Why This Cheat Sheet Matters for SAA-C03
This cheat sheet covers the most important Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud concepts tested on the SAA-C03 (AWS Solutions Architect Associate) certification exam. It contains 4 sections with 18 key points that you should memorize before exam day. EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Master instance types, pricing models, placement groups, Auto Scaling, and launch configurations for the SAA-C03 exam. Use this as a quick-reference guide during your final review sessions.
4Sections
18Key Points
Instance Types
- General Purpose (T, M): balanced compute, memory, networking.
- Compute Optimized (C): batch processing, HPC, ML inference.
- Memory Optimized (R, X, z): in-memory databases, real-time processing.
- Storage Optimized (I, D, H): high sequential read/write, data warehousing.
- Accelerated Computing (P, G, Inf): GPU, machine learning training.
Pricing Models
- On-Demand: pay per second (Linux) or per hour (Windows). No commitment.
- Reserved (1 or 3 year): up to 72% discount. Standard or Convertible.
- Savings Plans: flexible pricing, commit to $/hr for 1 or 3 years.
- Spot Instances: up to 90% off. Can be interrupted with 2-min notice.
- Dedicated Hosts: physical server. Required for BYOL licensing.
Placement Groups
- Cluster: low latency, single AZ, HPC workloads.
- Spread: max 7 instances per AZ, critical applications.
- Partition: large distributed workloads (Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka).
Key Features
- User Data: runs scripts at instance launch (runs as root).
- Metadata: http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
- Hibernation: saves RAM to EBS root volume, faster restart.
- Instance Store: ephemeral, high IOPS, lost on stop/terminate.
- ENI: basic networking. ENA: enhanced networking. EFA: HPC.
Practice EC2 Questions
Put your knowledge to the test with practice questions.