Chapter 1: Amazon Web Service Pillars
DevOps is, at its heart, a combination of the skills of development and operations and breaking down the walls between these two different teams. DevOps includes enabling developers to perform operational tasks easily. DevOps also involves empowering operational team members to create their Infrastructure as Code and use other coding techniques, such as continuous integration pipelines, to spin up the same infrastructure in multiple regions quickly.
In this book, we will go through the services and concepts that are part of the DevOps professional exam so that you have a solid understanding from a practical standpoint, in terms of both explanations and hands-on exercises.
Becoming Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified not only gives you instant validation of the technical skills that you hold and maintain – it also strengthens you as a technical professional. The AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Certification is a cumulative test that incorporates the base knowledge of fundamental AWS services, including system operations capabilities for running, managing, and monitoring workloads in AWS. This is in addition to developing and deploying code to functions, containers, and instances.
We go look at the test itself in more depth in Chapter 23, Overview of the DevOps Professional Certification Test, as well as provide tips for taking the exam.
The AWS pillars are the five guiding principles that guide architects and developers in generally accepted cloud architecture and design. They are subtly referenced in the DevOps Professional exam, but the pillars and their guidelines are tenets of best practices for working with any cloud service provider – especially Amazon Web Services. These are all guiding principles in DevOps practices and pipelines, and having a sound understanding of these five items will not only help you come exam time, but serve you throughout your DevOps career journey.
In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:
- Operational excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance efficiency
- Cost optimization