commerce Platform

2. AWS Services exploration via an E Commerce Platform Reference Architecture

3. AWS Well Architecture Framework Deep Dive

4. AWS Cloud SysOps Administrator Roles & Responsibilities

5. Identity & Access Management - A SysOps Administrator Perspective

6. Infrastructure As Code - Provisioning & Deployment

7. Designing & Implementing a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Pipeline (CI/CD)

8. System Management & Analysis

9. Monitoring and Reporting

10. AWS Logs Visualization with Kibana

11. Storage, Data Backup, Recovery & Retention

12. Security and Compliance

Reference Architecture

AWS Hosting Magento® eCommerce Software on AWS Reference Architecture

Extensions

• Amazon Personalize for Magento 2

• In-house developed extension that monitors various events that occur in the store (sales, reviews, code errors, etc.) and sends out a notification via Slack, email and summary provided via an Alexa Skill.

Projects

Students additionally work on projects source from black-owned startups and entrepreneurs in underserved communities that are looking to leverage technology to deliver a true competitive advantage.

Learning Method

• Inquiry based learning

• Game based learning

• Collaboration

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Recipe To Build & Launch An E-commerce Platform

An exploratory look into what’s required to build and launch an e-commerce site  to provide context as you begin your journey to becoming a Amazon AWS SysOps Administrator.

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AWS Services exploration via an E-Commerce Platform Reference Architecture

Learning by seeing and exploring a fully functioning e-commerce application to gain full insight into the different AWS services involved in the provisioning, building, deploying, managing and monitoring an application running in the AWS cloud.

An initial top down approach to teaching with labs, case studies, examples, FAQs, real-world problems, and solutions to help students obtain the needed context to what they will learn in future modules.

Exploration of the relevant AWS services and tools focusing on best practices and FAQ.

Via immersion learning be able answer the following question for each explored AWS service. '

• What it is used for

• How it is used

• What are the related AWS services

• Alternatives

• High level best practices

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AWS Well Architecture Framework Deep Dive

AWS Definition: The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes the key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. By answering a set of foundational questions, you learn how well your architecture aligns with cloud best practices and are provided guidance for making improvements.

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AWS Cloud SysOps Administrator Roles & Responsibilities

The AWS Cloud SysOps Administrators are responsible for managing and operating systems on the AWS platform and cost optimization.

Provide students an understanding of

• The environment in which they will be working.

• The technical and professional skills required to be successful,

• Dynamics of the different technology teams to equip them with the tools to optimize working relationships.

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AWS Identity and Access Management(IAM) - A SysOps Administrator, DevOps Engineer & Security Specialist Perspective

How to implement a scalable AWS Identity and Access Management architecture and how to monitor, track and alert on user changes & events for compliance, change management and security governance.

Deep dive into essential Identity and Access Management concepts required to implement a Multi-Account strategy and implementation of a scalable AWS Identity and Access Management architecture.

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Infrastructure As Code - Provisioning & Deployment

Managing AWS environments manually is complex and fault-prone but describing an infrastructure in code helps improve quality and save costs. Students will learn how to use AWS CloudFormation to automate the Infrastructure provisioning and application deployments.

Students will learn best practices to help them utilize AWS CloudFormation more effectively and securely.

• Learn how to plan, organize and manage the stacks and their resources.

• Develop reusable, configurable and composable templates that create and manage the AWS resources and the software application that runs on them.

• Learn how to leverage AWS CloudFormation to capture environmental changes succinctly and perform version control.

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Designing & Implementing a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Pipeline (CI/CD)

Students will learn how to design and implement two separate continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline with AWS CodePipeline and Jenkins .

Students with learn how to use a CI/CD pipeline to build, analyze, test, and deploy code every time there is a code change and defined release process.

A pipeline helps automate steps in a software delivery process, such as initiating automatic builds and then deploying.

CI/CD is much more than the automation of tasks to reduce the risks in each build. It’s a model and mindset that helps businesses get new solutions into the hands of their users as quickly, efficiently and cheaply as possible.

Topics

• Fundamentals of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.

• AWS CodeCommit

• AWS CodeBuild

• AWS CodeDeploy

• AWS CodePipeline

• Introduction to Jenkins

• Jenkins Master / Slave Setup with AWS EC2 and AWS ECS Fargate.

• CI/CD Pipeline with Jenkins

Activities

Students with learn how to use a CI/CD pipeline to build, analyze, test, and deploy code for the In-house developed extension that monitors various events that occur in the store.

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System Management & Analysis

Leveraging AWS System Manager as the backdrop, students will learn how to safely manage and operate AWS resources at scale.

Prepare students for the day to day responsibility of managing and operating a platform built on AWS.

• Foundational understanding of the factors involved in system management that looks beyond a chosen technology solution.

• Situational training that improve their troubleshooting proficiency and their ability to adapt as a platform evolves.

• Engage to encourage inventiveness on ways to continuously improve the management of a platform.

• Understanding of how to optimize the environment to ensure maximum performance.

• Understanding of how to Identify performance bottlenecks and implement remedies.

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Monitoring and Reporting

Students will learn how to implement Logging, Monitoring, Alert/Notification at scale utilizing native AWS services and tools and their integration with third-party solutions to facilitate security governance, compliance, change management, troubleshooting and responding to security incidents.

• Infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting

• Mean-time-to-resolution improvement

• Proactive resource optimization

• Application monitoring

• Log analytics

Topics

Amazon CloudWatch

AWS Lambda

Amazon Simple Notification Service(SNS)

Activities

Students will learn by practically managing and operating all the resources created to launch the e-commerce platform.

Simulation of potential error conditions and performance bottlenecks that students are expected to diagnose and resolve.

Conversation and execution of Jira support tickets created to reflect real-world support cases.

Perform daily monitoring of the network, servers, cloud and applications to ensure full availability and optimum performance. Utilize software tools and logs to monitor network and system health.

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AWS Logs Visualization with Kibana

Students will learn how to effectively analyze log data to gain visibility Into the e-commerce application and AWS Infrastructure that includes networking services, load balancer, database, cache, Docker containers, Lambda functions, etc.

Objectives

• Learn how to ship and analyze logs of applications running on Docker containers, AWS Lambda functions, etc.

• How to ship and analyze and infrastructure log from ELB, CloudTrail, VPC, S3 and CloudFront access logs, AWS WAF logs, API Gateway Access Logs, Amazon GuardDuty findings, etc

• Create Kibana visualizations and dashboards to monitor the state of the AWS infrastructure

• Stream CloudWatch log events to Elasticsearch

• Explore capabilities provided by third-party solutions such as Datadog and logz.io

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Storage, Data Backup, Recovery & Retention

Students will learn how to implement backup processes that offer the appropriate level of granularity to meet the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). of a business. The focus will be on backup, recovery, and archive approaches for a cloud native infrastructure.

In addition students will study different data retention policies and learn how to implement archival processes to preserve data for compliance or corporate reasons.

Objectives

• Foundational understanding of the different AWS Storage services that includes usage pattern, performance, durability & availability, scalability & elasticity, security and cost model.

• Explore the AWS products that can be used to build out a. backup and recovery solution.

• Create and manage data retention for different AWS services.

Topics

• AWS S3

• AWS Glazier

• AWS EBS

• AWS EFS

• AWS Storage Gateway

• AWS Snowball

Activities

Students will learn by practically implementing a storage, data backup, recovery & retention process for the the e-commerce platform.

• implementing data retention policies with Amazon RDS snapshot export to Amazon S3

• Creating EBS Snapshots

• Restoring from an EBS Snapshot

• Creating Consistent or Hot Backups

• Performing Multivolume Backups

• Database Backup Approaches

• Using Database Replica Backups

• Using Amazon RDS for Backups

• Using AMI to Back Up EC2 Instances

• In addition backup processes which are performed to keep a copy of the production data for a short duration to recover from data corruption or data loss.

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Security & Compliance

Students will be exposed to AWS security products and native security logging facilities via the e-commerce platform that includes networking services, load balancer, database, cache, Docker containers, monitoring, alerting, etc.

Students will be responsible for configuring and integrating AWS security products and native logging security facilities into the reference architecture and application. As a result, they will have the following opportunities.

• Discuss best practices and FAQ

• Study and observe the type of information produced

• Interpret the data and utilize the information provided.

• How the information produced integrates with third-party solutions and facilitate security governance, compliance and respond to security incidents.

Topics

• AWS GuardDuty

• AWS Inspector

• AWS Macie

• AWS Security Hub

• AWS CloudTrail

• AWS Config

• AWS Secrets Manager

• AWS Shield

• AWS WAF

• AWS S3 Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront Access Logs, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Logs, Amazon VPC Flow Logs

Activities

Team challenges on early detection of security threats and a security incident response simulation.