AWS Certified Advanced Networking Official Study Guide: Specialty Exam 1st Edition

Like the review title says: you should check out this book whether or not you'd ever go for the certs.Anyone that's done advanced networking scenarios mentioned in this book can and should admit to themselves that there is some complexity to AWS (no matter how "easy" it is), and this book helps address those focal areas in a concise manner (vs. AWS docs, FAQs, and random web searches). While AWS is changing every few months, this book should remain relevant for years, due to the value in the core principles it covers.Each chapter also has labs that you can do in AWS, as well as practice questions for the test.Let's see what that covers, by chapter:1. Introduction to AWS Networking:50k ft. view basics2. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and Networking Fundamentals - everything regarding VPC configurationAnything associated with the VPC configuration panel goes here: subnets, route tables, IP addresses, security groups, network ACLs, gateways, NAT, and VPN. While this might seem like the part you'd "already know", it covers many critical aspects of core VPC fundamentals that should be present in your AWS architecture and design patterns. It also dips into VPC peering and endpoints, which are expanded upon later (when we get to the advanced portion)3. Advanced Amazon VPC - VPC interconnectivityThis is where your experience possibly starts deviating from the book material. This chapter covers VPC endpoints in detail, AWS PrivateLink vs. VPC peering, and VPC resizing.4. Virtual Private Networks - VPNs into your VPCYou will find Site-to-Site and Client VPNs in many scenarios in this chapter. These were helpful for me, because no end user or customer has every scenario, and this will undoubtedly give you some ideas, as well as provide some design patterns.5. AWS Direct Connect - connecting your on-prem networks to AWSDirect Connect is something that's easy enough to setup, once you get it. There's more of a prevalence of 3rd-party providers like Megaport providing Direct Connect access to AWS in different regions, so the basic Direct Connect documentation resources might not apply to you, and this will give you a better picture of where it fits in either way.6. Domain Name System and Load Balancing - DNS with Route 53, and load balancing with Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)This chapter starts off by covering DNS within a VPC, and moves to using AWS' Route 53 DNS services. These are included in the same chapter as load balancing, since both can used to dynamically direct traffic to AWS resources. If you've used traditional load balancing, this chapter on ELB is very similar, and if not, it's a good resource anyway. If Amazon was to test on these subjects, you can imagine that they'd have questions as to whether Route 53 or ELB would be a good scenario, and this chapter should help.7. Amazon CloudFront - AWS' Content Delivery Network (CDN)This relatively short chapter covers the basics of working with CDNs, and the advanced features AWS has that tie into the value of having existing resources on the platform. If you need a primer on CDNs in general, this is not the place.8. Network Security - securing your AWS resourcesWhile reading this chapter won't make you an AWS security expert, it does steer you into some basic principles and design patterns, as well as provides info on security-focused AWS services. It does provide a very comprehensive set of next steps via links to other info. While anyone building AWS environments should read this, the test takers want to focus on the shared responsibility model, which is prevalent in all AWS training I've seen.9. Network Performance - a small collection of resourcesThis short chapter is a useful hodgepodge of resources, containing everything from performance through a VGW, Direct Connect circuit, etc. to EC2 advanced networking (available from HVM instance of Amazon Linux), including SR-IOV and Intel DPDK.10. Network Automation - AWS CloudFormation, Network monitoring tools, and loggingIf you're not experienced with infrastructure as code, this short chapter won't make you an expert. If you're studying, it will provide enough information you'd need for the test, and if you haven't used CloudFormation on Amazon yet, it's a good starting point.11. Service Requirements - networking requirements for other AWS Services, like Workspaces or Lambda12. Hybrid Architectures - advanced AWS networking design for on-prem and AWS resourcesThis chapter returns to more advanced networking scenarios between your on-premise resources and AWS, e.g. Direct Connect, using Transitive Routing, and transit VPC scenarios. If you have a hybrid cloud, or even just AWS and on-prem, you'll benefit from this chapter.13. Network Troubleshooting - summary of troubleshooting with traditional tools and AWS toolsCovers AWS Direct Connect, Security Groups, Network ACLs, VPC peering, CloudFront, ELB, DNS, AWS service limits, and VPN / IKE with traditional and AWS-specific tools.14. Biling - short chapter to help you understand how billing works for all of the AWS networking-centric services covered15. Risk & Compliance - Risk Management for your AWS enivonmentFirst and foremost, this covers the AWS Services in Scope (compliance for external standards like PCI DSS) for AWS components like VPC, DNS, etc. Other resources, such as audit reports and whitepapers are linked This also covers encryption, and monitoring network activity with CloudWatch et al. Finally, malicious activity detection with AWS Shield and Anti-DDOS measures, VPC flow logs, and CloudWatch alerting.16. Scenarios and Reference Architectures - a short chapter covering how you'd apply the appropriate hybrid IT architecture connectivity solution based on what you've learned in the book

I am not much into technical books these days. Definitely not so in 2021 to learn cloud technologies and / or prepare for certifications by reading books since obsolescence is fast in this medium. After all this is the era of A Cloud Guru (merged already with PluralSight at the time of this writing) and other online training platforms.Having multiple AWS certifications including passing the AWS Advanced Networking Specialty exam recently, I should point out that this book alone will not give the assurance of passing the exam but it will take you 60 to 75% of the way towards the target. You do have to supplement with whitepapers, blogs, reinvent videos, free AWS digital training videos as well as aforementioned training platforms. Here is a comprehensive guide site on how to prepare for AWS certifications (github.com/jdluther2020/awscert/tree/main/advanced-networking-specialty).This book is a very high quality book however by any measure and it deserves all the five stars. Kudos to all the authors for doing such a thorough and caring job. Having read cover to cover, I can vouch for its superior quality of thinking of the overall subject matter, explanation of concepts and the manner of material presentation. It is well written, comprehensive and organized in terms of chapters, lab exercises, end of chapter questions and the entire online test banks and flash cards.All inclusive this is a very good deal. It teaches holistically, builds your networking foundation strongly and promotes you forward towards the expert level at which point you will be spending all your time on AWS official documentation site after all to stay abreast with the dynamic pace of change of all the cloud technologies and services.

Aws certified offical study guides are great! This can probably be expected since they basically just copy and paste relevant text from the aws faq’s and white papers.It’s hard to know what the authors are doing, given that across this series there is lots of common text without any common authors. The least these “authors” could do would be to provide a decent index to this printed material. Try finding “aws storage gateway” in the index, good luck . More relevantly, try finding that topic in the index of the “solutions architect study guide”; there they go over that service in more detail, by pasting in more website material, but still don’t provide a convenient way to search for it in the index. I would think that each major service that aws offers at time of publication could be found in the index along with page numbers where the service is referenced. Nope...Don’t get me wrong this is a extremely useful book, but going through the aws exam guide and reading the original material online could be just as useful, more up to date, and more comprehensive.

The book covers current (2018) exam topic according to AWS exam blueprint, provides a few inside information on how AWS works, although not needed for exam, tests you at the end of each chapter and presents exercises so you can practice around. Having hands on in AWS is the most effective way of learning and fixing concepts for the exam and when working with it. Book guides you in most network technologies for exam and use cases, points to references for more detailed documentation when needed. However it does not provide step by step instructions, it's up to reader to find out more about it as it happens in real life, which I find good, as it e stimulates investigation.One topic I missed is BGP entirely in details. Not that you need in all situations or even in the exam (as I haven't been tested yet) but I assumed some knowledge such as hierarchy of routing decision would be mentioned. This should be fine if it out of exam scope, and it does not harm going a step forward if you can reading more about it as well.